Music Notes – Sunday, October 1st:
This Sunday’s musicians are UUCC Music Director Mike Carney and The Chancel Choir
Centering Music: “Dusk” from African Sketches – Okoye
Nkeiru Okoye (b. 1972) is an American-born composer of African American and Nigerian ancestry. She was born in New York, NY and raised on Long Island. After studying composition, music theory, piano, conducting, and Africana Studies at Oberlin Conservatory, she pursued graduate studies at Rutgers University and became one of the leading African American women composers. An activist through the arts, Okoye creates a body of work that welcomes and affirms both traditional and new audiences. Hailed as “gripping” and “evocative” by the New York Times, her works have been commissioned, performed and presented by Detroit Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony, Juilliard School, Houston Grand Opera, and many others (from nkeiruokoye.com). Composed as a memorial to Okoye’s first musical mentor, “Dusk” is the second movement of African Sketches, a four-movement piano suite written and published in 2006. African Sketches was inspired by time Okoye spent as a child visiting her father’s home country of Nigeria.
Offertory music: Simple Song – Bernstein & Schwartz
“Simple Song” was written by American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) with lyrics by Stephen Schwartz (b. 1948). It is the first aria from Bernstein’s Mass, a large-scale work that was commissioned for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. in 1971. Mass is an ambitious and fascinating piece of music but is rarely performed today as a complete work, most likely because of the wide-ranging and eclectic performing forces required: Bernstein’s score calls for the work to be staged dramatically and feature a Celebrant (vocal soloist), two adult choirs and a children’s choir, a full classical orchestra (including celesta, piano, and two organs) a rock band, and a marching band. Liturgically, Mass is loosely based upon the Tridentine Mass of the Roman Catholic Church, but it also includes influences from secular sources and from Bernstein’s own Jewish faith. Performed as a solo by the Celebrant in the staged production, “Simple Song” is a non-denominational salutation to God, sprinkling excerpts of traditional Latin Mass text in among the English lyrics celebrating the joy and, well…simplicity of singing praise to the Divine. Our Chancel Choir will sing “Simple Song” this Sunday, accompanied by Lucy Carney with vocal solos by Holly Walker, Pete Clapham, Pamela Schenk, and Steve Sanford.
Closing Hymn: We Are Many, We Are One – Carney
“We Are Many, We Are One” is a new song by UUCC’s Music Director Mike Carney. It is a partner song, meaning it includes multiple parts that can be sung independently or in combination with one another. “We Are Many, We Are One” is also semi-aleatoric, meaning that variation and improvisation are encouraged, and (hopefully) no two performances of the song will be exactly the same.
Postlude: We Are the Ones – Reagon
“We Are the Ones (We Been Waiting For)” is a song about justice and empowerment, originally written as tribute to the women of South Africa. The words come from renowned Jamaican American poet, teacher, and activist June Jordan (1936-2002) and were set to music by composer, song leader, and activist Bernice Johnson Reagon (b. 1942) for Sweet Honey in the Rock, the afro-feminist a cappella group she founded in 1973.
-Mike Carney, UUCC Music Director