Missouri State University Chorale - Radiance Untethered: The Choral Music of John Wykoff (2024) [Digital Download 24/96]

Poetry and music accomplish together what neither can accomplish alone. For the majority of the works on this album, John Wykoff collaborated with one of the best choral lyricists of our time. In writing the words for many of the works, Charles Anthony Silvestri was finely sensitive to the ways in which music transforms a text and is transformed in return. His lyrics are imaginative and beautiful, yet he leaves room for music to interpret the text and divert it's meaning… Music can account for many dimensions. From the comfort, consolation, protection, sacredness in Out of This Darkness, it also has the power to combine these with their opposite: threat, danger, and disquietude. Only the combination of words and music makes all these nuances possible. While lyrics typically precede music, sometimes it is the other way around, as with the Inventions for Choir (and Piano), where Wykoff considered what it would mean to take the spirit and purpose of Bach's famous keyboard inventions, but not the style, and write a set for singers in a contemporary choral idiom. And then there is Five American Songs, which began not with words or music separately, but with old songs whose words and music were already wed. Wykoff set out not to alter or change each song, but to lovingly frame it (to "curate it," as he heard Alice Parker say once). Any undue intrusion of the composer would distract from these charming songs, not enhance them. Songs do not live on paper. They come alive only when sung and played. The Missouri State Chorale, Parker Payne, and Cameron LaBarr bring these works to life. Music is something humans do together. And singing together is something that usually makes us more human.

Tracklist:
01. Laudemus Cum Armonia
02. Five American Songs: Look Up, Look Down
03. Five American Songs: Jenny Jenkins
04. Five American Songs: Who Killed Poor Robin:
05. Five American Songs: Pretty Saro
06. Five American Songs: I Got a Hog and a Pig
07. Beautiful Morning
08. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): I. I Hold You
09. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): II. All Our Lives
10. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): III. Only Water
11. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): IV. We Are Consumed
12. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): V. Out of This Darkness
13. Out of This Darkness (A Normandy Cantata): VI. A Season of Joy
14. Inventions for Choir: Anywhere
15. Inventions for Choir: The Duchess
16. Inventions for Choir: Tenu Tamen Potente
17. Inventions for Choir: Claddagh Crown
18. Inventions for Choir: I'm Told
19. Inventions for Choir and Piano: The Silence Moves
20. Inventions for Choir and Piano: Hard Heart
21. Inventions for Choir and Piano: Waking
22. Inventions for Choir and Piano: Radiance Untethered


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