Thomas Tallis (ca. 1505-1585) served the English royal chapel from the reign of Henry VIII through Elizabeth I, managing to navigate alternations between Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and proving himself adept at composing for both liturgies. His Latin motet O Sacrum Convivium appeared in his Cantiones Sacrae (1575), issued just after Elizabeth I had granted him the right to publish music. The text of the motet, for the Vespers of Corpus Christi, is a joyful celebration of the Eucharist, the sacred banquet. Tallis used what was then a traditional medium: a thick texture of five vocal parts. The text is clearly audible despite the complexity of the overlapping imitative counterpoint via a melodic setting in which each syllable largely receives only one note.

Judith Shatin is an American composer with an impressively prolific and diverse catalog of work, spanning chamber music, choral pieces, and works for orchestra right alongside electronic and multimedia compositions.  Her work has been commissioned by ensembles such as the Atar Piano Trio, Kronos Quartet, and Da Capo Chamber Players, while also receiving attention from larger institutions like Carnegie Hall and the Library of Congress.  Prestigious concert halls across the globe program her music, and her music has made appearances at festivals worldwide.  Shatin is currently William R. Kenan Jr. Professor Emerita at University of Virginia, where she established the Virginia Center for Computer Music.

Kassia – written for clarinet, harp, and string quintet – was commissioned by the Kassia Ensemble in May 2023.  Shatin wrote the roughly 13-minute piece in honor of that ensemble’s namesake, the 9th-century Byzantine poet, composer, and abbess.  Shatin drew inspiration from some of Kassia’s most well-known chants, The Fallen Womanand Augustus, the Monarch, for melodic material, as well as mining her poetry for rhythms.  The entire work unfolds in roughly three sections: the first establishes a gorgeous sonic atmosphere for contemplation, while the second ushers us into a world of shocking dissonance and cacophony, before transitioning back to the serene timbral beauty of the beginning.

Over the years so many superlatives have been used in reference to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756-1791) brief work for chorus, strings, and organ, Ave verum corpus. Yet even today the sheer sonic beauty and deft melodic writing leave one pleasantly speechless. We, too, find ourselves falling back on tired clichés as we try to capture in words what Mozart so brilliantly captured in sound. So pure is the composer’s vision of the text, so simple and concise the tonal structure upon which he builds this pearl. Of course, one can analyze the piece step-by-step, even chord-by-chord, paying particular attention to the focal points of dissonance and chromaticism. Such points earn their expressive intensification by virtue of the text, such as “cujus latus perforatum unda fluxit et sanguine” (“whose pierced side overflowed with water and blood”). But to undertake such analysis is to seek the skeleton when what one really treasures is the flesh and blood, the sensuous corpus upon which Mozart – and perhaps a Creator still more divine – has breathed life. The work shows the enlightened Mozart (a Freemason) at his most devout, writing, as one critic has commented, “without the slightest skepticism.”

Ave verum corpus was written in June 1791 for Anton Stoll, a minor choirmaster in the town of Baden who apparently helped Frau Mozart during her periodic vacations to the baths. That detail is not trivial, but it may be more significant to note that the commission for a grand Requiemmass for the dead came to Mozart during the same weeks in the summer of 1791. The Requiem would never be completed by the composer, but the short Ave verum corpus – a kind of trial run for his renewed faith in sacred music – survives in glorious completion, an ideal blend of devotional outbursts and classical restraint.

Born in 1941 in Rochester, New York, composer Adolphus Hailstork has ventured into just about every major classical genre there is, including opera, symphonies, chamber music, band music, piano and organ repertoire, songs for solo voice, and choral works.  He began formal composition studies with Mark Fax at Howard University in the 1960s, then went on to study with Nadia Boulanger in France, became a student of Vittorio Giannini and David Diamond at Manhattan School of Music, and finally took his doctorate at Michigan State.  Hailstork eventually migrated to Virginia, landing a role at Norfolk State College in 1977.  He is now Professor of Music and Eminent Scholar at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, and has been named Cultural Laureate of the state of Virginia.

The Lamb comes from Hailstork’s larger collection Five Short Choral Works, a set of five unaccompanied SATB pieces set to texts by various poets.  The fifth work in the set, The Lamb, is the composer’s setting for a poem written by William Blake, and was originally composed for performance by Hailstork’s church choir at the Unitarian Church in Norfolk for Christmas in 1983.  The composer’s writing for voice is sensitive and agile, eliciting beautiful, warm timbres from the mixed chorus.

Twentieth-century American composer Allan Blank (1925-2013) started his musical education in New York, gaining admittance to Juilliard through his talent as a violinist.  He continued further schooling in New York and the Midwest before attaining a spot in the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 1950.  Despite Blank’s obvious talent for performance, his legacy appears to have survived primarily through his work as a composer and teacher, eventually becoming emeritus professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond where he worked for nearly 20 years. Staunton Music Festival was honored to help premiere several of Blank’s works and feature him as a composer-in-residence on two occasions.

I Am Rose is a short vocal work written for high voices, set to an even more compact text penned by American writer and cultural figure Gertrude Stein.  Blank’s setting mirrors the playful nature of the short poem with frequent bursts of dynamic vocal lines which meander like a young mind in search of itself.  With staggered entrances and a canon-like texture threaded throughout the piece, these musings on the self seem scattered and diffuse. Yet they ultimately come together in the final coordinated fortissimo declaration of “I am Rose,” answered measures later by an equally forceful “like anything.”

Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685-1750) legacy to all genres of musical composition, excepting opera, are profound. And depending on who you ask, opinions differ about whether the 224 extant cantatas or 48 Preludes and Fugues or the numerous suites for solo violin and cello might not be his greatest gift to posterity. Did we forget to mention the B-minor Mass and the Passions? Well, you can see how difficult it would be to find a consensus. One thing that is certain is that Bach was known during his lifetime primarily for his church music, both organ and vocal, and that he spent more waking hours writing cantatas than anything else. He was charged to write cantatas weekly during his period in Leipzig, but examples also exist from as far back as his time in Arnstadt two decades earlier.

The cantata BWV 140, “Wachet auf!” (often translated as “Sleepers Awake!”) contains one of Bach’s most popular melodies. Timed for the last Sunday in the church calendar, the cantata would have been heard just before Advent. It was premiered in 1731 in Leipzig. Listeners today mainly know the beautiful fourth movement. Tonight, we hear the stately first movement, which starts with a dotted-rhythm introduction prior to the vocal entrances. Bach then brings in the sustained chorale melody in the soprano above active lower parts. Verses of the text are broken up by instrumental ritornellos, and for the Alleluia he briefly changes from chordal texture to fugal imitation.

Emily Masincup and Jason Stell, © 2025