Faith in Winter's End

In October 1994 Douglas Meyer asked me to write a short work for the Pennsylvania Centre Chamber Orchestra. Since Faith in Winter's End was commissioned to celebrate the relationship between the PCCO and Faith United Church of Christ where the orchestra performs, Dr. Meyer suggested that I write a kind of chorale-variation using existing liturgical music. The music of the United Church of Christ is rooted in traditional hymnody and with this in mind I selected three hymns commonly used there that lend themselves well to musical elaboration and derived all of the material in the work from them. The formal and harmonic underpinning of the music is the famous All Creatures of Our God and King. The hymn was expanded to about twenty times its normal lenghth and used as a kind of cantus firmus. Each of the phrases of the hymn became a section of the work. Each of its voices was then mis-aligned with the others in time so that, instead of forming clear vertical harmony as in the original hymn, the music is filled with long suspensions that seldom resolve and then only at important structural points in the piece. There is no development in the formal sense. The music simply unfolds in patient procession, coming to a close only after the final cadence of the hymn is reached. Since the premiere of the piece was scheduled for late Winter it is also a thanksgiving for, not so much the coming of Spring, but the ending of a bleak season of quiet and hopeful anticipation, which has parallels in religious faith. The music may be understood to represent contemplative, unresolved spiritual longing. It is, like a church, scattered with reassuringly familiar objects, though they are often barely discernable in the shadows.

Faith in Winter's End was commissioned by the Pennsylvania Centre Chamber Orchestra and Faith United Church of Christ and is supported by grants from the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, the College of Arts and Architecture and the School of Music at the Pennsylvania State University. I would like to thank Rev. William Cabell for his support in this project.

P.B.