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Samuel Barber - American Masterpieces: Choral Music Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The National Endowment for the Arts' American Masterpieces: Choral Music initiative is designed to celebrate our national musical heritage by highlighting significant American choral composers and their works of the past 250 years.  Stanton's Sheet Music is proud to present this series highlighting the composers and their works featured in this groundbreaking project.

(from NEA.gov)
Born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Samuel Barber (1910-1981) was a nephew of Louise Homer, a “golden age” contralto at the Metropolitan Opera, and he inherited a bit of a voice himself. He not only took singing lessons but made a recording of his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem “Dover Beach.” Vocal and choral music remained lifelong affinities for him.

His music study began early: at seven he was writing piano pieces, and at 12 he got a paying job as a church organist. Unfortunately, the choirmaster one day demanded young Sam hold a note longer than the score indicated. He refused, and was fired. Two years later he was admitted into the first class of the new Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. That city's great orchestra premiered his overture The School for Scandal when he was 23.

In the 1930s, while studying in Italy, he won the admiration of Arturo Toscanini, who conducted the premieres of two of his orchestral works, including the Adagio for Strings, which Barber had arranged from a movement of his String Quartet No. 1. When this became his most beloved work, he took the novel step of adapting its mourn¬ful but consoling melody into the choral “Agnus Dei,” so that it may be said to have three incarnations. (Reincarnations, not surprisingly, became another of his successful choral works; it consists of three settings of old Gaelic poetry as rewritten by James Stephens).  Prayers of Kierkegaard, settings of four prayers by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, was completed in 1954 to a commission from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation and is regarded as one of Barber's vocal masterpieces. His lovely 1968 Christmas piece, “Twelfth Night,” set to a text by British poet Laurie Lee, is another choral gem.

Selected Works:
Agnus Dei (Lamb of God)
Let Down the Bars, O Death
A Nun Takes the Veil (Heaven-Haven)
Prayers of Kirkegaard

Reincarnations
A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map
Sure on This Shining Night
Twelfth Night

For more distinguished choral repertoire suggestions, please contact us.

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