Summary of Dissertation Recitals: Three Programs of Choral Music

The choral works presented over three dissertation recitals are a comprehensive representation of various styles, genres, and periods, with the earliest work dating back to 1680 and the latest works dating to 2016. Likewise, these works speak to a broad range of human experiences, including love, faith, hope, empathy, oppression, and death. The first recital, I Heard a Voice from Heaven, was presented on September 29, 2018, at West Side United Methodist Church (Ann Arbor, MI) with an ad hoc chorus of twenty-six singers and orchestra of eighteen instrumentalists. The works featured include Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks by Hebert Howells; I heard a voice from heaven by Charles V. Stanford; and the 1893 version of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D Minor, Op. 48. The second recital, Ecstasy, Faith, Transcendence, is a compilation of performances given by the Chorus America Conducting Academy Chorus and Orchestra in Meng Concert Hall (Fullerton, CA) on July 15, 2018; the University of Michigan Arts Chorale on November 20, 2018 in Hill Auditorium; and the University of Michigan Chamber Choir on December 4, 2018 in Hill Auditorium. Works performed include Connor J. Koppin’s When music sounds; Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love; “My soul there is a country” from Songs of Farewell by C. Hubert H. Parry; William Dawson’s arrangement of Soon ah will be done; Felix Mendelssohn’s chorale cantata Christe, du Lamm Gottes; Johannes Brahms’s motet Geistliches Lied, Op. 30; and excerpts from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s cantata Five Mystical Songs. The final recital, In the Midst of Our Hands, was performed on February 10, 2019, in Stamps Auditorium with an ad hoc group of twenty-five mixed voices, string quintet, and a keyboardist. The works featured on this recital are two cantatas from Dieterich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri; Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands; Hall Johnson’s arrangement of I’ve been buked; Nathaniel Dett’s Don’t be weary traveler; and Nathan M. Carter’s arrangement of If I can help somebody.AMUMusic: ConductingUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/149969/1/glassje_1.pd