Cypress Groups to Offer ‘Wedding Cantata’

Sheridan Ball has been promoting new and lesser-known pieces of music for his choral groups at Cypress College ever since he arrived there in 1981.

Two years ago, by special arrangement with the composer, he introduced John Rutter’s “The Wind in the Willows” to the United States before it was published in this country.

Now, on Cypress College’s annual spring concert this Sunday at the college, Ball will lead Daniel Pinkham’s “Wedding Cantata” on a program that also includes two Mozart works--the Requiem and the Alleluia from the motet “Exsultate, Jubilate.”

Ball, describing the “Wedding Cantata” as “relatively short,” said in a recent phone interview that he was attracted to the work for its beauty, not its brevity. “It takes about 12 minutes, but it has some wonderful writing in it.”

The “Wedding Cantata,” composed in 1956, uses verses from the Bible’s “Song of Solomon” for its text.

Perhaps the reason the work is not done more than it is, Ball speculated, is the difficult soprano solo in the first movement, “Rise Up, My Love.”

“It takes a singer with a good body of sound,” Ball said. “The range is rather extensive. It gets up to high A, but it has to be sung with full sound and sustained well. Fortunately, we have several sopranos who can do it.”

Each of the three movements that follow provide contrasting moods, he said.

The second, “Many Waters,” is “a four-part canon.”

“It is very subdued,” Ball said. “In fact, I have taken a small group out of my select group and now have an octet singing that. The movement requires the most musicality from each singer in order to make the lines rise and fall the way they need to.”

The third movement, “Awake, O North Wind,” is “very exciting and works extremely well as an isolated piece,” he said.

The fourth, “Set Me as a Seal Upon Thine Heart,” is “just a little human setting with shifting meters to reflect the biblical language. . . . It ends not with a bang, but more with a thoughtful note--as a wedding should, perhaps,” Ball said.

As for Pinkham himself, his is not exactly a household name, although the American composer has a long and distinguished, if mostly academic, career behind him.

He was born in Lynn, Mass., in 1923, the great-grandson of Lydia E. Pinkham, founder of the medicine company that still bears her name.

He studied music with Copland and Walter Piston, among others, at Harvard University, then, as did many of his generation, went to France to study composition with famed pedagogue Nadia Boulanger.

His interest in Baroque music led him to form a harpsichord-violin duo with violinist Robert Brink in 1948. It made two European tours.

But during this period he also began teaching at various colleges in Boston, and since 1959, he has been on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music.

His interest in Baroque music long influenced his compositions, although he later adopted his own approach to serial composition techniques and in 1970 became interested in electronic music.

Pinkham has written the following about his aesthetic: “When writing a song (or even a symphony) the work at hand only reflects one or at best a few facets of any thoughts on music and these cannot be translated into words. Be that as it may, I can confess a certain sympathy for Francois Couperin who wrote in ‘L’art de toucher le clavercin’ (‘The Art of Playing the Keyboard’) that he preferred music which touched him to that which surprised him.”

Pinkham originally wrote the work for chorus and piano, then later orchestrated it, according to Ball.

“We are using piano accompaniment,” Ball said. “Frankly, it’s a matter of costs. For us, being a small college, we would have had to hire additional players. . . . It would have entailed a number of problems as well as financial concerns, budgets always being the tightest at this time of year.”

“Pinkham can be difficult for people to listen to, depending on how oriented their ears are to the 20th Century,” Ball added. “This is a nice piece--progressive, but there are some challenges. It leads you in different directions with a 20th-Century harmonic sense.”

Still, the work seems to be the choice of a number of newlyweds.

“I’ve seen this work come up in weddings now,” Ball said. “People are beginning to hearken to this work. Once you sing it, it sticks with you. The melodies are very beguiling.”

Sheridan Ball will conduct the Cypress College Chorale, Camerata, Singers and Chamber Orchestra in Mozart’s Requiem and “Alleluia” (from the motet “Exsultate, Jubilate”) and Daniel Pinkham’s “Wedding Cantata” at 3 p.m. on Sunday at the Cypres s College campus theater, 9200 Valley View St., in Cypress. Tickets: $6, general admission; $4, children under 12, students and senior citizens. Information: (714) 826-2220, Ext. 139.