PRELUDE (piano and strings): “Home,” from Winter Songs
Eliot in his late poem “Little Gidding’): “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner thing shall be well.”
While tonight’s concert features his anthem Unclouded Day, another of composer Shawn Kirchner’s choral works invokes a similar message of long-term hope, in the words of the 14th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich (also famously cited by T. In May 2022, the groups will collaborate again for a pair of concerts entitled “Consider the Lilies.” Tonight’s program will be repeated on Sunday, October 24, at Spivey Hall. In fact, the theme of “story” will anchor the entire season, along with an important subtheme, that of collaboration, both with other singers and with guest instrumentalists. But an artistic expression of resilience and determination is not out of the scope of our story.” Stephen Mulder observed, “Obviously, it is premature to claim the ‘new day’ when there are still lots of infections and deaths in the news. In designing the program, GCA director Dr. Many-if not most-of the selections are decidedly optimistic, exploring themes of darkness and light, awakening and dawning, redemption, and the triumph of hope. So it can be with the musical art in tonight’s concert. This outlook suggests that we can “also rise,” by discovering the art in the realities that confront us. Hemingway’s simple, artful descriptions of the minute details of fishing equipment and proper angling technique endow Jake’s thoughts and actions with near-sacramental significance, implying that such “art” is essential to the universal search for life-values. Perhaps the most important episode in the novel is the trout-fishing trip to northern Spain undertaken by the main character, wounded war veteran Jake Barnes. Of special artistic relevance in the novel is that the closest the characters come to an optimistic outlook is in discovering the “art” of everyday life, especially in encounters with the natural world. The “refuge” they find is not happy, but they do find a clear-eyed acceptance of the cycles of the risings and settings of the sun alluded to in the novel’s title reference to Ecclesiastes (also the source of Pete Seeger’s classic folk song “Turn! Turn! Turn!”). Hemingway’s main characters are American expatriates seeking escape in France and Spain from their disillusionment with the “Gilded Age” in their native land. Hemingway’s setting is shortly after World War One-known at the time as the “War to End All Wars”-as well as not long after the 1918 influenza pandemic that was even more deadly than our current Covid crisis. Roughly one century earlier, the world of that story was like our own in at least some ways. The Hemingway allusion is deeply resonant on many levels. The title of tonight’s concert is drawn from the famous 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway, which in turn quotes a biblical passage from Ecclesiastes: “The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastes to the place where it arose” (1:5, NKJV).
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