West Virginia Symphony Orchestra
Home for the Holidays

All of the music on our recent CD release was written by Maestro Grant Cooper.  We asked Maestro Cooper tell us a little of what went into the creative process while creating this music.  Here’s what he had to say:

Like most people (Scrooge excepted) I have always loved the Holiday season.  Since I was born in the Southern Hemisphere, I grew up experiencing Christmas and New Years as mid-summer events, even while learning the traditional northern-hemisphere refrains, such as Let it snow… along with most of the traditional Carols and songs.

Home for the Holidays Order Form

My move to the U.S. in 1976 changed all that and I became aware that this season of goodwill really did produce a palpable change, not only in the season, but also in society – a sense of joy and sharing which pervaded all one’s activities, defining community.

From this grew my own wish to define my own musical celebrations by the communities in which I was living.  I approached this by creating musical settings designed for my musical friends to perform for our own community of listeners.

Perhaps I should start by explaining why I call these “settings,” rather than “arrangements.”  An arrangement is a setting too, of course, but with different goals.  An arrangement delivers the tune, reinforcing the familiar and thus celebrating the traditions each listener may associate with that tune.  I think of a setting as something closer to the way a jeweler sets a precious stone.

A musical setting creates a context of its own for the tune: In almost every case, the listener to this CD will notice that each of my settings is an emphatically stated personal viewpoint of its melodic and textual material.  Listeners to this music have, on various occasions, referred to these settings as “compositions,” (again, in distinction to “arrangements,”) in reference to the fact that, except for the tune, that’s what they are.

As it turns out, my most recently completed works for this project appear as the first group of tracks on this CD, a twenty-seven minute continuous stream of music I have titled A Symphony of Carols.  Orchestras perform symphonies all the time, of course, so we are well aware that this term covers a wide variety of music.  This four movement symphony uses five standard carols as its thematic material and was written as the result of a pair of musical stimuli which I had thought about ever since beginning this entire project, some 20 years ago.

The ideas were simple enough.  One was the powerful melodic resemblance between O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.  This led me to conceive of a single setting which could accommodate both tunes (a musical figure heard at the outset of each of the first two tracks).  The second idea was to resolve the riddle that many musicians had posed in the past: how to explore the obvious connection between The Little Drummer Boy and Ravel’s Bolero while still creating a musically coherent piece of music?  Once I realized that I could use a transformation of  We Three Kings of Orient Are as the material for my second theme, I was able to conceive my own version.

Conception is important, but it takes time to realize such an idea.  My WVSO schedule does not normally allow me to work on writing music during the winter season.   I had hoped to attend the 90th birthday celebrations of Mimi Seaman on April 15th, 2007.  Mimi is among the many wonderful people who support a WVSO season in Parkersburg, WVa.  An ice storm between Charleston and Parkersburg on the day of her celebration made travel unwise, so I used this as an opportunity to sketch out the whole thing in one sitting.  Completely losing track of time, I worked from 4pm to 4am and was done.  It is to Mimi that The Little Drummer Boy Leads Three Kings from the Orient is dedicated.

I feel blessed that my high school music teacher, Laughton Patrick, had followed a performer-specific path with our high school community during my musically formative years.  Mr. Patrick always wrote all the music for our annual Carol Concerts, tailoring the arrangements to the particular skills of his student performers.  One year, for example, he wrote a florid descant for me to play on the soprano cornet to the carol, Deck the Hall.  [My own setting of that carol, track 5 on this CD, is dedicated to him].

My own re-imagining of "Deck the Hall” is my attempt to write a Carol-Prelude in the manner that Johann Sebastian Bach might have written his Chorale-Preludes.  A web of contrapuntal filigree gradually allows the tune to be revealed in long notes, until it bursts into full view at the entry of the chorus.

In what was to be the first of my carol settings, Away in a Manger was written in 1988.  (I mentioned that this project started 20 years.)  As a child, I had learned what I suppose I should call the “English Tune” to Away in a Manger in New Zealand – it is quite distinct from the standard tune used in the US.  I wondered if the two tunes could be performed simultaneously and, when I discovered that they could, I wrote a third tune (first stated by the flute) to further embellish the counterpoint.

After arriving in Charleston, the WVSO and I worked on establishing an annual Holiday Concert as part of our season.  The orchestra encouraged me to write more arrangements specifically for our wonderfully talented players.  We also took a renewed interest in featuring locally-based singers in our performances.

For Mariel van Dalsum Boggs, I was able to meld her idea of a soprano’s roulades on Jingle Bells with the delightfully pure sounds of the Appalachian Childrens Chorus to come up with a version of this classic song.  It begins with the grumpy sounds perhaps coming from parents who see Christmas as perhaps being too much about endless presents and parties, but ends with the overwhelming ebullience of children’s joy.

The text of The Cherry Tree Carol exists in many forms, going back half a millenium.  I chose this Appalachian version and created music that attempts to capture the dramatic differences in temperament of the three protagonists in the carol: Mary, Joseph, and the as yet unborn Jesus, who speaks from the womb.  Joseph’s callous dismissal of Mary’s needs is both disturbing (a story one will not find in the Bible) and understandable,  [“Let the father of the baby gather cherries for thee!”]

Close listening to The Cherry Tree Carol will reveal that its thematic basis is the same music I use in Goldilocks as her sleeping music.  This theme was, in fact, written while I was in high school for an original production of Alice in Wonderland, where it served as the song Speak Roughly To Your Little Boy, ironically described by Lewis Carroll as a lullaby. In The Cherry Tree Carol this theme is used in both its inverted and original forms, along with some newly composed material representing Joseph’s anger.

A favorite carol of mine while growing up was The Coventry Carol.  It is such a beautiful tune and yet its text describes horrific events.  My musical setting attempts to reflect the pain and anguish endured by the parents of those who suffered under Herod’s barbaric actions.

A few years ago, Mariel was kind enough to introduce me to some beautiful music from her own homeland, Holland.  The carol Kerstlied is a simple and direct Dutch Carol whose inclusion here serves to remind us here that our traditions are constantly changing and being enriched by each person who moves to a community.

In the Bleak Mid Winter, with a haunting tune by Gustav Holst, had long been one of my favorite carols.  My setting was written for (and is sung here by) my colleague Patrick Mason.  I wanted to attempt to capture the perfect blend we find in the words of hope and beauty in the midst of an austere landscape.

Prior to writing my own settings, I had used the same published versions of these carols and songs heard annually in most communities around the world.  There are many, many fine arrangements as well as much original music available.  John Rutter has created an amazing catalog and it was his version of O Come, All Ye Faithful, set as a fanfare and carol, that inspired me to create my similarly structured version of Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.

Goldilocks and the Three Elves is a tongue-in-cheek resetting of the Three Bears story, a work I had created for a Holiday Concert in 1989, since it was, at that time, the favorite bedtime story of my then infant daughters.  You will hear the audience laughing at some of the “performance” aspects, chiefly involving my (as narrator) changing hats for the various characters.  We included Goldilocks as a bonus track to the CD – a reminder that there is nothing quite like being there at a live performance!