The Crossing @ Christmas 2022

The Jeffrey Dinsmore Memorial Concerts

The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Scott Dettra, organ
Paul Vazquez, sound designer

recorded
Sunday, December 18, 2022 @ 5pm 
The Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia

Program
WRTI Broadcast Notes

Hosted by Donald Nally

from our 2013 studio recording Christmas Daybreak

 Christmas Daybreak (1996) Robert Convery
Lo' how a Rose e'er Blooming, Op. 13 (2007) Benjamin C.S. Boyle
What Child Is This (1991/2007) Andrew Gant
Adam lay ybounden (1997) Colin Mawby

The Crossing @ Christmas 2022

make peace (2016, a Jeff Quartet) David Lang

 Mass Transmission (2012) Mason Bates

I. The Dutch Telegraph Office
II. Java
III. Wireless Connection

 Ochre (2022) Caroline Shaw
— East Coast Premiere —
commissioned by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music
for The Crossing and Donald Nally,
Cantori New York, and Volti (San Francisco)

I. Siderite
II. Limonite
III. Maghemite
IV. Magnetite
V. Hematite
VI. Vivianite
VII. Goethite

sleeper’s prayer (2016) Lang

from our 2013 studio recording Christmas Daybreak

 Lullay, Lullay Little Child (1990) Jonathan Varcoe
Love Came Down at Christmas (1989) Edwin Fissinger
The Holly and the Ivy, Op. 18 (2008) Boyle
Down with the Rosemary, Op. 22 (2009) Boyle
To Morning (2003) Gabriel Jackson
Ane Sang of the Birth of Christ (2004) Jackson

Notes + Texts

photo by Becky Oehlers Photography

Christmas Daybreak
music by Robert Convery
words by Christina Rossetti

Before the paling of the stars,
Before the winter morn,
Before the earliest cock-crow
Jesus Christ was born:
Born in a stable,
Cradled in a manger,
In the world His hands had made
Born a stranger.

Priest and king lay fast asleep
In Jerusalem,
Young and old lay fast asleep
In crowded Bethlehem:
Saint and angel, ox and ass,
Kept a watch together,
Before the Christmas daybreak
In the winter weather.

Jesus on His mother’s breast
In the stable cold,
Spotless Lamb of God was He,
Shepherd of the fold:
Let us kneel with Mary maid,
With Joseph bent and hoary,
With saint and angel, ox and ass,
To hail the King of Glory. 

–Before the paling of the stars, Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Lo, how a rose e’er blooming, from Three Carols for Wintertide
music by Benjamin C.S. Boyle
words by Theodore Baker

Composed for The Crossing in 2007

Lo, how a rose e'er blooming,
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse's lineage coming,
As seers of old have sung;
It came, a flow'ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter,
When half spent was the night.
Lo, how a rose e'er blooming,
From tender stem hath sprung!

–trans. of 16-c. German carol “Est ist ein Ros,” Theodore Baker (1851-1934)

What Child Is This? 
music by Andrew Gant
words by William Chatterton Dix

Arranged for The Crossing in 2007

What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary's lap is sleeping?
Whom Angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?

This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds praise and Angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him praise,
Jesus, the Son of Mary.

How comes he in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Yet have no fear, God's love is here,
His love all loves exceeding.

Raise, raise your song on high,
As Mary sings a lullaby,
Praise, praise the Son of Man
Jesus, the Son of Mary.

Earth, give him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come tribes and peoples, own Him;
The King of Kings salvation brings,
So in your hearts enthrone Him.

Nails, spear shall pierce Him through,
Such pain he bore for me and you.
Praise, praise the Son of Man
Jesus, the Son of Mary.

–William Chatterton Dix (1837-1898)

Adam lay ybounden 
music by Colin Mawby
words from a 15th-century English Carol

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter,
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkes finden,
Written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie,
Abeen heav'ne queen.

Blessed be the time
That apple taken was,
Therefore we moun singen.
Deo gracias!

–15th-c. English Carol

make peace 
words and music by David Lang (after the mourner’s kaddish)

make peace is a Jeff Quartet, The Crossing’s 2016 commissioning project: fifteen composers who knew and worked with co-founder Jeff Dinsmore wrote quartets in his memory. The commissioning of make peace was supported by The Ann Stookey Fund for New Music.

From the composer:
The text for make peace is a rewriting of the last section of the Kaddish, the prayer that Jews say in memory of the dead. 

if you can make peace
make peace
in the heavens
in us
in all the world
make peace

Mass Transmission 
music by Mason Bates
words from various sources

From the composer:
Mass Transmission tells the true story of a distantly-separated family communicating over the earliest radio transmissions. It’s 1920’s-era Skype: on one end of the line is a Dutch girl sent to be a page in the colonial government of the East Indies; on the other end is her mother, thousands of miles away in the Dutch Telegraph Office. The piece explores the warmth of human emotions pulsing through a mechanistic medium. 

Two obscure texts are set to music. The texts for outer movements are adapted from an obscure 1928 government publication about the technological advances made by the Dutch in communicating with their colonists, compiling transcripts of these ground-breaking communications, and giving us the mother’s perspective. The central movement gives us the daughter’s perspective of jungle-life in Java, drawn from the diary of Elizabeth van Kampen about growing up there.

The chorus sing these texts, comprising the ‘animal warmth’ of the piece, while the electronics give us a ‘musical scrim’ of static and short-wave radio sounds. The organ connects the two: sometimes it supports the chorus, sometimes it plays the toccata-like music of the Dutch Telegraph Office.

I. The Dutch Telegraph Office

The miracle still lies in my memories like a dream.

Slowly layers of mystery unveil. Gradually my eyes alight as if recovering from a dream.

A bit fearfully, I speak into the microphone:

“Hello? Hello? Are you there, my child?”

12000 Kilometers, not a single wire. The air is what transmits the message. A miracle.

My voice travels to the Indies, which took my daughter weeks to reach on a steamboat. Days and nights, the endless sea around her. Now I can speak to that distant land, and my voice travels there wirelessly.

“Hello! Hello! Are you there, my child?”

But the reality around me is sober and mechanical. I’m in the headquarters of the Dutch Telegraph Office, in a small lifeless studio. A strange apparatus before me. A technician nearby. The earphones, the microphone on the armchair. It is very cold.

This is where Holland converses with its colonists in Java.

My child has been sent to be a page in the government in Java. It is a great honor, but it is hard on a mother.

A bit fearfully, I speak into the microphone:

“Hello! Hello! Are you there, my child?

In a single second, I have crossed 12000 kilometers, as if it were the distance between two rooms.

And within that second, my daughter’s voice comes back:

II. Java

What I love most about Java are the moments I wake up.

I stay just a little longer in bed to listen to all the tropical noises. Birds twittering, monkeys echoing through the jungle. I hear soft, strange, beautiful music coming from the village. Gamelan music. Then I go outside, enjoying the fresh morning fragrance and admiring all those colorful flowers and the Durian trees.

My house is built on poles and made of stone and bamboo. The doors and windows are painted green. On top of the house is a red zinc roof. Underneath the house I often hide with the other children.

Sometimes we go right into the jungle. It is always hot and magical, and it always has a special smell — a bit of snakes and all sorts of plants. I watch my steps in this strange, lovely kingdom. The atmosphere is so unreal, like a paradise or Eden.

In the evening, lying in bed, I listen again to the gamelan in the village, and I miss you. You are so far away.

III. Wireless Connections

Are you there mum? Yes, my child. I can definitely recognize your voice!
Is everything fine with you, mum? Yes, dear … so good to hear your voice.
I miss you mum! I miss you too, my child.
Well … it is hot here in Java. And it’s storming here in Holland!
Is granddad with you? Nope, he has not come.
Okay, have a good night then. Good night, my child.

The voice from the East. Nothing is farther apart than the two straits that separate us. In this way the world grows closer and closer, even as we move further apart.

Each phone call was allowed to last 6 minutes at most. Six minutes, it seemed far too short. The six minutes passed, and the voice comes to a halt. The headphone is silent, the microphone lies on the table in the Dutch Telegraph Office.

Later, when I lie in my white bed, I can still hear my child’s voice: the memory, the ecstasy. No poem, no music is more beautiful than that. Holland and Java lie in the deepest part of a mother’s heart, and in every sigh is a wireless signal: Hello, oh, my child…

–“The Dutch Telegraph Office” & “Wireless Connections” adapted from Hallo Bandeong, hier Den Haag! (1928). Translation by Jerry Chu. Used by permission. “Java” adapted from Memories of My Youth in the Dutch East-Indies by Elizabeth van Kampen. Used by permission.

Ochre 
music by Caroline Shaw
words from various sources

Commissioned by the Ann Stookey Fund for New Music for The Crossing and Donald Nally, Cantori New York, and Volti (San Francisco)

From the composer:
I like to write music for voices without text, because it allows the voice to be a colorful instrument independent of language. And I like to combine different kinds of text, fragments from various eras and sources, to build a nuanced frame for thinking about a subject. Ochre lives more in vowels and timbres than in text, but I’ve woven in fragments of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (which frames human existence with metaphors of geologic time, iron ore, rock), as well as a partial setting of Goethe’s “Wanderers Nachtlied" in Longfellow’s translation. (Goethe was a geologist, and goethite — a common mineral in ochres — is named for him.) In general, there is both a mournful quality to this material, but also a sense of joy and wonder about the planet, and really about music and the voice. 

The fifth movement contains the formula for the iron oxide compound hematite — Fe2O3 in its unhydrated form, resulting in red ochre — and Fe2O3 · H2O for the yellow ochre of hydrated hematite. 

I have been inspired by the work of Heidi Gustafson, an artist and ochre specialist. From her Dust to Dust: A Geology of Color:

Humans are themselves displays of complex sedimentary process. “In the human there is material, fragment, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos,” a stone-loving Nietzsche once proclaimed (Beyond Good and Evil, 117). We grow magnetite rocks in our heads, hematite in our organs, carbonates in our bones, gorgeous crystalline geodes in our kidneys, and when we die, our minerals are redistributed, largely as ashes or clumps of carbon, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen, and a handful of others elements. Dust to dust.if you can make peace
make peace

I. Siderite

wordless

II. Limonite

Overall 
quiet now
hearest thou
a breath

–fragments from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wandrers Nachtlied 2

The solid earth whereon we tread.

In tracts of the fluent heat began
And grew to seeming random forms
The seeming prey of cyclic storms
Till at last arose the man. 

–Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118

III. Maghemite

Scarpèd cliff and quarried stone

–Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 56

IV. Magnetite

wordless

V. Hematite

Mille regretz, que vous abandonner 
Et d’eslonger…
Qu’on me verra [brief mes jours definer.]

My brief days…so soon

Translation:
A thousand regrets at deserting you 
and leaving behind…
That it seems [soon my days will dwindle away.]

–fragment from a 15th-c. chansons att. to Josquin des Prez

VI. Vivianite

Contemplate all this work of Time,
…
As dying Nature’s earth and lime;

Within oneself, from more to more;
…
Life is not as idle ore.

–Tennyson, In Memoriam, Canto 118

VII. Goethite

hear hush still quiet sleep

now you all wait soon

sleeper’s prayer 
words and music by David Lang

From the composer:
sleeper’s prayer was originally written for boy soprano and organ, and I arranged it for chamber choir in 2019. The commissioners – the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Jacaranda – specifically asked me to write a piece that would include the spectacular and powerful organ in Walt Disney Hall. I am a little scared of concert organs – their sound can be overwhelming, and I started wondering if I could make the fear of being overwhelmed part of the piece. I thought if I had a very small and fragile voice singing along with the organ, we would care about the power imbalance between the two. It might make us feel that the singer needed both support and protection from the organ, the way we all need support and protection from the world, and from life in general.

Then I remembered the prayers that religious Jews say before going to bed. The prospective sleeper might say these prayers to calm himself or herself, to give thanks, and to ask for protection in the night, when the sleeper is most vulnerable and unguarded. For my text, I rewrote a portion of these prayers, trying to focus on just how fragile peacefulness really is, and on how much we need it.

when sleep falls upon my eyes

let me lie down in peace
let me rise up again in peace

no evil dreams
no sleep of death

no snare
no sorrow
no terror by night
no arrow by day

no thousand at my left
no ten thousand at my right

let me lie down in peace
let me rise up again in peace
let me find my better self

when I go out
when I come in
when I lie down
when I rise up

in life
in peace
now and forever
by day
by night
when I lie down
when I rise up

let me lie down in peace
let me rise up again in peace

at my right hand
at my left hand
before me
behind me
above me

Lullay, lullay little child 
music by Jonathan Varcoe
words from a 15th-century English Carol

Lullay, lullay, little child, mine own dear food,
How shalt thou suffering be nailed on the rood.
So blessed be the time?

Lullay, lullay little child, mine own dear smart,
How shalt thou suffering the sharp spear to thy heart?
So blessed be the time!

Lullay, lullay little child, I sing all for thy sake,
Many on is the sharp show to thy body is shape
So blessed be the time!

Lullay, lullay little child, fair happis thee befall,
How shalt thou suffering to drink ezyl and gall?
So blessed be the time!

Lullay, lullay little child, I sing all beforn,
How shalt thou suffering the sharp garlong of thorn?
So blessed be the time!

Lullay, lullay little child, why weepy thou so sore,
Thou are both in God and man, what wouldest thou be more?
So blessed be the time?

–variation of a 15th-c. English Carol

Love came down at Christmas 
music by Edwin Fissinger
words by Christina Rossetti

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and angels gave the sign.

Worship we our Godhead,
Love incarnate, Love Divine;
Worship we our Jesus:
But wherewith for sacred sign?

Love shall be our token,
Love be yours and Love be mine,
Love to God and all men, 
Love for plea and gift and sign. 

–Rossetti 

The Holly and the Ivy, from Three Carols for Wintertide
music by Benjamin C.S. Boyle
based on the English Carol, c. 17th-century

The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown.
The holly bears the crown.

R. O the rising of the Sun and the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing of the choir.

The holly bears a blossom as white as lily flower.
The holly bears a berry as red as any blood.
The holly, it bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn.
The holly bears a bark as bitter as any gall. R.

The holly and the ivy,
Now both are well full grown.
The holly bears the crown.

–based on the English Carol, c. 17th century

Down with the Rosemary, from Three Carols for Wintertide
music by Benjamin C.S. Boyle
words by Robert Herrick

Down with the rosemary and bay,
Down with the mistletoe;
The holly hitherto did sway
Until the dancing Easter day,
Or Easter eve appear.

Then youthful box which now has grace
Your houses to renew ;
Grown old, surrender must his place
Unto the crispèd yew.

Now the yew is out, then birch comes in,
Both of a fresh and fragrant kin.
Green rushes, then, and sweetest bents,
Come in for comely ornaments.

Thus times do shift; 
each thing his turn doth hold.
New things succeed, 
as former things grow old.

–adapted from: Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve, Robert Herrrick (1591-1674)

To Morning
music by Gabriel Jackson
words by William Blake

O holy virgin! clad in purest white,
Unlock heav'n's golden gates, and issue forth;
Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light
Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring
The honey'd dew that cometh on waking day.
O radiant morning, salute the sun
Rous'd like a huntsman to the chase, and with
Thy buskin'd feet appear upon our hills.

Ane Sang of the Birth of Christ
music by Gabriel Jackson
words by att. John Wedderburn

I come fra hevin heich to tell
The best nowells that e’er befell;
To you thir tythinges trew I bring,
And I will of them say and sing:

This day to you is born ane child
Of Marie meike and Virgin mild,
That blessit barne, bening and kind,
Sall yow rejoyce baith heart and mind.

Let us rejoyis and be blyth 
And saull and life, stand up and see
Wha lyes in ane cribbe of tree,
What Babe is that, sa gude and fair?
It is Christ, Goddis Sonne and Air.

O my deir hert, yung Jesus sweit,
Prepair Thy creddill in my spreit,
And I sall rock Thee in my hart,
And never mair fra Thee depart.

Bot I sall praise Thee evermoir
With sangis sweit unto Thy gloir,
The kneis of my hart sall I bow,
And sing that rycht Balululow.

–att. John Wedderburn (c.1500-1556)

Team

The Crossing

Walter Aldrich
Isobel Anthony
Katy Avery
Kelly Ann Bixby
Karen Blanchard 
Steven Bradshaw
Matt Cramer
Micah Dingler
Ryan Fleming
Joanna Gates
Steven Hyder
Michael Jones
Lauren Kelly
Anika Kildegaard
Heidi Kurtz
Maren Montalbano
Daniel O'Dea
Daniel Schwartz
Thann Scoggin
Rebecca Siler
Tiana Sorenson
Daniel Spratlan
Elisa Sutherland
Daniel Taylor

Donald Nally, conductor
Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor
John Grecia, keyboardist
John Conahan and John Walthausen, guest keyboardists
Paul Vazquez, sound designer
Ben Perri and Brittany Saunders, production assistants

Jonathan Bradley, executive director
Shannon McMahon, operations manager
Jesse Kudler, grants manager
Elizabeth Dugan, bookkeeper

The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artists Management