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collection of shape-note hymns rst published
in the th century.
ese lyrics, set in entirely
new melodies, sing about “going home.” Each
hymn refers to water in some way, as an image
of what lies between this world and the next, and
each carries a sense of joy in looking beyond
that river. e words reveal our essential human
yearning for a home, a safe resting place.
Narrow
Sea
was commissioned by Music Accord (
).
–Caroline Shaw
GEORGE CRUMB (b. 1929)
e Winds of Destiny
(
American Songbook IV
)
e fourth volume of my
American Songbook
cycles—
e Winds of Destiny
—was completed
in
.
e work’s “subliminal co-ordinates”
(to borrow a term from Vladimir Nabokov) are
fourfold and include two famous songs of the
American Civil War—“Mine Eyes Have Seen
the Glory” (“Battle Hymn of the Republic”)
and “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”;
secondly, that in nitely tender but emotionally
devastating appeal for death—“My Last Trial”;
thirdly, two joyful and rousing Afro-American
spirituals—“Twelve Gates to the City” and “Go
Tell It on the Mountain”; and lastly, “Shenando-
ah,” perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful of all
American folk songs.
e other pieces in this
work are of a more transitional and less func-
tional nature.
My setting of “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory”
carries the heading “eerie, uncanny, spectral;
like a deserted battle eld under full moonlight.”
Any sense of a “marching song” has been elim-
inated and the voice enters as if disembodied,
over a choir of four singing bass drums. One
hears disconcerting sounds: an Australian ab-
origine “thunder stick,” the intermittent hoot-
ing of an owl. “When Johnny Comes Marching
Home” begins “jauntily, even arrogantly” and
seems driven by a kind of militaristic savagery
throughout its rst three stanzas. At a certain
transitional point, however, the whole structure
and logic seems to implode and the music by
degrees loses intensity and collapses into a -
nal “
marcia funebre
”—a bitterly ironic funeral
music that restates the text of the rst stanza.
I overlay here a sardonic theme from the slow
movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. .
“Twelve Gates to the City” is, of course, an ec-
static vision of the “City of God,” and I rein-
force the sense of jubilation with the sound of
tambourine and ringing metallic timbres.
e
intermittent outbursts of “alleluja!” have been
expanded into vocally acrobatic roulades of
sound. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” likewise
implies a sonorous tintinnabulation e ect, and
in the closing passages of this song I imitate
the multi-echoing phenomenon of an alpine
acoustic.
“All My Trials” combines one of the most beau-
tiful melodies with one of the most moving song
texts in the entire traditional American song
genre. I have introduced an African Udu to sug-
gest the erratic heart palpitations and feverish
breathing of a stricken human being. “Death’s
Lullaby” is my own subtitle for this woeful song.
At the beginning of that truly transcendental
song “Shenandoah,” I placed the following de-
scriptive words: “Serenely majestic; like a larger
rhythm of nature (luminous, incandescent; like
van Gogh’s
Starry Night
).” One hears an incred-
ibly so web of polyrhythmic sound in all the
instruments. Time is suspended and the voice
enters “as if oating on the wind from afar.”
“Shenandoah” is a love song, but also an evoca-
tion of the great unknown, mysterious spaces of
the American landscape.
–George Crumb
DAWN UPSHAW,
soprano
Raised in Park Forest, IL, soprano Dawn Up-
shaw studied at Illinois Wesleyan University
(BA,
) and the Manhattan School of Music
under Ellen Faull, completing an MM in
.
at year she won the Young Concert Artists
Auditions, a er which she joined the Metro-
politan Opera’s Young Artists Development
Program. Upshaw won the Naumberg Compe-
tition the following year, setting the stage for an
opera career spanning from Salzburg, Paris, and
Glyndebourne to the Met, where she has made
nearly
appearances. Her credits include the
great roles of Mozart—Pamina, Ilia, Susanna,
Despina, and Zerlina—and contemporary roles
ranging from Constance and Blanche in Pou-
lenc’s
Dialogues des Carmélites
and the Angel in
Messiaen’s
St. Françoise d’Assise
to original roles
such as Daisy Buchanan in John Harbison’s
e
Great Gatsby
and the title role of Kaija Saariaho’s
Clemence
. Upshaw has championed many new
works in her career, including John Adams’s or-
atorio
El Niño
, Saariaho’s oratorio
La Passion de
Simone
,
and Osvaldo Golijov’s song cycle
Ayre
and chamber opera
Ainadamar
, the vehicle of
her
Ravinia appearance. In
Upshaw
recorded a new song cycle written for her by
Maria Schneider,
Winter Morning Walks
, which
won three Grammy Awards, including Best
Classical Vocal Solo Performance. She has four
additional Grammy Awards to her credit among
her discography of more than
recordings,
including the million-selling Symphony No.
by Henryk Górecki. Upshaw holds honorary
doctorates from Yale University and Allegheny
College, as well as from her alma maters, and
in
she became the rst vocal artist to be
named a MacArthur Fellow. e following year,
she became a Fellow of the American Academy
of Arts & Sciences. Upshaw currently leads vocal
programs at both Bard College and Tanglewood.
Dawn Upshaw rst sang at Ravinia in
and
tonight returns for her th season at the festival
George Crumb
Caroline Shaw
AUGUST 27 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2018 | RAVINIA MAGAZINE
99