“The Witching Hour” Program Notes
By Katherine FitzGibbon
The Halloween holiday that we know and love today combines aspects of the ancient Celtic holiday Samhain (pronounced sow-in), the Catholic Hallowmas period of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, and the Roman festival of Feralia. Coming at a time of year when the nights grow longer and colder, Halloween provides a festive time of celebration and superstition. In the Celtic tradition of Samhain, the dead were thought to be able to walk the earth on October 31 (the last day of their old year, before New Year’s Day on November 1), and the Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off those ghosts.
In the early centuries of the Common Era, the Romans ruled the Celtic lands, and their festivals were incorporated into the Celtic tradition. They had a similar day in late October called Feralia that commemorated the passing of the dead. They also honored Pomona, the goddess of fruits and trees, and our tradition of bobbing for apples likely comes from Pomona.
In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 as All Saints’ Day, a holiday to honor saints and martyrs, possibly as an attempt to replace Samhain with a related but church-sponsored holiday. It became known as All-hallows, which means All Saints, and the night before became known as All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. In the eleventh century, the church designated November 2 as All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It was celebrated similarily to Samhain, with bonfires and costumes. Those three days of Catholic celebrations – All Saints’ Eve, All Saints’ Day, and All Souls’ Day – were known collectively as Hallowmas.
As European immigrants came to America, Halloween became a festive American celebration, with parties and parades for the holiday in parts of the country. In particular, as Irish immigrants escaped the potato famine in the late 19th century, they brought traditions of dressing in costume and going door to door for food or money. This became our tradition of Trick-or-Treat. We seem, however, to have lost some of the traditions; originally Samhain was thought to be a day for divining the future as well, with young women employing traditional methods for finding out whom they might marry.
In all of these traditions, the common thread is a focus on the dead walking the earth – literally or, at the least, in our thoughts. In music, that translates into songs that set the scene for a mysterious haunted evening, portraying ghosts and other supernatural characters, and reflecting on the dead and on our own mortality. The music may accomplish that through certain kinds of mysterious-sounding chords, minor keys, and rhythmic instability, or through a marriage of dramatic text and music.
Resonance will explore the way these cultural traditions resonate musically. Jon Stuber will provide a prologue of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a piece long associated with spooky Halloween. Our first half will continue with a set entitled “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” in which we’ll hear music by Brahms, Ravel, and Rautavaara that sets the scene for creepy encounters. In the second set, “Things that Go Bump in the Night,” those creepy encounters transpire: with ghosts who step out of picture frames in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore,” with the witches of Verdi’s Macbeth, and with the ghosts of Berlioz’s “Le Ballet des Ombres.”
The first half continues with a trip to the underworld with Orpheus, where we meet the chorus of the furies – first in Glück’s 1762 opera Orfeo, and second in Offenbach’s comic opera Orfée aux Enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld). You will recognize the tune of Offenbach’s “Galop,” which has become known with different words. We assure you that this is the original source of the tune.
We conclude the first half with three pieces that have characters with “Dark Secrets”: a mother revealing her true nature to her daughter in Brahms’s “Walpurgisnacht,” an ex-lover with attachment issues in “I Hold Your Hand in Mine,” and the “demon barber” Sweeney Todd, who slits the throats of his clients with his razor in order to provide his collaborator Mrs. Lovett with meat for “the best [meat] pies in London.”
The second half begins with a set of three songs called “Hauntings”: Vaughan Williams’s story of “The Lover’s Ghost” who returns from a watery grave to profess his love for a maiden; Bialosky’s song “Little Ghost Things,” which sets e.e. cummings’s poem “hist whist”; and an arrangement of Stan Jones’s “[Ghost] Riders in the Sky.”
We conclude with music that explores the serious side of Halloween, the complex relationship we have with the idea of death. You will hear Edwin London’s creative “re-composition” of Bach’s chorale “Come soothing death,” in which each singer is asked to sing each phrase of the chorale at his or her own pace, yet all voices come together and reach the phrase “homeward I’m turning” in the end, as we all approach death in the end. Next, you will hear three movements of Hugo Distler’s 1932 work Totentanz, or “Dance of Death.” This work’s original form combined 14 choral movements with medieval dialogues between the figure of Death and various townspeople – the bishop, the emperor, the farmer, the baby – all of whom must be called to Death in the end. These are contemplative and, indeed, haunting pieces. Finally, we conclude with the American composer William Schuman’s piece “To All, to Each,” a setting of part of Walt Whitman’s “Death Carol” from Leaves of Grass. Echoing the Bach, the text reads, “Come, lovely and soothing death / Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving / In the day, in the night, to all, to each / Sooner or later, delicate Death.” Not only at Halloween, the poem suggests, we must reflect on the universality of death. But the picture Walt Whitman offers is a hopeful one: death can be soothing, serene, and delicate.
Jon Stuber is currently the Organist/Choirmaster of First Presbyterian Church, Portland, Oregon. He earned his DMA and MM degrees from the University of Texas in Austin and his BM from Baylor University. At FPC, Jon conducts the Chamber and Chancel Choirs and the Adult Handbell Choir as well as playing the organ at all worship services. In addition, he co-administers the musical aspects of Celebration Works, a year-round series of concerts and art exhibits held at First Presbyterian. He has served as staff accompanist for the Oregon Repertory Singers Youth Choir programs and has performed locally with the Consonare Chorale, Oregon Repertory Singers, David York Ensemble, Columbia Chorale and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. He will also serve as guest conductor for the opening concert of the 10th Anniversary season of Belle Voci Women’s Ensemble.
