I have decided to resume the Repertoire Blog function of my website, with contributions from friends and colleagues who would like to write about their favorite choral pieces. The first entry is one of mine, though: Among the Fuschias from Five Songs of Laurence Hope by Harry T. Burleigh, arranged for SATB chorus and piano by Marques L. A. Garrett.
Score Preview and Choral Recording
Voicing: SATB chorus and piano
Why do singers like it?
Among the Fuschias has gorgeous Romantic melodies and lots of dynamic contrast. Each phrase really lends itself well to expression, depicting the breathlessness of love!
What is meaningful about it?
The lives of the composer and the poet (who was actually a woman using a male pen name) are endlessly fascinating to me!
What is challenging about it?
The harmonies in Among the Fuschias are pretty chromatic, and there are a lot of flats…
What is easy about it?
There is significant piano support for those harmonies! Most of the vocal material is doubled in the piano, since that’s the main source of Dr. Garrett’s choral parts.
Where can you order Among the Fuschias?
The whole set is available at GIA.
Program Notes from the BACH Choir Performance
I programmed this song cycle in a concert entitled The Three Bs (Bonds, Burleigh, and Boulanger) with the Baroque Artists of Champaign-Urbana back in 2023. You can read the program here, but I will include the relevant program notes below:
With lyrical melodies and intriguing harmonic surprises, the Five Songs of Laurence Hope can easily captivate the listener without explanation. However, the fascinating careers of poet, composer, and arranger provide a deeper appreciation of this previously underperformed song cycle.
About the Poet
We begin with the poet known as “Laurence Hope,” born Violet Adela Florence Cory (1865-1904) in Gloucestershire, England. Adela moved to India at 16 for her father’s career, then married Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson at 23. Garden of Kama was her first poetry book in 1901, though presented as translations of Indian poetry to increase the appeal, and this was followed by Stars of the Desert in 1903 and the posthumous Indian Love in 1905. Nicolson’s work reflects the influence of Indian poets; she often wore traditional Indian clothing and was fluent in Urdu. There was a strong appetite for “exotic” eastern settings in Europe, and the male pseudonym allowed her to publish fairly explicit sensual poetry. Scholars have speculated about whether the themes of forbidden love refer to her rumored affairs (potentially with both men and women) or merely catered to the fashions of the time. In any case, she ended her own life in 1904 after the loss of her husband.
About the Composer
Composer Harry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) is frequently associated with his teacher Antonín Dvořák at the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Burleigh’s grandfather Hamilton Waters, who had purchased his freedom from slavery, taught Burleigh the spiritual melodies that he later shared with Dvořák– inspiring the Largo theme from the New World Symphony. In New York, Burleigh was an acclaimed high baritone with positions at Temple Emanu-el and St. George’s Episcopal Church (though many congregants at St. George’s initially objected because of his race).
H. T. Burleigh was best known for his spiritual arrangements, particularly “Deep River” in 1917, which opened the door for numerous others to be sung by Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and other vocal greats of the day. To understand Burleigh’s purpose in creating these arrangements, we can reflect on the following quote:
The plantation songs known as “spirituals” are the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in camp meetings, revivals and other religious exercises. …. It is a serious misconception of their meaning and value to treat them as “minstrel” songs, or to try to make them funny by a too literal attempt to imitate the manner of the Negro in singing them….
Their worth is weakened unless they are done impressively, for through all these songs there breathes a hope, a faith in the ultimate justice and brotherhood of man…. The message is ever manifest that eventually deliverance from all that hinders and oppresses the soul will come, and man—every man—will be free.
– Harry T. Burleigh, 1917
Despite the success of his spirituals, Burleigh wanted to be known more for his art songs. The 1915 Five Songs of Laurence Hope were premiered by tenor John McCormack and pianist Edwin Schneider in 1916, and audiences received them with enthusiasm. “He has sensibility, humor and even imagination; and he shuns our molasseslike sentimentality as though it were the plague upon our songs that it really is,” wrote H. T. Parker in the Boston Transcript.
About the Song Cycle
Five Songs of Laurence Hope depicts scenes of forbidden love, often in romantic and fragrant settings. “Worth While” contains an unrestrained outpouring of passion, but perhaps the most breathtaking moment is the piano’s sighing chromatic descent into C major. “The Jungle Flower” reveals Burleigh’s gift for melody; on the sentimental phrase “sweet thou art and loved,” he adds depth with stunning harmonic inflections. In “Kashmiri Song,” the narrator reflects on their past lover in an increasingly dramatic manner, and Burleigh depicts the relentless obsession primarily with steady 3- and 4- bar phrases in 4/4 time.
It is fitting that “Among the Fuschias” highlights the raised fourth scale degree in E flat minor while describing the “secret place” that tempts the narrator away from reason. “Till I Wake” concludes the set with a depiction of death and the hope of remembering one’s lover in the afterlife; Burleigh’s rhythms and melodic contours paint the contrast between dying and awakening. Echoing the end of the first song, Burleigh has the piano (and the lower voices in this arrangement) gently sink into C major.
About the Arranger
Because the high quality of this song cycle begs more modern performances than it has received, Dr. Marques L. A. Garrett deftly employed material from the piano accompaniment to arrange it for SATB chorus in 2020. An Assistant Professor of Music in Choral Activities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Garrett is a highly respected clinician and researcher in today’s American choral scene. Particularly notable is his database of Non-Idiomatic Music by Black Composers and the brand new Oxford Book of Choral Music by Black Composers (he explains on his website: “Non-idiomatic, as it relates to black composers, refers to the original concert music that is not part of the traditional idiomatic canon associated with black musicians. That canon includes spirituals, gospel, jazz, hip-hop, and rap among others.”).