A Promised Land: 250 Years of American Choral Music
Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Concert Choir presented its Fall 2026 concert,
A Promised Land: 250 Years of American Choral Music, at Exodus Church in Carbondale—and what an evening it was. The 600-seat church was packed, the parking lot was overflowing, and we had the extraordinary privilege of sharing this program with our wonderful Southern Illinois audience.
One of the most meaningful moments of the evening was the world premiere of Keith Javors’ It Takes a Village. We were joined by the Pinckneyville High School Choir and their director, Ellen Filkins, bringing high school and university singers together for a piece whose very message is about community: that what we build, we build together.
A PROMISED LAND
PROGRAM NOTES
by Emerson Eads
American musicians have long sought to define an American sound. Across 250 years, composers have grappled with questions of identity: looking toward European traditions, resisting them, borrowing from them, and searching for musical languages that might more fully express the complicated experience of this country. Yet much of what we now recognize as distinctly American developed not at the center, but at the margins.
From the beginning, American music was shaped by pilgrims, immigrants, displaced peoples, and enslaved peoples, by communities carrying musical traditions with them and transforming those traditions in a new place. Early singing masters and largely self-taught composers, including several represented on this program, sought to make music accessible to ordinary people, fostering a culture of congregational singing that prized participation and the robust sound of voices raised together. Shape-note traditions grew from that impulse, while African musical traditions, brought to these shores through the violence of slavery, would profoundly transform the rhythmic, melodic, and expressive vocabulary of American music. Later waves of immigration brought still more languages, instruments, and traditions, adding new colors and textures to an already evolving musical landscape.
In churches and taverns, fields and schools, homes and concert halls, these traditions met, collided, borrowed from one another, and gradually became something new. American music emerged from this convergence; indeed, its identity has never been fixed. In fact, some of the voices once excluded from our understanding of the American tradition have proven central to it. That process continues today as composers and performers recover neglected histories, challenge inherited boundaries, and enlarge our understanding of what American music can be.
This concert traces one path through that unfinished story. Its music reaches from the communal energy of shape-note and Sacred Harp traditions to the choral legacy of Stephen Paulus and the Minnesota school; from Appalachian folk and hymn traditions to musical theater; and from spirituals and gospel to jazz and the immense influence of Black American musical traditions. These are not separate tributaries so much as intersecting currents, continually flowing into and changing one another.
The program is, in part, pedagogical: an opportunity for our singers to encounter the extraordinary breadth of the traditions they inherit whenever they sing American music. But I also hope these pieces, heard together, reveal something larger: the story of a country continually searching for its voice. Perhaps its greatest promise lies not in discovering a single voice that can speak for all of us, but in creating a place where many voices can flourish alongside one another.
That is the promised land toward which this program sings.
DRYDEN | Daniel Read (1757–1836) Text by Isaac Watts (1674–1748), a metrical paraphrase of Psalm 61 |
Jason McClure, baritone
When American congregations sang psalms during colonial worship, they sang in this style. Dryden is named after the literary giant John Dryden, well known in colonial America as the author of A Song for St. Cecilia's Day. The tune represents early American psalmody, a tradition shaped by composers such as William Billings, Timothy Swan, and Daniel Read. Because printed music was scarce and hymnals expensive, 18th-century congregations relied on "lining out": a worship leader would intone each line, and the congregation would sing it back in call and response.
Working within these constraints, composers pursued an ideal rooted in their Calvinist heritage—melody that was simple, direct, and uncluttered by polyphony. Yet even within that austerity, composers like Read found room for expression, using word painting on words like "fly" to evoke the soul's flight from the body. A verse paired with a repeated refrain gives the piece a simple binary form—easy for a congregation to learn quickly and sing by ear, without printed music.
NOT ONE SPARROW IS FORGOTTEN (choral improvisation) | Shaker Hymn Paraphrase of Luke 12:6 |
Jason McClure, baritone
Not One Sparrow Is Forgotten, first printed in the 1908 Shaker hymnal from Canterbury, New Hampshire, paraphrases the words of Jesus found in Luke 12:6: “Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God?” The hymn’s profound simplicity gives the choir unusual freedom to move beyond the strictures of a written arrangement and into improvisation. What you will hear tonight is not written down and has been rehearsed only twice. Instead, the singers listen and respond to one another, allowing harmony, texture, and gesture to emerge in the moment. Each performance is therefore unrepeatable: the feelings of the day, the particular gathering of people—even the humidity in the air—infuse the music with new energy. By virtue of living outside of ink, this old Shaker hymn lives on as something newly made each time it is sung.
I NEVER HAD BUT ONE LOVE | John Jacob Niles (1892–1980) Text and music by John Jacob Niles |
Riley Stephens, soprano
Niles, known as the "Dean of American Balladeers," was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and devoted his life to transcribing and cataloging the folk songs of Appalachia. Wounded while serving in the U.S. Army's Air Service during World War I, he went on to study music in Lyon and Paris, then at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music after returning to the United States. Performing as a singer on instruments he built himself to showcase the songs he'd collected, Niles became an important influence on the American Folk Revival of the 1950s and '60s—Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan all recorded his songs.
Niles wrote and arranged this song in the 1950s for Malcolm Maclean Johns, founder of the Grosse Pointe Community Chorus, in Michigan. Its simplicity and directness don't feel dated—it is as meaningful and direct as anything else in Niles's prodigious output, whether the songs he wrote himself or the folk songs he collected and preserved.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN from Frostiana | Randall Thompson (1899–1984) Text by Robert Frost (1874–1963) |
Randall Thompson, an American composer known primarily for his choral works, also taught many of the leading composers and musical figures of the twentieth century, including Samuel Adler and Leonard Bernstein. Thompson introduces us to the scene Frost describes in D minor, with the piano plodding along in a comfortable walking Andante, its quarter notes tracing a steady path while the right and left hands move in contrary motion—a musical image of divergence. The choir enters in unison and remains there through the first two stanzas; in the third, the choir becomes an extension of the piano’s accompaniment, while the piano interjects with small affirmations, like a confidante listening and occasionally responding.
It is the choir, however, that ultimately alters the course of the music, turning D minor into D major. The sudden brightness elicits a brief dance from the piano, as though affirming the significance of the choice. Yet the music eventually returns to D minor, again led by the choir—a final remembrance, perhaps, of the path not taken. Thompson then leaves us with open fifths, neither distinctly major nor minor. The music refuses to tell us which path was ultimately right; instead, it leaves us with the possibility that every path carries its own beauty, consequence, and worth. Even here, in the melismatic passages, one can hear the distinctive musical voice of the composer who, nineteen years earlier, had written the world-famous Alleluia for the Tanglewood Chorus.
ANTHEM from Chess | Benny Andersson (b. 1946) and Björn Ulvaeus (b. 1945) Text by Tim Rice (b. 1944) Arranged by Per-Anders Sjöberg (b. 1972) |
Melina Carter, soprano
The choice to include, on a program of American choral music, a song written by Swedish musicians ABBA and a British lyricist, from a musical about a chess match between Russian and American champions—and sung, no less, by the Russian player—may cause some consternation, if not a little alarm. Yet Chess is, at its heart, a work about national identity, borders, allegiance, and the complicated meaning of home. Its crucial line, “My land’s only borders lie around my heart,” offers a surprisingly apt meditation for an American choral concert: a reminder that belonging may be shaped by nation and geography, but our deepest sense of home ultimately resides somewhere more intimate.
American music has always wrestled with questions of identity, as composers have sought to define the borders of an American sound. Yet the American sound has become precisely what it is because voices from everywhere have entered into it, making those borders increasingly impossible to draw. Anthem itself sounds like an anthem: its broad melody and expansive rhetoric stir the heart, while its very form seems to invite us to join in. But whose anthem is it? Here, an anthem written by Europeans, about an international conflict, and sung by a Russian character nevertheless speaks directly to an American experience of identity, immigration, and belonging. Perhaps that is the most American thing about it: a song whose borders cannot be neatly drawn.
ZION’S WALLS | John G. McCurry (1821–1886) Adapted by Aaron Copland (1900–1990) Arranged by Glenn Koponen |
John McCurry’s Zion’s Walls appeared in his publication The Social Harp, a collection of shape-note songs intended for congregational singing. This American revivalist song begins with an invitation to all—fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers: surely, we all fit somewhere among them—to join in singing the praises of Zion, a symbolic place of gathering and reunification. When Aaron Copland, a Jewish-American composer born in Brooklyn, encountered the song, its meaning could hardly have been confined to the revivalist tradition from which it emerged. As a young man, Copland expressed sympathy for the Zionist cause and, after 1948, for the fledgling Jewish state of Israel. The convergence of these meanings makes his choice of Zion’s Walls especially resonant: a song rooted in American revivalism, invoking an ancient biblical homeland, is reclaimed by an American composer whose own Jewish identity gave the word “Zion” an additional personal and historical dimension.
Copland featured Zion’s Walls as the second song in his collection Old American Songs, Set II, and later incorporated it into his opera The Tender Land. In doing so, he transforms a song of religious revival into something larger: an American song about the longing to gather, to belong, and to find a place we can call home.
FIRE | Katerina Gimon (b. 1993) |
Adam Arbatello, tenor, caller
The third of four movements in a work for choir by the Ukrainian-Canadian composer Katerina Gimon, this piece uses pseudo text, body percussion, and extended vocal techniques.
Programming a Canadian composer alongside American ones feels apt: Canada is, after all, part of North America, and for the past 250 years, our neighbor to the north has been deeply intertwined with our own history.
This piece lets singers live on the liminal edges of what it means to sing. For singers who work so hard to listen and sing together, this piece offers a different challenge: how to improvise and stand out amid the written textures while still creating a cohesive collective voice.
PRECIOUS LORD, TAKE MY HAND | Hymn tune adapted by George N. Allen (1812–1877) Text adapted by Thomas A. Dorsey (1899–1993) Additional text by “Joyce Merman” / Marjorie Farmer (1921–1996) Arranged by Roy Ringwald (1910–1995) |
Amber Carter, soprano
Thomas A. Dorsey wrote the text of this beloved hymn in 1932, after the death of his wife, Nettie, and their infant son in childbirth. He set his words to George Allen’s hymn tune Maitland, better known as “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone.” The song later became closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement and was one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite hymns. On the night before his assassination, King asked his friend Ben Branch to play “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” at the meeting that evening, saying, “Play it real pretty.” Joyce Merman, a pseudonym for Marjorie Farmer, later reworked Dorsey’s text, incorporating words from King’s final speech.
Roy Ringwald’s setting allows this extraordinary text to remain central. Across its three stanzas, the music unfolds with the simplicity of a chorale, giving the words room to speak rather than competing with them. At the final verse, however, Ringwald adds a soprano solo but removes the words from the line altogether. The solo voice rises above the choir in a wordless lament—as if, in the face of King’s death and the grief that surrounds it, there are no words left to sing.
STEAL AWAY | Traditional Spiritual Arranged by Patrick Dupré Quigley |
Spirituals such as Steal Away remain in the DNA of American music. Born from the experience of enslavement, their sounds of suffering, longing, faith, and hope have become woven into the American musical consciousness, whether we recognize them or not.
Quigley’s arrangement strips the song down to its essentials. A repeated D in the piano forms an insistent ostinato beneath a pop-inflected accompaniment, while a single measure of 3/8 creates a small rhythmic disruption—a hocket in an otherwise smooth, almost hypnotic propulsion toward the end. Against this spare foundation, the choir is given unusual freedom to shape the text and phrase the melody. The result feels less like a formal arrangement than an informal gathering around a piano: voices drawn toward that persistent D, returning to it again and again, as though it were a tether to something that cannot be shaken—hope, faith, or perhaps the act of singing itself.
ALLELUIA | Elaine Hagenberg (b. 1979) Text by Saint Augustine (354–430) |
Alleluia is a word that many choral singers immediately associate with Randall Thompson’s beloved 1940 setting, composed for the opening of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. Where Thompson seems to inhabit the full range of human emotion through the repetition of that single word, Elaine Hagenberg’s setting looks outward, using Alleluia to contemplate eternity.
Hagenberg pairs the ancient acclamation with words drawn from the closing lines of St. Augustine’s City of God, bridging the distance between those who have gone before us and those of us still here: making music, loving, hoping, and striving toward something we cannot yet see. The music seems suspended between those worlds. Its recurring 7/8 meter gives uncertainty a buoyancy of its own; rather than allowing doubt to weigh the music down, Hagenberg makes it dance. Augustine’s words emerge in passages of simple, chordal writing that serve as connective tissue between shifting keys, textures, and increasingly luminous climaxes. Despite the work’s contrasting musical materials, these recurring gestures give it a remarkable unity. In Hagenberg’s hands, the Alleluia becomes more than an expression of praise: it is an act of faith, reaching across the distance between the here and now and the mystery of what lies beyond.
SURE ON THIS SHINING NIGHT | Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) Text by James Agee (1909–1955) |
Sure on This Shining Night is one of Morten Lauridsen’s most beloved choral works, a setting that brings the expressive world of the art song into conversation with the lyricism of Broadway composers such as Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. That influence can be heard in the supple melodic lines, whose expressive rubato continually presses against the underlying pulse. The challenge for the ensemble is not simply to stay together, but to inhabit this elasticity together—to allow the music to breathe without dissipating its flow.
Lauridsen’s shifting meters and carefully placed expansions of tempo disrupt the sense of rhythmic inevitability, allowing the music to linger over Agee’s imagery. The piano and voices seem to participate in the same act of looking upward: a small rising gesture might suggest a distant cloud catching the light; the voices rise and fall in waves on “shining”; and moments of harmonic suspension seem to evoke the moon briefly obscured by passing clouds. Rather than merely illustrating Agee’s words, these gestures create a musical world in which singers and listeners join in wonder.
The warmth and spaciousness of D-flat major further imbue the opening lines with a sense of luminous affirmation. Yet, even as he ends his setting with the opening lines of Agee’s poem, Lauridsen does not allow that affirmation to settle into sentimentality. Wonder here is both joy and yearning—the recognition that to look into the night sky is also to become aware of one’s own solitude within it.
PILGRIMS’ HYMN from the opera The Three Hermits | Stephen Paulus (1949–2014) Text by Michael Dennis Browne (1940–2026) |
Michael Dennis Browne, librettist for Stephen Paulus’s opera The Three Hermits and one of the composer’s most important collaborators, died in March of this year. In this setting of Browne’s words, Paulus gives musical form to an enduring hope: that even before we ask for help, our prayers are heard; that our hopes are not offered in vain.
The music begins with striking simplicity, its largely homophonic writing giving the text the directness of prayer. At moments, however, the texture blossoms into eight-part divisi, creating great billowing clouds of sound, as though the music itself were enveloped by the love of a radiant and attentive God. Each strophe concludes with a miniature doxology, a praise of the Trinity stretched across an extended cadential gesture. Again and again, the music seems to arrive at the same assurance at the heart of Browne’s text: that even when we cannot see or feel an answer, we may still trust that we have been heard.
Across 250 years of American choral music, that longing for assurance—for some sign that our prayers, our hopes, and our lives are heard—has never disappeared. Neither has our need for the comfort this music offers.
IT TAKES A VILLAGE World Premiere | Keith Javors (b. 1971) |
Riley Stephens, soprano · Jimmy Beers, percussion · Mike Alderfer, bass · Keith Javors, piano
It Takes a Village is both a homage to the power of unity, inclusion, and community and a dedication to the Heartland values I was raised with in Southern Illinois. Woven throughout the lyrics are these ideas and the ways they are lived out in the everyday lives of ordinary, decent people.
The piece opens with an improvised piano introduction, followed by a harmonically colorful chorale that gradually builds into a call for togetherness. A reference to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” reflects the bridge each of us can become—standing in the gap and helping bring diverse experiences and vantage points together for the collective good.
“Village” then moves into a set of hocketed verses that lead to a Gospel-tinged chorus, serving as a call for all to embrace a spirit of service. An ethereal, modulating middle section provides a runway into an instrumental solo before the thematic material returns.
The work concludes with an invitational reprise, or tag, calling for “no less than everything and no less than everyone” to come together. It also contains a hidden instrumental reference to my niece Sierra and a song I recorded and released in the 2000’s entitled “Sierra Nicole’s Bossa”. It has been a blessing to witness the ways our community has rallied around her in her fight against NUT carcinoma, a rare and aggressive cancer.
Ultimately, “Village” speaks to everyone—including those who may not realize that the piece was written for them, too.
Program note by the composer.
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