Matt Adomeit, December Celebration
Pentatone’s new holiday release, “December Celebration,” contains seven compositions and one arrangement by some of America’s finest living composers. While the title suggests a focus on secular works, it is rather meant to encompass a wide range of influences, as these composers take us on a journey through the world of religious carols, secular celebrations and everything in between.
The major unifying factor to the album is its diversity. Although all seven composers are from the same country, the generational and stylistic differences are often enormous. Sonically, the use of chorus and strings is very heavy, although there is at least one element on each track that is unexpected....
[Gordon Getty's] “Four Christmas Carols” finally elevate the chorus to the central role of the ensemble, and each small carol, while short, is a gem that one could imagine would easily be heard in church on Christmas morning. Gordon’s arrangement of Franz Gruber’s “Silent Night” occupies the coveted position at the close of the album. It is certainly an interesting choice to include the only arrangement in such a prominent place. However it becomes instantly clear upon listening to the beautiful orchestration why this choice was made. Just as the arrangement unifies text in three different languages it also serves as a unifier for the whole album, reminding the listener that everything they have listened to so far has in fact been inspired a particular aesthetic.
The subtitle to “December Celebration” reads “New Carols by Seven American Composers.” This album is proof that terms such as “Christmas carol” and “American composer” are not nearly as specific as they might seem. Although all the compositions bear some of the traits of traditional Christmas carols, either in their text, subject matter or tone, almost every track sets a remarkably different mood. With a few exceptions, the album is nostalgic and reflective, more reminiscent of carols such as “Silent Night” than “Jingle Bells.”
The concept behind the “December Celebration” was not one that was guaranteed to work, but with such skilled and experienced composers on board, it is no surprise that the result was immensely effective.
Phil Muse, The White Election
These 32 poems that Gordon Getty has set to music have the thematic and musical unity to constitute a real cycle. The subject is Death (the “White election” of the title), and the poems look at the subject subjectively from every angle. Getty organizes them in four Groups: 1, The Pensive Spring; 2, So We Must Meet Apart; 3, Almost Peace; and 4, My Feet Slip Nearer. A noticeable progression occurs as the poet delves ever deeper into the mysteries of life and death, which are not the diametric opposites we commonly imagine.
As scholars have observed, Dickinson’s poetry seems to spring from origins in church music, especially in the shape of her discrete four-line stanzas, though the flow of the thought often carries over between those stanzas, and they are not as foursquare metrically as many church hymns often are. Getty conjectures that Dickinson, who had studied voice and piano, must have set many of her poems to music for her own satisfaction. These “odd, old tunes” (her description) were certainly not intended for publication, which would have been out of character for someone who never sought to publish her poetry during her lifetime. In setting them to music, Getty confides, “I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems.”
As played by Fritz Steinegger, the perfect partner for Ms. Delan in this recital, the piano accompaniment is ideally suited to the sense of the lyrics. It seldom takes the form of a florid line, but usually occurs in the form of widely spaced chords or even single notes, either quietly stated or powerfully expressed, depending on the emotion of the poetic line. Occasionally it becomes more florid, as it does in a poem that celebrates the reunion of mother and son in death after many years, he a recent casualty in one of the Civil War’s terrible battles... The vigorously extended piano introduction before the first stanza suggests the rapid call of bugles; in this case, the martial music is both unusual and appropriate to the idea of death as a victory over the unnatural pain of separation, numbed though it may be with the passing years....
Of course, even a first acquaintance with Dickinson’s poetry gives you the impression that it is at the same time simple in form and very sophisticated, both in her daring use of approximate and vowel rhymes and in the way a simple declaration or a striking images can resonate with meanings far beyond the stave’s end. You can’t just set them to music and sing them without interpreting fine nuances of significance. To that purpose, Getty’s song accompaniments often continue beyond the last stanza, extending and amplifying the mood and purpose of the poem...
Mary Kunz Goldman, Piano Pieces
Gordon Getty, the octogenarian composer/oil tycoon, writes witty and often lovely music that looks backward to the 19th century. You can do that when you’re an oil tycoon, thumb your nose at academia.
Of course you also need talent to write music in the style of Schumann, Ravel and other masters whose inspirations shine in Getty’s work. Tao’s crisp precise playing brings out the music’s arch sweetness and makes a strong case for how good it is. I could see the components of the “Homework Suite,” music dating from Getty’s student days, entering the mainstream repertoire, as a curiosity and on its own merits...
Jeff Kaliss, Four Dickinson Songs
It felt like a new experience to hear Gordon Getty's Four Dickinson Songs up close and personal, though their performance by [Lisa] Delan a year ago...had seemed unaffected and accessible, even in awesome Davies Hall. The granitic aspect of Getty’s composition, at times Mahlerian in its panoramic scope, was perhaps more striking in the smaller SFCM venue, and the contrasting delicate veins and occasional pastoral touches were more aurally accessible, with pianist Robert Schwartz forthcoming with colorful support. The most familiar of the evening’s many pieces of verse — Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” — proved the composer capable of setting and changing a scene convincingly, and providing the singer with a comfortable but affecting vehicle for her lyric.
Cedric, The White Election
We don't recall hearing any of Gordon Getty's music thus far, and we weren't blown away. The going from a world we know (some other delightful verses from Dickinson) talks about, well, the going from a world we know, and the mystery of what's beyond the end. Oddly enough, Getty concludes this on the most obvious and trivial of all endings, a tonic-dominant-tonic coda on the piano that has neither poetry nor mystery.