Hallelujah! Ok. Another Post About Music!

The Christmas season is over with all the wonderful music.  Our former Music Director Wayne Bradford wanted Christmas to last all year because he loved the music of Christmas.  I started listening to the music on the local classical music station WWFM 89.5. ( http://www.wwfm.org/ ) It is located in Mercer County Community College and it is a great station.  For those of you out of the listening area you can listen on the web.

In addition, music has been circulating on the web.  You may have seen the link to the Hallelujah chorus that went around to the choir and other people.  Recently the PBS News Hour got into the act with their blog called The Rundown. The title is Hallelujah! A Global Mash-up of Handel's
'Messiah'  http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2010/12/musical-montage-handels-hallelujah-chorus.html

There is a lot of information about Messiah in this blog including video the Newshour staff singing and links to all the U-Tube videos.  There are also links to Messiah performances on PBS and NPR.

Now about Messiah, I used to sing in the Masterwork Chorus under David Randolph. Since Messiah is a moneymaker (more about that later) Masterwork sang five performances of Messiah a season including two in one day!  When you have sung that many Messiah performances you get a little tired of singing the piece.  In addition, we had to sing it at a rapid pace because professional musician get paid double time after 11PM so we had to end before then.  My favorite song in the piece aside from the alto arias is "The Trumpet Shall Sound".  For one reason is that it is near the end of the piece and for the other reason because of the trumpet.  I would wake up and sit up in my seat to hear whether the trumpet player is going to do a good job or blow it!  (Pardon the pun!)

About Messiah being a moneymaker, there was another PBS story entitled   "Hallelujah!: How Handel Orchestrated a Classic Financial Portfolio " http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec09/composer_12-23.html  The video is there as well as the transcript. In Handel's time, most composers wrote operas. 

"Harvard's Mike Scherer has written a classic on
classical music and economics: "Quarter Notes and Banknotes." Opera
was the road to independence from the patronage of court and clergy, he
says."

However, opera was expensive to produce.

ELLEN HARRIS:
( MIT) "Paying for the orchestral musicians, paying for sets, paying for
costumes. Opera has never been a really good moneymaker. We know this today.

Therefore, Handel decided to write oratorios.

PAUL SOLMAN:
Oratorios, like "The Messiah," required no sets, no costumes, cheaper
singers.

ELLEN HARRIS:
He began using exclusively English singers. So, he had a very different cost
ratio to his performances. And it's only with the oratorios that he began
making really big money

Later on the above article, they talked about the economy of
Britain depending on the slave trade.  Handle got his money out of that
business before it went bust.

So here is the financial side of music as well as the enjoyment side. Incidently for the first time in years I went to a Messiah sing in Princeton with the Musical Amatures.  I enjoyed it because everyone knew the music. 

Now we should do Bach's Christmas Oratorio but that's another story.

Happy New Year!

Jeannette Brown