OTHERS
In te Domine – VIII. Sicut Erat – Nicola Porpora (1686-1768)
Nicola Porpora, in addition to his compositions, has also gained a significant reputation as a voice teacher, numbering among his students the great castrato alto Farinelli for whom the alto solos Ospedali, the homes for young women which were famous for the quality of their choral music, much of it for women’s voices. Sadly, little of these vast resources of music for London to compose were for an opera company, creating a rival with the company directed by George Frederic Handel. It was this situation which turned Handel from Italian opera to concentrate on oratorio. The greatest frustration of Porpora’s life was his failure to for the last time, settling first in Dresden. Five years later he went to Vienna, destitute and depending on voice and composition lessons for a living. His prize pupil was none other than the young Franz Joseph Haydn, who served Porpora as valet and accompanist in return for composition lessons. Haydn later said that “I wrote diligently, but not quite correctly, until at last I had the good fortune to learn the true fundamentals of composition from the celebrated Porpora.”
In Te Domine for the figlie di coro at the Ospedale della Pietà. It distinctively shows his characteristic workings of two choral parts against two others, where one group is very active and the other very sustained. The original manuscript is an eight movement work written for SSATB chorus and string accompaniment. It is found at the British Museum, London, in the part book collections of Nicola Porpora. Earlier this summer Vox Musica’s music director, Daniel Paulson, was able to acquire a copy of the original manuscript in Porpora’s own hand and was able to transcribe four of the movements into modern notation. It is important to note that this is an unpublished musical work.
Text
Sicut erat in principio,
et nunc, et semper,
et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Translation
As it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be:
world without end. Amen.
For More Information Contact: www.dpmusic.net
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Love – Derek Sup (b1992)
Derek Sup was born and raised in Sacramento, and started classical piano lessons with Debra Miller in Gold River. He attended Rio Americano High School, where he focused more on jazz and pop music, playing vibraphone in the big band and singing in rock groups. In May of 2014, he graduated from Willamette University with a Bachelors in Music Composition. He sang in four choirs, and continued studies of jazz music in campus ensembles. For his thesis, he wrote, directed, and accompanied a forty-minute opera called Neon Mirror Festival for SATB chorus, barbershop quartet, piano trio, organ, and soloists. Throughout college, he played synthesizer and sang in a Sacramento-based art-rock group, Family Photo, which has released two EP’s and one full-length album, and toured the east and west coasts.
His compositions continue to be actively performed in Oregon. He received a commission from the Willamette Master Chorus to write a piece called, First I Tell the Patient, for their concert, Celebrating Life, in May 2014. In 2013, he won the Young Composer Award for his choir piece, Angels, put on by the Portland Vocal Consort. Although he currently is organist/choir director at St. Paul’s Episcopal in downtown Sacramento, he beings a new position at St. Paul’s Lutheran in Oakland in June as an organist/choir director.
Love is based on the biblical text, Corinthians 13:4. The text is fragmented into cells into which other segments of the text are plugged, creating a repetitive atmosphere which subtly changing harmonies. Halfway through the piece, the composition enters a more dissonant tonal world, where the composer reverses the text to ask the question, “Is love?” instead of the previous statement, “Love is.” A heated, frightened crisis ensues, until the text reverts back to its original layout and tonality, displaying the simplicity of love triumphing over evil, rejoicing in the truth.
For More Information Contact: www.dereksup.com
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Ode to the Sun – Derek Sup (b1992)
This amazing work was inspired by the poem Ode to the Sun, by Scott Mehner. Ode to the Sun is found in Mehner’s recent publication, Illustrated Poems, which is a collection of his poetry that has been illustrated by twenty other artists and calligraphers from all around the globe. Vox Musica commissioned Derek Sup to compose a setting of this text especially for this performance. The result of the collaboration is a stunning work for choir, organ, and projection mapping.
NOTES FROM THE COMPOSER: The sun was formed by a gravitational collapse of matter within a molecular cloud, a mixture of interstellar dust and hydrogen gas, 4.6 billion years ago. It is roughly 864,000 miles in diameter, and the core temperature of the sun is 27 million degrees F. The energy within the sun is equal to 400 billion one megaton nuclear bombs every second. Roughly three- fourths of the sun is hydrogen, and the remaining is comprised mostly of helium with traces of oxygen, carbon, neon, and iron. The gravity of the sun accounts for about 99.8% of the mass of the Solar System, and dictates the orbits of all of the planets within it. Through the sun are coursing many enormous rivers of plasma, each generating its own magnetic eld. These magnetic fields explode through the surface of the sun, creating Solar Wind, a stream of charged particles ring in all directions away from the sun. The sun is accountable for all changes in seasons, ocean currents, weather, aurorae, and all life on our planet. It is a yellow dwarf star, and will develop into a red giant in 5 billion years, swelling and engulfing Mercury and Venus and obliterating everything on Earth. The outer layers of the sun will be shed, leaving only the core, transforming into a white dwarf. Once it runs out of energy, which will take longer than the age of our universe, it will reach its final stage, forming the theoretical stellar remnant known as a black dwarf.
For More Information Contact: www.dereksup.com
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