Mother Tongue:
Kodály’s Hungary
June 3 and 4, 2017
Sonja Bontrager, Conrad Erb, Amy Hochstetler, Nicandro Iannacci, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Nathan Lofton, Cortlandt Matthews, Brian Middleton, Hank Miller, John Piccolini, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Eddie Rubeiz, Lizzy Schwartz, Melinda Steffy, Emily Sung, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman
Norvég leányok Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)
Akik mindig elkésnek
Köszöntő
Hymns from the Old South Virgil Thomson (1896—1989)
· My Shepherd Will Supply My Need
· The Morning Star
· Green Fields
· Death ‘Tis a Melancholy Day
Pange lingua Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)
Pange lingua György Orban (b. 1947)
Intermission
Matrai Kepek Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)
Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit arr. William Dawson (1899—1990)
Shenandoah arr. Steven Sametz (b. 1954)
Elijah Rock arr. Moses Hogan (1957—2003)
Notes on the Program
Zoltán Kodály was a prolific composer, philosopher, linguist, and music educator whose pedagogy remains in use throughout the world. Today, however, we celebrate his legacy as a champion of folk music. With his colleague Béla Bartók, Kodály traveled his native Hungarian countryside cataloguing local folk songs. His work as an ethnomusicologist helped elevate folk music from a peasant genre scorned by classical musicians to a valid and vital source of musical inspiration––not just in Hungary but around the world.
Kodály sought to understand and value his own Hungarian cultural roots through his work, but his legacy gives value to vernacular music in any and every community. He wrote, “What is universally human can be approached by all peoples only through their specific, national characteristics.” Today we approach “what is universally human” not only through Kodály’s own compositions and arrangements of Hungarian folk melodies but also through American musical traditions from the same period. Kodály’s work spotlights the value of music grown organically from the experiences of everyday people.
We begin with a range of Kodály’s Hungarian works treating very distinct themes but each with the composer’s typically evocative melodies. Norvég leányok takes us to faraway Norway, with a heavy undercurrent of melancholy and homesickness. Composed in 1940 with a contemporary text by Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, the piece has been interpreted as support for the Norwegian people suffering under Nazi occupation. The local girls give their smiles to “a foreign lad,” presumably a sailor, and they are left with no laughter for themselves at home. Kodály’s lilting melodic lines suggest both the girls’ unheard sighs and the ever-present sea breeze; the gentle persistence of raindrops––in both sound and text––throughout the piece situates us completely in this misty fishing village. Akik mindig elkésnek has an even darker feeling, alternating between the tired sadness evoked by the poem and fiery sixteenth-note figures that offer brief glimpses of hope before ultimately flickering out.
Köszöntő is actually Kodály’s arrangement of a well-known Hungarian folksong. Its title means “toast,” and it is traditionally sung as a birthday greeting in Hungary. Kodály takes the traditional tune and embellishes not only with harmony but also with a slightly unsettling counterpoint: listen for the tenors almost echoing the melody, but off by a beat and in a different key.
Kodály’s contemporary in another culture, the American composer Virgil Thomson spent time in Paris, where he studied Satie and befriended Gertrude Stein, later setting her writing to music. Many of his works were avant garde, and he was a critic and something of a cynic––he famously defined music as “that which musicians do.” But his Hymns from the Old South betray his traditional side and his Missouri roots with their loving treatment of American folk hymns. Thomson’s arrangements are simple, honoring the original hymn tunes without much in the way of arranging beyond harmonizing. Both My Shepherd Will Supply My Need and Death, ‘Tis a Melancholy Day have texts by Isaac Watts, who is known as the father of English hymnody. The former’s American pedigree goes even deeper, as it is set to the hymn tune “Resignation” from the 1835 Southern Harmony. Similarly, the text of Green Fields was written by Anglican clergyman John Newton, who is better known as the author of “Amazing Grace.” The Morning Star also uses a text that hails from Europe––it is an English version of the hymn Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern by Phillipp Nicolai, which J. S. Bach used for one of his choral cantatas. But these European texts became distinctly American when they were set to music in Southern Harmony and similar popular hymnals. For the people in the American South who gathered to sing these hymns, they were––and are––as much an expression of community as of religious conviction.
Kodály valued the cultural traditions of sacred music as well as secular folk music. Pange Lingua takes the hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas and expands it with a contrapuntal treatment whose result is evocative despite its simplicity. Like Kodály, Romanian-born Hungarian composer György Orban draws from Renaissance techniques, but in contrast, Orban also draws inspiration from jazz and adds intricate rhythmic elements that are anything but simple.
Kodály’s folk focus is perhaps best encapsulated in Mátrai képek, or Mátra Pictures, a boisterous compilation of folksongs from the Mátra region of Hungary. Composed in 1931, the piece features five folksongs from the mountainous northern region. Kodály’s setting emphasizes the narrative aspect of each tune, with stark emotional and dynamic contrasts: a depiction of the famous outlaw Vidróczki, a nineteenth-century bandit; an exchange between a village boy who yearns for a more cosmopolitan life and his no-nonsense sweetheart; a mournful plaint from one who has left his home—perhaps even the sailor we encountered earlier in Norway; a playful and flirtatious exchange between a young woman working in the fields and a suitor who believes she deserves a gentler vocation; and finally, a rousing vignette of the comic dramas of country life, including uncooperative livestock, unwanted guests, and insufficient wine.
We close the program by returning to our home soil with arrangements of American folk tunes. Although these settings are lively and upbeat, they—like Kodaly’s folksongs—speak to darker elements of our history. Our country’s musical inheritance includes this rich tradition borne out of centuries of oppression and suffering—likely a legacy that would have been familiar to Kodály, given Hungary’s violent political upheaval and occupation during his lifetime. Knowing the cultural significance of these American traditions, we can only imagine what resonance might have once been carried in the mournful tunes about Hungarian bandits or livestock.
Here in the States, enslaved people of African and African-American descent may have used spirituals like these to discreetly pass news or messages––Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit features a train that is thought to be a reference to the Underground Railroad. This song and Elijah Rock are representative of spirituals in their Christian content, but they are more than mere hymns: like Thomson’s assertive settings and Kodály’s folk tunes, they testify to a community and a faith that is deeply, viscerally felt and needed.
Local composer Steven Sametz arranged Shenandoah for his choir at Lehigh University. The song’s precise origin is unknown, but it is thought to come from Canadian and American voyageurs: fur trappers and traders who, in the early nineteenth century, were the only people of European descent who ventured west to the Missouri River, where encountered the Oneida Iriquois, perhaps including a chief named Shenandoah. Like many of the melodies we’ve heard today, the piece’s beauty and its melancholy are inextricably linked. This is ultimately the power of the vernacular tunes that Kodály championed: although the people and places depicted in these melodies are far away or long gone, we meet them again in their songs. That is worthy of a toast, indeed.