COMPOSER WEBSITE

https://www.elainehagenberg.com/

VIDEOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XluEe7j13oo

PROGRAM NOTES

Written by Bill Hemminger

BY NIGHT 

ELAINE HAGENBERG

Duration: 4 Minutes

Most university and high school choristers would recognize the name of Elaine Hagenberg, so popular have her choral works become in recent years. Hagenberg (b. 1979) is now in great demand as composer, choral conductor, and clinician. With an undergraduate degree in music education from Drake University, this midwesterner has led performances of her works around the world. Recently, she led the National Youth Choir at Carnegie Hall and the International Children’s Festival in London. And she is a regular participant at the American Choral Directors’ Association Conference. 

Tonight’s composition By Night, is a setting of an 1897 poem by American Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921), a prolific if now little-known writer. The poem is almost Gothic in its sweeping and mysterious evocations, which Hagenberg deftly mines for their musical implications:

She leaned out into the midnight,

And the summer wind went by,  

The scent of the rose on its silken wing

And a song its sigh.  

Deep in the tarn the mountain  

A mighty phantom gleamed,  

Shadow and silver and floating cloud 

Over it streamed.  

And, in depths below, the waters  

Answered some mystic height,  

As a star stooped out of the depths above

With its lance of light.  

And she thought, in the dark and the fragrance,  

How vast was the wonder wrought  

If the sweet world were but the beauty born  

In its Maker’s thought.

Hagenberg accompanies the singers with piano, violin, cello, and three percussionists; together they provide pulsing rhythm and dramatic coloration to the sung text. The harmonic palette is reminiscent of Ola Gjeilo, another “go-to” contemporary choral composer, and the effect is altogether enchanting.