Cedille Records has just released its final recording for 2007, Snowcarols: Christmas Music of William Ferris, with the William Ferris Chorale, conducted by Paul French. The disc contains Ferris's big Christmas cantata, Snowcarols, along with shorter Christmas-themed choral works. As I like to do when we release a new project, I have asked someone intimately familiar with the project to guest blog the "backstory" of the recording -- in this case, Ferris Chorale Artistic Director John Vorrasi. Before I turn this over to him, I should note that the new disc and all full-price Cedille recordings are part of the Holiday Sale at our Newly Redesigned Web Site. I hope you will give it a look and let us know what you think of the new site. Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving, Jim. Now here's John's post:
David Diamond remarked that, because of my long association with composers, I had begun to think like one. I was, in his view, a composer who knew the art inside and out, even though I didn't actually compose.
If his assessment was accurate, it most certainly would apply to my relationship with the music of William Ferris. I was Bill's friend and a partner with him in artistic projects since we first met in September of 1966. I wrote the books for his two operas and six cantatas and I also arranged texts for numerous other works. I was "his" soloist, and most of the tenor music he composed was with my voice in mind. There was a wonderful spontaneity in our musicmaking -- it was as free and easy as if we were improvising together.
With the exception of The Lord Said to Me, I heard each of the works on this recording measure by measure as they were being composed. Every day, Bill would play his freshly baked sketches for me. I learned quickly when to share my opinions and when to remain silent. Over time I came to understand the depth and intensity of his creative process.
Not unlike Proust's episode of the madeleine, each time I hear one of these works I am drawn back to the time of its creation. The experience is not quite a deja vu (which, when I have experienced one, have found to be quite frightening) but rather a warm all-embracing involuntary memory. I suppose it's not unusual that a good many of these memories involve snow.
I know snow. In my hometown of Rochester, New York, every winter brought at least two or three of what the local weathermen called "The Classic Lake-Effect Snowstorm." As a child I reveled in snow on snow, drifts as tall as hills, traffic at a standstill and closed schools. The whole world seemed silent under a blanket of white, punctuated only by the drip-drip of slender icicles.
Such poetic memories from childhood hardly prepared me for the Chicago blizzard of 1979. A great city ground to a halt is not so much fun viewed from an adult vantage point. Streets, alleys, sidewalks and driveways were utterly impassible for more than a week. The simplest of everyday personal tasks became formidable challenges, compounded by mass disruption of everything-public transportation, waste collection, emergency services, burials-well, everything. Chicago's Department of Streets and Sanitation just couldn't keep pace with the relentless accumulation. So much snow had fallen that there was no place to dump it all. As a last resort, the city decided to pack it into empty railroad cars, sending tons of snow south to delight Floridian children. Here in Chicago, however, there was no delight. Angry citizens blamed Mayor Michael Bilandic for the breakdown of public services. Fair or not, they took their revenge, voting him out of office in favor of Chicago's first woman mayor, Jane Byrne.
A lifelong Chicagoan, William Ferris knew snowstorms, too. In 1979, Ferris was chairman of the theory department at the American Conservatory of Music. The hundred-year-old Conservatory was then still quite strict about the number of class hours required of each student to receive credit for coursework. So braving the snow, the dedicated and tenacious Ferris made the long and slow trek to his studio in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. Naturally, not one student showed up. So to pass the time, he began paging through an old hymnal. Coming upon Gustav Holst's setting of Christina Rossetti's "In the bleak midwinter," he decided to use his newly found "free time" productively by making his own setting of the text. And from that came the genesis of Snowcarols.
The William Ferris Chorale traditionally began its subscription series with a Christmas concert. After the first few seasons, Ferris tired of programs filled with twenty or so short works, beautiful though they might be, and wanted to build his program around a more substantial central offering. Much of the music that appealed to him called for large orchestras and choruses, well beyond the ensemble's early budgets. So he decided to tailor-make cantatas for the Chorale to sing. Snowcarols was the result of this practical impulse.
Snowcarols was constructed from the inside outwards, beginning with the unaccompanied carol, written during the winter of 1979, then moving forward and backward throughout the spring of 1980, with the orchestrations completed in the early fall.
The meaning of the word "carol" is stretched significantly in these quasi-symphonic movements much as "motet" is expanded by Bach's essays in that form. Ferris's meditation on snow is singable, listenable and memorable. A sense of narrative, declamation and unselfconscious tunefulness creates a world full of variety. Like all of the great carols, he makes an important musical statement in the most beguiling and gentlest of possible ways.
The orchestration of Snowcarols, particularly of the last movement, is Ferris at his most inventive and coloristic. With a liberal use of mallet instruments, kettle drum glissandi, frolicking woodwinds and tremulando gongs and cymbals, the listener-and performers-come to feel almost literally caught up in a snowstorm.
Snowcarols was nominated for the 1980 Pulitzer Prize in music. I've always considered it a badge of honor that it didn't win the prize because, in my opinion, most of the works that were selected in the 70s and 80s were not especially audience friendly. In fact, the more arch and avant a work was, (and the closer its composer's proximity to the Hudson River) the better its chances of winning. Perhaps Chicago Sun Times critic Robert Marsh was on the mark when he said: "Ferris is a conservative composer in the best sense of the word. His music makes its points easily and well, but he is innovative, imaginative and unafraid to write something that makes an immediate appeal through its pure beauty of sound."
Ferris was fond of saying that his first aesthetic experience came as a boy soprano in the Cardinal's Cathedral Choristers of Holy Name Cathedral. The inherent drama of the Catholic liturgies moved him greatly but never more so than at Christmas. It was, above all others, his favorite holy day so it comes as no surprise that he composed a great deal of music for the feast.
Ferris had left his position as organist at Holy Name Cathedral and had taken a job at a small parish in Evergreen Park, Illinois when he composed The Lord said to Me, an anthem meant to be sung as the priest and ministers walked in procession for the Christmas Mass at midnight. With its Strausian sound construct and dramatic climax, it was absolute "cathedral music" and as such was an immediate success with clergy and congregations alike.
By the fall of 1966 he had moved to Rochester, New York to become music director and composer in residence at Sacred Heart Cathedral, where Fulton J Sheen had just been named bishop. For Bishop Sheen's first Christmas at the cathedral, Ferris decided to perform The Lord Said to Me and struggled to get the Cathedral's pastor to authorize funds to hire the required brass quartet and percussionists. And a struggle it was since, in pre-Ferris times, music for liturgies at the cathedral was sung by either a rag-tag choir of grammar school girls or a glee club from the major seminary. So to keep costs down Ferris hired students from the Eastman School of Music (one of whom was Ross Beacraft, now a well known performer on the Chicago music scene), borrowed the school's instruments an arranged for a parishioner's pick up truck to move the percussion. I was enlisted to help with the move and I recall sitting in the open air flatbed with tarps covering the drums and, of course, a steady downfall of snow covering us all. The adventures getting the drums up the winding narrow staircase and into the choir loft of the Cathedral is a story best saved for another time.
-- John Vorrasi
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