It is impossible to listen to Ralph Vaughan William’s gorgeous and transcendent piece, The Lark Ascending, without imagining a lark climbing, diving, turning, soaring as the violin’s flurry of notes floats above the orchestra below, the lush harmony a forest canopy of green dotted with geographical landforms. Peaceful and picturesque as it is, however, we should not dismiss the piece, or the poem by George Meredith which inspired it, as merely Romantic sentimentality, arousing feelings of nostalgia in listeners.
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This Christmas season marks our second advent in a post-COVID world. For many Canadian musicians, the road back to normalcy has been much slower than our American counterparts; we persevered through a second lockdown and our concert halls currently are only just being filled with live patrons at heavy capacity limits instead of virtual ones.
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Advent is a strange time for the Christian, who often finds herself caught between two calendars: on the secular calendar, the moment the last bite of Thanksgiving goes down, the Christmas season begins, and will stretch until the magic of Christmas morning, after which it is fairly immediately extinguished. But on the Church calendar, we are in a season of waiting, of expectant longing, right up to the fall on darkness on Christmas Eve, at which point we begin a season og rejoicing too intense to be confined to one morning, and so which stretches through the following twelve days. The soundtrack of this now and not yet double season, controlled as it is by secular concerns, is mostly skewed towards premature celebration. But some of its songs strike the right chord of expectation for the Christian. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is one of those.
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This month’s Composer in the Spotlight series is Dr. Sungji Hong. An award- Korean composer now living in the US, Sungji teaches composition at the University of North Texas. Commissioned by the Fromm Music Foundation (USA), the National Flute Association (USA), the Texas Flute Association, the Tongyoung International Music Festival (Korea), the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra (Korea), the Keumho Asiana Cultural Foundation (Korea), the International Isang Yun Music Society (Germany) and the MATA Festival (USA), Sungji’s music reflects an intelligent, playful exploration of timbre.
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