Gordon Getty
YOUNG AMERICA • Choral Works

San Francisco Symphony Chorus
Chorus Director: Vance George
San Francisco Symphony
Concert Master: Nadia Tichman
English horn: Julie Ann Giacobassi

Conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas
(Young America & Annabel Lee)
Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, Stockholm
Chorus Masters: Bo Wannefors
(Bad Kissingen) & Mats Nilsson (Moscow)
Russian National Orchestra
Conducted by Alexander Vedernikov
(Three Welsh Songs, Victorian Scenes & “Jerusalem”)
“Jerusalem” scene:
Lisa Delan, soprano - Clarence
Vladimir Chernov, baritone - Henry IV
Pavlo Hunka, bass-baritone - Chief Justice
Gunnar Birgersson, baritone - Warwick
Mats Carlsson, tenor - Hal

PTC 5186 040

DSD recorded

Composer’s notes
Young America
Stephen Vincent Benét has given more than the closing quatrain to Young America. “Hark the Homeland” is modeled on the opening pages of John Brown’s Body, and is my homage to this neglected master. I wrote the text of “Heather Mary” on safari seven years ago, and of “Daughter of Asheville” and “Hark the Homeland” a few months later. “My Uncle’s House” goes back to my college days. I began writing the music for all but “Daughter of Asheville” a few days before the September 11 atrocities, and finished within three weeks while also putting in full days at the office. Busy times.
Poetry is meant to be cryptic. If you understand everything, I have failed. “Heather Mary” is set in the British Isles some two or three centuries ago, by the sound of it, when emigration was a daily topic and the new world less defined. Heather Mary and Little Jamie are perhaps eight or nine years old. What they say reminds us that children can know the meaning of a promise, better than we, and know the things that end with time, and the things that do not.
Where that song is a poem set to music, “Daughter of Asheville” is a lyric set to a tune I thought up years before. Both the words and the music of the latter are meant to sound as if they might have come from the Civil War. What can we guess of Janet Alicia and her dancing partner? I think he is telling us that he died in the Battle of the Wilderness, with her name on his lips. I would conjecture that she died generations later, in a world of motorcars and relativity, surrounded by their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, with his ring on her finger. Now they dance, with the merry and brave, seeing only each other, into a dawn past reach.
Benét’s great miniature reverses the time-line, and takes us back to the forest primeval in which “Hark the Homeland” began. What an ear! The unexpected spondee in “all lost wild America,” and the warmth and wit of the whole, make the piece a prize in any company. All a composer need do with such a text is to get out of its way.

Three Welsh Songs
I am the world’s worst singer, unless your hat is in the ring. I always wanted to sing “All Through the Night,” and bought an anthology including it. The English translation given there may have been faithful to the Welsh, for all I know, but was pretty clumsy after the first four lines. The arrangement was plain, with a nice use of parallel thirds and sixths in lines four and five. I kept the four good lines and the parallel thirds and sixths, and the glorious tune itself, and otherwise started from scratch.
“ Welcome Robin” and “Kind Old Man” were in the same anthology, again with simple accompaniments. “Welcome Robin” already had a charming text, and needed only more harmony and counterpoint. “Kind Old Man” is a wonderful nonsense song, alternating between doleful and lively refrains. I added still more nonsense to the words, and hammed up the slow parts with barbershop melisma and melodrama. Keep the text in front of you, since I have asked the singers to take the fast parts presto possibile.
“ All Through the Night,” of course, is the closer. I intended the text as a lyric, with a common touch, rather than a stand-alone poem. I chose hymn-like harmonies, more or less inevitably, but added a counter-melody in broken chords to bring out the bardic potential.

Annabel Lee
By all accounts, Poe’s marriage was serene. But his wife-cousin bore the lung disease that had killed his mother when he was two. By the spring of 1846 her condition was dangerous. A neighbor at that time happened to see Poe in a cherry tree, tossing the fruit down to Virginia. She was laughing as she caught them in her lap. All at once blood came from her lips. Poe leapt down and carried her into the house.
In January 1847 Virginia Clemm Poe died of tuberculosis. Like Poe’s mother, she was twenty-four. They had been married over ten years. She was buried near their home in Fordham. A friend reported: “Many times...was he found at the dead hour of a winter night, sitting beside her tomb almost frozen in the snow...”. Annabel Lee was finished by mid-1849. Poe’s own death at forty followed within the year.
The poem is a unique challenge. Critics will not need their spectacles to find its faults of taste. But any who are not moved by it might as well give up reading poetry, or at least romantic poetry. It invites us to re-examine our prejudices against sentimentality. It puts us through the wringer, like it or not. Mawkish and melodramatic, towering and harrowing, it will not leave us in peace.
Each of us recognizes the kingdom by the sea, where the angels cannot be trusted. We knew it before we knew any other world, the world of first helplessness, first beauty, a homeland older than memory. We cannot return without pain. And each of us recalls something of ourselves in the haunted innocent who the gods, out of mercy, had made mad.

Victorian Scenes
The six choruses collected here were begun as separate a cappella works. “All Along the Valley” was published in this form in 1959, and the rest in 1982 and 1983. Accompaniments were an afterthought, evolving bit by bit from discreet pitch cues to full melodic partners with lives of their own. In source and spirit, all six are campfire songs. So it shouldn’t seem surprising that all the poems are resonant of nature, and that they were chosen from an age when “natural philosophy” and melancholy were the special genius of English verse.
We Northerners are not so long accustomed to cities as our Mediterranean cousins. In the end we would rather trust the forests and mountains, the sea and stars. And it was never more so when Victorians made a gallant stand against the skepticism inherent in their own science. The two generations that separate our poets are proof of the persistence and compass of the vision that unites them.

“Jerusalem” scene (from Plump Jack)
Plump Jack is about the opposite trajectories of Hal and Falstaff in the Henriad. The text is by Shakespeare as far as I could make it, with some additions by me to stitch together the parts that I chose. The “Jerusalem” scene shows Henry IV’s collapse after hearing the news of his victory over the Percys. Hal enters in time to be reconciled with his dying father.

Gordon Getty

Gordon Getty
One scarcely expects to run into a living and breathing nineteenth-century composer in our time. But that is precisely how Gordon Getty likes to describe himself, and he backs up his self-portrayal with an explanation that has the ring of authenticity and blunt honesty. “Much of my stuff, if premiered a century earlier, would not have sounded strange,” Getty explained recently. “I’ve attended quite a few composers’ conferences where I meet people working in a wide range of styles, sometimes on a path populated by very few practitioners and an audience to match; and I’m the only guy at those gatherings who is writing classical music in a mainly nineteenth-century idiom. Others avoid it like the plague.”
He continued: “Passion and ideals are what move me, and they were central to the pre-modern ethic. Of course, the Victorians sometimes lapsed into sentimentality. There is such a thing as kitsch, and we shouldn’t accept kitsch as if it were high art. But the great composers of that century, and those who kept the old values into the twentieth century, held high ideals: Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner, Verdi, Mahler, Puccini, Strauss. Their aim was nobility.
“ They also wrote from the heart, without embarrassment, and they communicated feelings to listeners. Not much music of that kind is written for the concert hall or opera house today. There is a remnant of it, perhaps, in the film composer, whose job asks him to tap into sentiments that many people share. If you go to movies, you get a clue about how that works. I am glad to find that many people respond to my music in the same forthright way. If music doesn’t come clearly from the heart, meaning a sense of ideals, I’m really not interested in writing it.”
This Super Audio CD brings together the complete choral works (with the exception of Joan and the Bells, released on PentaTone PTC 5186 017) of a composer whose oeuvre now reaches back more than 40 years. Getty, who was born in Los Angeles in 1933 and has lived in San Francisco since 1945, received early instruction in both piano and voice. As a student at the University of San Francisco he majored in English Literature, and, following military service, he worked in family businesses. (Yes, his father was J. Paul Getty). He still follows both careers, innovating financial ideas when not writing music.
But he always found time for composition. In the early 1960s he enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he studied music theory with Sol Joseph. Since the 1980s he has produced a steady stream of compositions, beginning with The White Election (1981), a much-performed cycle of 32 poems by Emily Dickinson for soprano and piano. First recorded (on the Delos label) by the late Kaaren Erickson, this cycle has been performed in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and the Pierpont Morgan Library (in New York), the Kennedy Center and National Gallery of Art (in Washington, D.C.), and concert halls at Harvard and Yale Universities, among many other venues.
In 1987 he unveiled his opera Plump Jack, an operatic interpretation (to his own modification of Shakespeare’s text) of the latter’s outrageous but poignant character Falstaff. Following premiere performances by the San Francisco Symphony, Plump Jack was revived at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Royal Festival Hall, Tchaikovsky Hall (at the Moscow Conservatory), at the Aspen and Spoleto festivals, and also by the London Philharmonia (with London Voices), and, most recently, the Puerto Rico Symphony.
Getty’s compositions, which are published by Rork Music and distributed by Theodore Presser Company, mostly involve the voice. His Victorian Scenes (1989) and Annabel Lee (1990) are choral settings – with orchestra or piano – of poems by Tennyson, Housman, and (in the latter work) Poe. Both were premiered by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The San Francisco Symphony and Chorus performed Annabel Lee in both 1998 and 2004, conducted on those occasions by Michael Tilson Thomas: the latter concerts also included Getty’s Young America (2001), a cycle of six movements for chorus and orchestra to texts by the composer and by Stephen Vincent Benét, and those concert performances formed the basis for the corresponding tracks of this recording. The Three Welsh Songs (1998) were born of a desire “to find the right tone” in his personal response to it.
Getty’s cantata Joan and the Bells (1998), to the composer’s own libretto about the execution of Joan of Arc, was recently released in a critically acclaimed recording by the Russian National Orchestra, Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, and soloists Lisa Delan and Vladimir Chernov, with Alexander Vedernikov conducting (PentaTone Classics). It is his most frequently performed piece today.
Words and the voice are central to Getty’s music. He has sung opera himself, including all the bass and baritone roles in Plump Jack at one time or another, most recently as Warwick with the Puerto Rico Symphony.
He says: “My music is tonal, though with hints of atonality, such as any composer nowadays would likely use to suggest disorientation. My style has not changed fundamentally during my career. The earliest work in this collection is ‘All Along the Valley’, now part of Victorian Scenes, which was published in a simpler version before I even entered conservatory, and my way hasn’t changed. I’ve learned a lot since then, of course, particularly in orchestration. And I am a tinkerer when it comes to my compositions, so I sometimes change their details as I live with them. But even in those cases, their basic musical substance really does not change much, and it always grows out of the style that was already in place when I was a teenager. For a period of eighteen years I endured a sort of writer’s block and didn’t complete a single piece. In retrospect, I realized that it was because I was hung up on trying to achieve a more complex language, that I was not being faithful to my inner voice. That helped me realize just where I stood as a composer. I represent a viewpoint that stands somewhat apart from the twentieth century, which was in large measure a repudiation of the nineteenth, and a sock in the nose to its ideals. Whatever it was that the great pre-modern composers and poets were trying to achieve, that’s what I’m trying to achieve, and in pretty much the same language.”

“There's clearly a strong personal voice here [and] the results are consistently winsome, sometimes even hauntingly beautiful.... Those attracted to the spirit behind this music will find that the performances are fluent and that the sound - as usual with PentaTone - is exceptionally natural.”

International Record Review (November 2005)

...Getty is an extremely talented, communicative composer - one who writes in an extremely conservative, audience-friendly style, but who manages to find his own authentic voice. The more of his music I have heard, the more I've come to appreciate him as a powerful musical personality... while his music is tonal and tuneful, it is not without touches of 20th-century harmonic grammar... for any listener who enjoys robust choral writing, good tunes, lively rhythms, and ethereal beauty, this disc can be enthusiastically recommended.

The texts of Young America were mostly written by Getty... This music and the texts recall just what the title implies, a young America, and the work is evocative and powerful despite or perhaps because of its simplicity. Getty also has a nice feel for orchestral colors. The Three Welsh Songs are settings by Getty, and "All Through the Night" is a remarkably beautiful closing to the group. Victorian Scenes is a setting of poems by Tennyson and Housman, and evokes scenes of nature very effectively. Annabel Lee is a setting of Poe's heart-on-sleeve poem paying tribute to his wife who died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. What saves Poe's words from excessive sentimentality is their deeply felt sincerity and the elegance of his outpouring of love and sorrow, and Getty captures this in his music...

Special praise goes to baritone Chernov, soprano Delan, and bass Hunka for their clear, committed singing in ["Jerusalem" from the opera Plump Jack]. All of the performances here are excellent - both choirs sing with beautiful blend and balance, clear diction, good intonation, and a real feeling for the music. I heard the SACD in regular two-channel stereo and thought the sound superbly balanced, with plenty of air around the chorus but no muddiness. PentaTone supplies full texts. This is an extraordinarily engaging disc, one to which I shall return many times.

Henry Fogel, FANFARE

“The performances are outstanding…sound quality, as usual from PentaTone, is superb. Highly recommended, for lovers of choral music, or anyone that yearns for a bygone age.”
--Tom Gibbs, AudiophileAaudition

“Gordon Getty has described himself as “a 19th-century composer,” and after spending some time with his music you must conclude that he knows exactly what he is doing; he has mastered the art of traditional tonal composition….The music is limpid and beautifully presented.”
--Joe McLellan, RedLudwig.com

“These performances present a strong case for the music, which should be popular with choruses searching for Americana to program.”
--Robert Benson, classicalcdreview.com