A Handel Easter hymn

Happy Easter, dear readers! A few weeks ago I accidentally introduced a hymn we sang in church today, Thine Is the Glory (or Thine Be the Glory, I've seen both titles). To explain, the music for the hymn comes from George Frederic Handel's oratorio Joshua, from a chorus titled “See, the conqu'ring hero comes!”. We've been going through the book of Joshua in Sunday School, and I'd been taking turns teaching while our regular teacher was away for a few weeks. I listened to Joshua (the oratorio) due to being reminded of it, remembered the hymn derived from it, and, since it's a resurrection song and Easter was a month away, introduced it to the class. Which reminded our music leader about it, causing him to pick it for Easter (despite it not being in our usual rotation). I felt like this was as good an excuse as any to digitally engrave some music, and whipped up the score below this afternoon for fun:

In the process I learned the difference between the Early Modern English verb forms ‘hast’ (second-person singular present indicative) and ‘hath’ (third-person singular present indicative) while checking lyrics, since some versions (incorrectly) used the latter instead of the former in the phrase “Thou o’er death hast won.”

There's an interesting history behind this tune, which you may see categorized in hymnals as “Judas Maccabeus”. You see, in 1746 Handel composed an oratorio titled Judas Maccabeus, which became one of his more popular oratorios. The next year in 1747 he composed Joshua, along with this tune. Joshua falls into what I would describe as “solidly average” for Handel; it's not bad by any means, and has its share of high points (I'm particularly fond of “A solemn March during the circumvection[sic] of the Ark of the Covenant”), but mostly didn't achieve the same popularity.

Except for this chorus, which is sometimes rated as Handel's second-most-famous chorus after the “Hallelujah” chorus from Messiah. Noting its popularity, Handel went back and added it into Judas Maccabeus (perhaps in 1751, it's generic enough in wording that it fits), and the combination took off. Then in 1884 the music was used by Swiss hymn writer Edmond Louis Budry as the basis for a new hymn, “À toi la gloire,” or Thine Is the Glory when translated into English.

And that's the story of how a tune composed for one oratorio got named after a different oratorio and ended up in a hymn. (It helps that it's a relatively simple chorus sung in unison without any polyphony, making it pretty easy to sing.) History is truly fascinating sometimes. A hui hou!

Orchestrating Handel's “The Harmonious Blacksmith”

Today I'm pleased to finally be able to share a new project I've been working on for a few months now. Back in February I mentioned I started learning LilyPond in order to engrave sheet music, and after finishing copying Ecossaise in E♭ Major by Beethoven as a warm-up exercise I was looking around for something new to practice with. I settled on Handel's piece known as The Harmonious Blacksmith, the name given to the fourth movement from his Suite No. 5 in E major for harpsichord. I discovered this fantastic piece last year, and in the process of writing the LilyPond code for it I listened to a whole bunch of different versions of it, including two versions of it orchestrated for a full orchestra. After copying a version for harpsichord(/piano), this inspired me to undertake something a bit more ambitious: making my own orchestrated version!

I settled on a sixteen-instrument ensemble, where two coincidences neatly dovetailed: MIDI handles channels in groups of 16, and the staves for those instruments also pretty nicely filled exactly one page vertically. It's scored, somewhat arbitrarily, for first and second violins, viola, cello, bass, harp, flute, oboe, English horn, bassoon, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tuba, French horn, and xylophone. I started sometime in mid-March or so, and worked on it off and on for the next month and a half. In early May I gave a short talk at our astronomy department's weekly Monday lunch (which often features people talking about hobbies or interests) and gave the first public premiere of the (mostly) finished work by playing the synthesized MIDI audio. Since then I've tweaked a few little things (such as changing instrument parts to the correct keys for transposing instruments), and this weekend I finally worked out an easy way to render MIDI to audio. (Turns out there's a convenient Python package, midi2audio, which makes it a snap.)

Anyway, here's a video I made so I could display the sheet music along with the audio:

This was, obviously, my first such attempt at orchestration and I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I'm sure if I actually knew music theory I'd be able to weave even more beautiful passages, but even so I stumbled upon quite a few bits that still give me goosebumps, or which just sound lovely: the gentle introduction of the harp in the first variation, the punctuating xylophone taps on pages 8–10 (but especially on page 9) like little blacksmith's hammers, the interplay between trumpet and oboe (page 11), the pastoral, sublime repetition of the second variation (page 14) right after the bombastic introduction a page before, the staccato viola (page 17) interspersing with the flute*, the introduction of the third variation with its gentle, lilting interplay between the woodwinds and harp, the xylophone intermittently shadowing the oboe (page 23), the growing crescendo involving nearly all the instruments which ends that variation (page 24), those  two insistent growling low notes from the bassoon in the fourth variation (page 27), the trumpet making a surprise appearance in the fifth variation (page 34), the four-part instrument unison between the violins, viola, and trumpet on page 38 (never fails to bring out the goosebumps), and the entirety of the last two pages as everything slows, and builds, and crescendos before the final cascading descent to the finish. I've listened to this piece I don't know how many dozens of times at this point (both my version and others), and I have yet to tire of it.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. I hope you enjoy the music, and feel free to point out any musical mistakes I might have made—I did have an experienced violinist friend look it over so I'm fairly confident the strings don't have any unplayable notes (he found those already), but I might still have made mistakes with the other instruments. A hui hou!

*The staccato markings were one of the few liberties I took with the original notes along with adding a few trills in places, though there are a number of trills in the second variation in the original. The dynamics markings and tempi are also mine.

Christmas Music Singing

Merry belated Christmas and happy early New Year, everyone. It's a quiet Christmas holiday for me so I haven't had much to talk about. My big excitement for December so far was attending a Messiah sing-along for the first time.

I'd never been to a Messiah sing-along before so I didn't know what to expect, but I ended up having a lot of fun. The four voices of the choir were split up around the church and I ended up sitting in front of my choir director, who coincidentally also sings bass. This turned out to be very helpful as my ability at singing unfamiliar music can be summed up as “tempo, lyrics, pitch—pick any two!” (and while I'm intimately familiar with the solo parts of the Messiah, I get lost in the dense melismas of the multi-part choruses).

Ultimately, I had a great time with it (we didn't perform the entire work, just Act I, the Hallelujah chorus, and the final two choruses) and I hope to participate again next time I get a chance. A hui hou!

Birth of a Genre: The Origin of the English Oratorio

I've written before about my love of classical music and my slowly-growing collection of oratorios. While most people my age are keeping up with the popular music scene, much of my music collection has passed its two-hundredth birthday already, and in some cases is pushing three hundred.

Case in point: last month I got Handel's oratorio Esther, originally composed in 1718 (and thus coming up on 295 years!). Most people only know Handel for his Messiah, but he actually wrote a total of 29 oratorios, 25 of them in English. In fact, Esther is the very first oratorio in English rather than German or Italian. Not just the first English oratorio Handel wrote, but the very first one ever. Handel had already achieved a measure of fame in writing Italian (and non-vocal) works, so this departure from his usual fare was unusual, and only done because it was a private commission. It was originally staged as a private performance only, and wasn't revised and publicly performed for over fourteen years.

(The story of how that happened is interesting; Handel had revised the original 1718 composition slightly two years later and this copy apparently fell into the hands of another music company sometime in the intervening eleven years, who then proceeded to put on what was essentially a pirated performance in 1731 which was a huge success. Handel responded by doing some more revisions and adding some new content and putting on a performance of the new and revised Esther the next year in 1732. [The recording I got is a reconstruction of the 1720 version, as best can be determined, however.])

When it was finally performed for the public, however, Esther's success helped show Handel that there was a lively market for classical music that the up-and-coming English-speaking middle class of Britain could actually understand. He came out with his second oratorio Deborah a year later in 1733, and their popularity helped convince Handel to make the switch from Italian to English works. Although he continued to write Italian operas for another ten years after this, of the twenty-three oratorios he wrote after Deborah only one of them was in Italian.

Anyway, I wrote this post because I wanted to examine the first ever English oratorio. I've had Deborah in my collection for some years now (it was the second oratorio I ever got, actually), and it's interesting to compare them. You see, I've always found Deborah to be rather slow and dragging, overall. I admit, I tend to prefer faster tempos in general (and Deborah has a few energetic fast pieces), but I think I can appreciate a good slow piece as well (and Deborah has some sublime ones). It's just that it tends to have a lot more of the latter than the former, and takes a lot of time for anything to happen. I had long unconsciously expected that Esther, being the first oratorio Handel wrote, would also be a bit slow and plodding. I figured that Handel was still finding his feet with these early oratorios, before he got better and wrote such masterpieces as Messiah, Saul, and Belshazzar.

The truth turned out to be a bit more complicated. For one thing, I hadn't really realized just how important the librettist is the finished product. Handel didn't come up with the words to his works himself, he simply set to music words provided him by a librettist. And different librettists had differing levels of competence in composing poetic English that can be sung easily. Some librettists worked with Handel over multiple years and provided the librettos for multiple oratorios (some of the better writers were in this category, thankfully), but the librettists for both Esther and Deborah were one-shots, making it impossible to compare them with anything else fairly.

The point is that Esther, although it also has a bit of plodding in its first half, has some surprisingly fun and peppy rhythms. Haman's first aria has to be the most upbeat and cheerful song about genocide I've ever heard. Once the second half rolls around the action picks up a bit and there are quite a few really good arias in quick succession through the remainder from Mordecai, Esther and Ahasuerus. It helps that it's a bit shorter than the norm for a Handelian oratorio – most run about two CDs long, while Esther only about three-fourths that.

Although I wouldn't classify it as one of Handel's masterpieces, Esther is a decent piece of oft under-appreciated music. After all, if it hadn't been performed without his permission and shown Handel just how popular music in English actually was, he might not have switched from writing Italian works, and we might not have the Messiah we have today. The list of oratorios in English is not over-large, and Handel is responsible for quite a sizable chunk of it. I always find it interesting seeing where things come from, and the origin of the English oratorio is a personally enjoyable subject.

Music of the Sphere-Studiers

In my last post I mentioned William Herschel, well-known in astronomy circles as the discoverer of the planet Uranus. What is probably not as well known, however (I didn't know it until last week), is that Herschel, before he became interested in astronomy, was actually a professional musician and composer, writing a total of 24 symphonies and numerous concertos and other works.

Herschel lived from 1738 to 1822, pretty much the entirety of the Classical period (so-called to distinguish it from the preceding Baroque and the following Romantic periods). Although born in what would become Germany, he moved to England at the age of nineteen where he spent over a dozen years performing and composing music before becoming interested in astronomy. Recordings of his work are very rare; at the moment there are only one or two CDs of his music available online, but I was able to pick one up on Amazon that contained 6 of his symphonies.

Listening to them, I can say that he was quite an accomplished composer. It's always impossible to say with these things, but I think that if he hadn't become interested in astronomy he might have become famous as a composer. His music is definitely of the Classical type, a bit less complex than the Baroque, though it still sounds somewhat Baroque in places (which makes sense since he was writing most of it near the transition from Baroque to Classical). Strangely, it often reminds me in places of Handel, another German-born musician who later immigrated to England. (Given that Handel is probably my favorite composer, I'm just fine with the occasional resemblance.) All in all, Herschel's music (or at least symphonies 2, 8, 12-14, and 17) is quite good, and I would highly recommend it to any lovers of good music out there.

Mutopia

Serenity

by Daniel Berke 

Lightly wafting breeze the zephyrs,

Winding on their merry way,

Hot the Sun and cool the breeze is,

On this balmy Hilo day.

In other news, yesterday I stumbled across the Mutopia project. Their motto is "Free sheet music for everyone". Not only do they provide sheet music, but each piece comes accompanied by a midi file of the piece. Being synthesized music, midi can never replace instrumental music (and it can't imitate the human voice at all), but it does come pretty close, and makes for a wonderful repository of free listenings of many great classic pieces. I've been using it for something new to listen to while working on writing a paper. I've been having great fun picking new, complex Handel and Bach compositions and improvising along with them, which makes for a fun and enjoyable form of mental exercise. I'm currently working my way through Bach's Goldberg Variations. Anyway, I should probably get back to writing that paper...

Handel! And Pipe Organs! And Handelian Organ Concertos!

Today I learned that my favorite composer, Handel, wrote concertos for one of my favorite instruments, the pipe organ. And not just one or two, but whole bunches of them! I've now been listening to previews of them on Amazon for the last hour, and the combination of such beautiful music and the chocolate bar I just happened to be eating at the same time nearly caused me to burst with elation. There's nothing like listening to one of the old masters showing how it's done! Beautiful melody, elaborately decorated on all sides by wondrous, joyful harmony, all supported by rhythm in its proper place. The joy of listening to good music that engages the mind, even as it flows through the veins like fire! Words are so inadequate to describe the feelings inspired by any one of these amazing pieces. One of the reasons I so love a good pipe organ is the fact that it is the best instrument I've ever found to be accompanied by whistling.

As if all this wasn't good enough, I discovered that I have had one of these organ concertos all along! It had me fooled because it is one of the few to get a name of its own beyond a mere opus number: The Cuckoo and the Nightingale. That's how it came labled on the CD I got it off of, along with an assortment of other Handel pieces, so I never suspected its true nature. I've always loved it, though, and now I know why!