Home | Contact | Join Our Mailing List! | Privacy Policy

PROGRAM NOTES

Click here to view Concert Repertoire

Program Reflections from the Artistic Director

When our Music Selection committee reviewed several multi-movement works in anticipation of this concert, I was lukewarm about Thompson’s “Frostiana.” It seemed so simple, with quiet flowing poetry and lilting musical phrases. I had performed several of the individual movements but never the entire set and I wondered whether the set would effectively carry the second half of a concert.

In digging deeper, I discovered that the compositional writing is relatively simple but, like Frost’s poetry, the more I delved into these pieces the more complex and interesting they became. Soon the music and the poetry began to take hold of me.

Robert Frost (winner of four Pulitzer Prizes) and American composer Randall Thompson knew each other and admired one another’s work. In 1958, Thompson was commissioned to compose a piece for the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. He selected seven Frost poems that depict the simple, everyday experiences of rural life and titled the set “Frostiana: Seven Country Songs.” In addition to the rural images, a subtle thread unites the seven poems emphasizing the small but significant choices we make in our lives.

Frostiana incorporates parts for mixed chorus as well as pieces composed for men’s and women’s choruses. The middle piece, The Telephone, is composed as a dialogue for a seven-part mixed chorus. Intrigued by the conversational tone of this piece, I programmed it for a chamber choir within the chorus.

Thompson originally composed “Frostiana” for chorus and piano in 1958, but later arranged the movements for chorus and full orchestra. I wanted to utilize the color and warmth of Thompson’s instrumental writing without bringing an entire orchestra on stage and decided to find a way to combine the best of both setting. After seeing Joseph Schlefke’s arrangement of “La Bohème” at Theatre Latté Da last winter, I knew he was the man for the job. A sense of longing and loneliness is evident in the strings and the sounds of nature are prominent in the oboe, clarinet and flute parts. It has been a delight working with Joe and listening to the unfolding of this lovely arrangement.

Our ensemble, OVation, opens Set Two with Peace of Wild Things, with text by another great American poet, Wendell Berry, setting the stage for the nature-centered poetry of “Frostiana.” We conclude with an anthem composed for the 2004 GALA Festival, With One Voice.

Inspired by the common thread of Frost’s poems, Set One is programmed around stories and images of one’s ability to make a difference in the world based on choice and deliberate action. Several songs tell true stories as in Marie, a young woman who fought the courts in order to take her girlfriend to her high school prom – and Not in Our Town, the true telling of a Montana town’s powerful stand against the Klan. Others reflect the sense of isolation one may experience in choosing to stand against the crowd as in James Taylor’s famous That Lonesome Road and I Come from Good People, a song from a multi-movement work commissioned by the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus.

Fred Small’s beloved Everything Possible has inspired children and adults alike to “be anybody you want to be and love whomever you will” since it first appeared on Fred’s album in 1993. While Australian songwriter Judy Small sings a similar message in Influenced by Queers, her style is entirely... unique!

This concert brings back a wonderful piece, Word to the Wise, which One Voice commissioned with Jeanie Brindley-Barnett for a concert in 2000 with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre. We welcome back our friends and collaborators, the talented students from the Community of Peace Academy on the East Side of Saint Paul, who are featured as our bell ensemble. Much of the work we do is inspired by and for the youth of our culture. It is your choices and actions that will most profoundly change the world we live in!

— Jane Ramseyer Miller, Artistic Director, One Voice Mixed Chorus

Program Reflections from the Arranger

I was approached by Jane Ramseyer Miller, Artistic Director of One Voice Mixed Chorus, to arrange a chamber version of “Frostiana” after she saw Theater Latte Da’s winter production of “La Boheme”, for which I was Music Director and reorchestrated the entire Puccini score for five instruments. Jane and I have also been friends for a long time. She wanted to perform Randall Thompson’s “Frostiana” with her chorus but wanted something more than the piano accompaniment that the composer created. Thompson also orchestrated the songs for full orchestra, so I just made a sort of compromise of the two arrangements. My reduction does use piano in addition to violin, cello, flute, oboe and clarinet. I can’t say that I needed to do a whole lot of re-imagining of the score, because Thompson had done most of the work already. I by no means would call for efforts “new settings” of the poems, because I was just taking Thompson’s music and fitting it into Jane Miller’s performance concept. I didn’t do any composing, just arranging.

The esthetic, however, will be very different. Although the piano accompaniment is at times very beautiful, it is only one instrument, one color. The full orchestra version that Thompson created has a lot more interest, but it blows up the poetry onto a very large scale. The chamber version that I came up with expands the expressiveness of the piano accompaniment and offers more timbral colors, but it also creates a sense of intimacy, but not loneliness. It is now as if a small group of friends were communally enjoying Frost’s poetry, as opposed to one person reading silently to himself or a lecturer reciting it into a microphone to a large auditorium of listeners. That, I think, is the most rewarding result of my arrangement.

— Joe Schlefke, Music Director and Conductor, Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra

Guests: Community of Peace Academy Bell Ensemble

Last spring, One Voice had the honor of working with students from Community of Peace Academy on a joint concert and commissioned a piece of music. Through our rehearsals over three months, some wonderful relationships were formed between our choirs. We are delighted to welcome CPA students to our concert tonight as performers in the CPA Bell Ensemble under the direction of Mr. John Sorlien.

Community of Peace Academy charter school, located in East St. Paul, has received many accolades in its eleven years of educating students. In 2003, it became the first charter school to be selected as a National School of Character by the Character Education Partnership in Washington, DC, and, in 2004, was one of eight schools chosen by the U.S. Department of Education for inclusion in the publication “Successful Charter Schools.” CPA’s mission, “to educate the whole person - mind, body and will - for fullness of life for all,” extends beyond the classroom to involve the students in many community projects. The Bell Ensemble is excited to join OVMC for this concert as a fellow organization dedicated to supporting the ideas of peace and equality. For more information on Community of Peace Academy, visit their website: www.cpa.charter.k12.mn.us or call (651) 776-5151.

Poetry Texts
Frostiana

Poetry by Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.



I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went –
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

The Telephone

“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say —
You spoke from that flower on the windowsill —
Do you remember what it was you said?”

“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”

“Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word —
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say —
Someone said ‘Come’ — I heard it as I bowed.”

“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”

“Well, so I came.”

A Girl’s Garden

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple tree
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, "I know!

“It’s as when I was a farmer …”
Oh never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

Stopping By Woods

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Choose Something Like A Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud —
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.