Old Favorites
and New Friends

Program Note

(N.B.: Colin Britt is the Artistic Director and Conductor of the West Village Chorale in NYC)

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry captures the exhilaration of standing within a landscape and briefly feeling part of something larger than oneself. Colin Britt responds with music filled with openness, motion, and youthful wonder. The choir seems to breathe with the natural world as the poem’s images pass from voice to voice. Our program begins not with a grand declaration, but with a moment of attention: a willingness to look outward, listen closely, and be fully present.

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Gabriel Fauré composed Cantique de Jean Racine in 1865 while still a student, setting a French paraphrase by Jean Racine of an ancient Christian hymn. Its long melodic lines and gently unfolding harmonies already reveal the grace and restraint that would characterize Fauré’s mature sacred music. Rather than portraying faith through dramatic force, the work approaches the divine with warmth and quiet confidence. The voices rise from the accompaniment as if emerging from stillness, offering a prayer for guidance, mercy, and peace.

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Michael Bussewitz-Quarm’s Nigra Sum sets words from the Song of Songs and is dedicated to refugees throughout the world and to all who are lost. Chant-like melodies, suspended harmonies, and tightly clustered chords create music that seems to search for security and belonging. The ancient text becomes more than an expression of love and self-knowledge. In this setting, it also speaks for those who have been displaced, overlooked, or separated from home, affirming the beauty and dignity of every human life.

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Brahms sets a seventeenth-century poem by German physicist and poet Paul Fleming that counsels patience, trust, and perseverance through suffering. The title simply means “Sacred Song,” and the music unfolds with an almost architectural calm. Voices imitate and support one another in a carefully constructed canon, while the accompaniment maintains a steady foundation beneath them. Its message is not that hardship can be ignored, but that fear need not have the final word. The concluding “Amen” expands that private reassurance into a luminous communal affirmation.

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(from Considering Matthew Shepard)

Craig Hella Johnson’s oratorio Considering Matthew Shepard reflects upon the life and legacy of Matthew Shepard, whose 1998 murder became a defining moment in the movement against anti-LGBTQ+ violence. Ordinary Boy asks the listener to encounter Matthew before the headlines, symbols, and arguments that followed his death. He was first a son, a friend, and a young person searching for his place in the world. Johnson’s simple, tender musical language restores individuality to a life too often discussed only through tragedy. In remembering the ordinary person, this movement asks us to recognize the extraordinary value held within every human life.

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Built from only a few lines of text, Even When He Is Silent offers a profound meditation on maintaining faith, love, and hope when none can be easily felt. Kim André Arnesen’s music begins in fragility, with isolated sounds surrounded by silence. Gradually, the harmony grows warmer and more expansive, but it never offers an easy or triumphant resolution. Hope here is an act of courage, expressed quietly and sustained together when certainty is impossible.

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Keith Hampton draws upon the energy of gospel music in this vibrant expression of praise. Rhythmic vitality, repetition, and dialogue between musical lines create the feeling of a community gathering momentum through shared testimony. Portions of familiar hymn language are transformed through syncopation and an increasingly joyful intensity. After the inward reflection of the preceding works, Praise His Holy Name turns faith outward, inviting both singers and listeners into celebration.

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The second half opens with a traditional spiritual shaped through the distinctive arranging voice of Stacey V. Gibbs. Its layered rhythms, unexpected harmonic turns, and animated exchanges among the voice parts preserve the music’s communal character while creating an exhilarating contemporary choral experience. The repeated declarations gather force through repetition, illustrating one of the spiritual’s enduring strengths: a simple musical idea can carry an extraordinary depth of faith, resistance, memory, and joy.

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Jake Runestad sets Alfred Noyes’s brief poem A Prayer, in which grief becomes an urgent desire for love to reach someone who has been lost. The music begins with tenderness and restraint before opening into a powerful wave of sound. Yet the work’s emotional peak is not merely an outcry of sorrow. It is an insistence that love can continue to speak beyond absence.

Runestad has described the piece as an offering of hope amid darkness, and its gradual ascent allows grief to be heard, transformed, and finally released.

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This cumulative spiritual builds its story one number and one musical layer at a time. Paul Caldwell and Sean Ivory treat the familiar material with theatrical energy, rhythmic playfulness, and a constant sense of forward motion. Individual voices emerge from the ensemble before being folded back into the larger texture, reflecting the song’s central idea of being called, sent, and joined in shared purpose. What begins as an instruction becomes a celebration of community in action.

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Daniel Gawthrop’s best-known choral work grew from a collaboration with poet Jane Griner. Her text presents music as a language capable of expressing what ordinary speech cannot: desire, grief, comfort, remembrance, and love. Gawthrop’s unaccompanied setting moves with the intimacy of a private confession, each phrase supported by rich, carefully balanced harmony. The work suggests that when words reach their limit, singing may carry us further, giving voice to truths that can be felt more readily than explained.

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Shawn Kirchner’s arrangement of the nineteenth-century American gospel hymn begins with buoyant simplicity and gradually expands into a brilliant display of choral color. Voices imitate instruments, rhythms overlap, and the original tune passes freely throughout the ensemble. The promised “unclouded day” is both a vision of heaven and a broader image of release from hardship. Kirchner’s arrangement makes that hope feel immediate, physical, and joyfully alive.

Program Note

Paul Halley’s Freedom Trilogy draws three musical traditions into one unfolding celebration: the 4th Century Kyrie de Angelis, South African songs of praise and procession, and the familiar hymn Amazing Grace. The melodies first appear in succession and then begin to coexist, each retaining its identity while becoming part of a larger musical whole. Greek, Sotho, Zulu, and English meet within a vibrant tapestry of voices and rhythms.

This work offers a fitting conclusion to this inaugural program. Freedom is presented not as a solitary achievement, but as a shared journey sustained by mercy, courage, memory, and song.

Distinct voices do not have to become identical in order to create unity. They listen, answer, and move forward together.