Christmas Mourning
The second movement from the cantata Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration for mixed chorus and orchestra. There are no vocal solos. A recording of the complete cantata can be found on the 2004 Clarion Records CD Eternity Shut in a Span.
Duration: 6’50”
Difficulty: 4/5 (Difficulty Rating Overview)
Listen on YouTube
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VOICES
Mixed Chorus (divisi/no solos)
(This work may also be performed with piano accompaniment)
ORCHESTRA
2 Flutes
1 Oboe (doubling English horn)
2 Clarinets in B♭
2 Bassoons
2 Horns in F
2 Trumpets in B♭
2 Bass Trombones (Tuba optional)
Percussion (3 players)
Timpani
Bass Drum
Floor Toms (small, medium, and large)
Snare Drum
Tam Tam
Suspended Cymbals (medium and large)
Piatti
Finger Cymbals
Tambourine
Small Triangle
Vibraphone
Glockenspiel
Crotales (C, D, F, G, and A)
Chimes (Tubular Bells)
Marimba
Xylophone
Harp
Strings
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Christmas Mourning
Vassar Miller (1924-1998)
On Christmas day I weep
Good Friday to rejoice.
I watch the Child asleep.
Does he half-dream the choice
The Man must make and keep?
At Christmastime I sigh
For my good Friday hope
Outflung the Child's arms lie
To span in their brief scope
The death the Man must die.
Come Christmastide I groan
To hear Good Friday's pealing.
The Man, racked to the bone,
Has made His hurt my healing,
Has made my ache His own.
Slay me, pierced to the core
With Christmas penitence
So I who, new-born, soar
To that Child's innocence,
May wound the Man no more.
Christmas Mourning by Vassar Miller has been used with permission of Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, TX.
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PUBLISHER’S NOTES
Mark Foster (Hal Leonard)
Far from a typical Christmas work, this searching, insightful text illuminates the sacrifice that God already understood when He sent the baby Jesus to earth. Illustrating the emotions of the text, the music begins with the soft wonder we expect, moves to an aching and painful climax, and finally culminates in a restful and peaceful conclusion as we realize the magnitude of this innocent Child's birth.
PROGRAM NOTES
Thomas L. Durham, Professor of Music, Brigham Young University
Redford chose a text by the modern American poet Vassar Miller for the second song [of his cantata, Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration]. The play on words in Miller's title "Christmas Mourning" foreshadows something bittersweet. The poet poignantly articulates a sense of relationship with Christ. In this verse, one comes face to face with the core of Christ's message and in the process, discovers something new about personal truth and resolve. The language in this poem is perhaps the most emotional of the entire work. Unlike the buoyant first movement where musical ideas seem more diffuse, this quasi-rondo forms a tight, alternating form conjured from two ideas. The woodwinds open in even eighth notes along a chromatic path centered around G. This introduction acts as the dominant leading to the second idea a lilting, somber theme in C-minor with hints of C-phrygian. The treble voices sing the melody first, followed by a brief interlude of the first idea in the violins and strings with the antique cymbals charming the texture. The men then take up the melody and both ideas continue to dovetail throughout. The piece ends with a reprise of the eight-bar introduction.
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Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration was commissioned by the Utah Chamber Artists and premiered on 11 December 1993 at Abravanel Hall in Salt Lake City by the Utah Chamber Artists with Barlow Bradford conducting. A recording of the premiere performance was broadcast nationwide in December 1994 over NPR affiliated stations on the syndicated program The First Art. The work was recorded for CD by the Utah Chamber Artists for their album Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration (Bonneville Classics BCD 9501-2).
The Utah Chamber Artists presented the work (with piano accompaniment) at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art during their series of concerts with the Israel Chamber Orchestra in 1995 and at the San Diego ACDA conference in 1996.
Welcome All Wonders has also been performed by the California Master Chorale under David Hughes, the University of South Carolina Concert Choir directed by Larry Wyatt, the choir of Lover’s Lane United Methodist Church in Dallas with Constantina Tsolainu conducting, and the Knoxville Symphony under Kirk Trevor, the Riverside Master Chorale, conducted by Karen Garrett, and the combined choirs and orchestra of Pacific Lutheran University under the direction of Richard Nance and Brian Galante.
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“Still, there was one more present under the tree Saturday, namely J.A.C. Redford’s Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration, commissioned by the Utah Chamber Artists for their first-ever concert in Abravanel Hall. And a handsome package it is, a five-movement choral symphony that weds poems from Renaissance and modern-day England and America to music that embraces all three. The result is a piece that sounds at once old and new, as the exuberant dissonances of the opening, drawn from the poetry of Richard Crashaw, give way in celebratory fashion to the antique piping of a shepherd’s dance. At times Britten and Rutter are recalled, but in a way that never sounds derivative. Likewise the second movement, a Waltonian meditation on Vassar Miller’s “Christmas Mourning,” whose violin solos seem almost a melancholic extension of Vaughan Williams, only here more “The Lark Descending.” At the center stands Robert Southwell’s “The Nativity of Christ,” here treated as a vibrant scherzo in which voices and instruments reinforce one another in bellike fashion. Then comes “Good Is the Flesh,” the first of two Brian Wren poems, whose pastoral serenity (with the voices unaccompanied at one point) leads to “Christmas Now,” its darker edge and Coplandesque tuttis culminating in an extended “Alleluia!” that returns us to the sharp enunciations that opened the piece. . . . throughout the scoring is imaginative, the counterpoint ingenious and the settings are at least as affecting as the texts themselves. Moreover, . . . despite their separable quality, [the movements] really do add up to a symphony, each section standing as an integral part of the whole.” (William S. Goodfellow, Deseret News, December 13-14, 1993.)
“The contemporary oratorio style has enjoyed the attention of Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, Walton and others in the early part of this century, and more recently of John Rutter. The 1993 debut of Los Angeles composer J.A.C. Redford’s Welcome All Wonders: A Christmas Celebration heralds a new American voice in this genre: Redford’s careful selection and interpretation of his texts are matched by profound musical inspirations, and executed by well-crafted orchestrations and genuinely masterful choral writing.” (Gene Parrish, The First Art, NPR, December 1994.)
“A model of the contemporary oratorio style, the work is remarkable for its synergy of voices and instruments, interacting to form an organic unity of expressive dimension, lovingly projected from Redford’s richly-hued musical palette. . . . Redford’s compositional style is marked by melodies that hold in the mind; by rhythms that are always propulsive, however gently or forcefully; and by harmonies that vary in color and intensity—all with sensitive accommodation of the text. Amid the innocent and unbridled glee of the first movement, the lament of the second, the jocular depth of the third, the tranquility of the fourth, and the majesty of the last, we hear the echoing of faint songs—on a wind whose scent carries the tradition of Christmas legacies handed down for generations—now sung with deliberate abandon by J.A.C. Redford. Invoking the ancient artist’s custom, he autographs the score “Soli Deo Gloria” —to God alone the glory.” (Peter Rutenberg, Liner Notes from Utah Chamber Artists Welcome All Wonders, Bonneville Classics BCD 9505-2, 1995)