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Princeton University Chamber Choir: Music in Memoriam
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Fri, Apr 5, 2024
8:00 pm
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Princeton University Chamber Choir in association with the SSCM Conference presents Music in Memoriam: Singing about Death in Moscow, Salzburg, Dresden, Constantinople, and London. Featuring the Washington Cornett and Sackbutt ensemble, directed by Gabriel Crouch & Michael McCormick
Program
Selig Sind die Toten Andreas Gleich
Die mit Tränen Heinrich Schütz
Ich will Schweigen Johann Michael Schein
Das ist je Gewisslich Wahr Heinrich Schütz
Domine tu Eruisti Thomas Tomkins
Sleep Fleshly Birth Robert Ramsey
Then David Mourned Thomas Tomkins
Funeral Music for Queen Mary Henry Purcell
Духовная моя братия (My spiritual brethren) Anonymous
Kalophonic Eirmos Petros Bereketis
Плачуся и рыдаю (I cry and weep) Anonymous
Трисвятое Надгробное (Burial Trisagion) Anonymous
Sinfonia Terza Concertata Stefano Bernardi
Missa Pro Defunctis Stefano Bernardi
About
The Chamber Choir at Princeton is the smaller sibling of the Princeton University Glee Club, and forms part of a large network of choral and vocal groups on our campus which includes the Glee Club, Chapel Choir, Playhouse Choir (for theatrically-inclined singers), a Vocal Consort Certificate program (for students interested in one-to-a-part singing) and as many as fifteen a cappella groups. Led by Gabriel Crouch since 2010, the choir has grown significantly in size and in ambition and has distinguished itself in some notable collaborations and invited performances: The complete motets of JS Bach with the Leipzig vocal ensemble ‘Calmus’ in 2014, performed in both Princeton and Leipzig; headline performances for the conference of the American Handel Society of Dixit Dominus and a new German language edition of Messiah in 2017; the forgotten masterpiece Black Christ of the Andes by Mary Lou Williams with pianist Cyrus Chestnut; and in 2022, a performance of Francis Poulenc’s epic cantata Figure Humaine, which earned the choir a place in the closing concert of the 2023 National Collegiate Choral Organization (NCCO) in Atlanta, performing the same work.
As with all our choirs at Princeton, our singers receive no credit for participation, and the vast majority of them are normally found in departments far removed from Music!
Gabriel Crouch is Director of Choral Activities and Professor of the Practice in Music at Princeton University. He began his musical career as an eight-year-old in the choir of Westminster Abbey, where his solo credits included a Royal Wedding, and performances which placed him on the solo stage with Jessye Norman and Sir Laurence Olivier. After completing a choral scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was offered a place in the renowned a cappella group The King’s Singers in 1996. In the next eight years, he made a dozen recordings on the BMG label (including a Grammy nomination), and gave more than 900 performances in almost every major concert venue in the world. Since moving to the USA in 2005, he has built an international profile as a conductor and director, with recent engagements in Indonesia, Hawaii and Australia as well as Europe and the continental United States. In 2008 he was appointed musical director of the British early music ensemble Gallicantus, with whom he has released six recordings under the Signum label to rapturous reviews, garnering multiple ‘Editor’s Choice’ awards in Gramophone Magazine, Choir and Organ Magazine and the Early Music Review, and, for the 2012 release ‘The Word Unspoken’, a place on BBC Radio’s CD Review list of the top nine classical releases of the year. His recording of Lagrime di San Pietro by Orlando di Lasso was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2014, and his follow-up recording – Sibylla (featuring music by Orlandus Lassus and Dmitri Tymoczko) was named ’star recording’ by Choir and Organ magazine in the summer of 2018. His most recent release is Mass for the Endangered, a new composition by Sarah Kirkland Snider released on the Nonesuch/New Amsterdam labels, which has garnered high acclaim from The New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ and elsewhere.
Michael McCormick, originally from Oneida, New York, serves as the Choral Specialist at Princeton University. He graduated from Westminster Choir College with a B.M. in Music Education (summa cum laude) where he was named an Andrew J. Rider Scholar, and received an M.M. in Choral Conducting from Rutgers University where he was awarded a Robert E. Mortensen Fellowship. In addition to his work at Princeton, Michael serves as the Music Director and Organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, NJ and Music Director of Ars Musica Chorale in Ridgewood, NJ.
An experienced choral singer, Michael has performed with some of the leading choirs and orchestras in the United States, such as the Westminster Choir, Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. His collaborations also include professional engagements with Spoleto Festival USA, Downtown Voices, Norfolk Chamber Choir, St. Bartholomew’s Church NYC, and St. Vincent Ferrer Church NYC. His solo engagements include works by Joseph Haydn, Arthur Honegger, Lili Boulanger, and Claude Debussy with the Rutgers University Kirkpatrick Choir and Glee Club, and Riverside Choral Society. As a conductor, he has served as a Conducting Fellow at the International Conductor Training Program at University of Cincinnati, Conducting Apprentice at Berkshire Choral International, and will serve as a Conducting Fellow with the Norfolk Chamber Choir at the Yale Summer School of Music in August, 2024.
A native of Taiwan, Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen is Assistant Professor of Historical Keyboards at the University of Oregon. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music (Historical Musicology) and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Humanities at Princeton University. Under the guidance of Wendy Heller, Joyce is currently working on her dissertation, “Musica Experientia/Experimentum: Acoustics and Artisanal Knowledge in the Global Seventeenth Century,” which explores the intersection between science, music, and aesthetics involving instrument-making, sensory experience, and the development of acoustical theory. For this project, Joyce spent 4 months working as an apprentice at Zuckermann Harpsichords International—the last harpsichord manufacturing factory in the United States— in Stonington, Connecticut. In addition, she just finished building her first harpsichord from a Troubadour Virginal Kit.
As a solo harpsichordist, Joyce has performed throughout the United States, France, Belgium, and Taiwan. Joyce received the 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts and was a featured soloist in the 2019 Emerging Artist Showcase by Early Music America. Joyce is releasing her first solo harpsichord album featuring English virginalist music in 2024/2025. Joyce holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Harpsichord Performance from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
Outside academia, Joyce is a dedicated church musician with over 12 years of experience. As an organist specializing in the baroque repertoire, Joyce recently received the Colleague certification from the American Guild of Organists.
Dušan Balarin is a Peruvian, New York-based, soloist and accompanist on lutes, theorbos and early guitars. His passion for inventive artistic explorations has led him to perform with an eclectic array of leading artists and ensembles in the fields of Early Music, Jazz and contemporary orchestral and chamber music. Notable collaborations include; Masaaki Suzuki, Lionel Meunier, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rachel Podger, Bruce Dickey, Stephan MacLeod, ARTEK, TENET, Paul Watkins and Phil Setzer of the Emerson Quartet, Tessa Lark, Reginald Mobley, and Nicholas Phan. In addition, he regularly performs with historically-informed ensembles such as The Washington Bach Consort and Early Music New York.
Dušan attended the Juilliard School as a graduate recipient of the Historical Performance Scholarship where he rigorously performed with Juilliard 415. Before settling in New York, he apprenticed with virtuoso lutenist Nigel North and received his MM in Historical Performance with the highest of honors from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble
Considered one of the premiere ensembles of its kind in North America, the Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble (WCSE), directed by Michael Holmes, consists of historic brass instrument specialists based in Washington D.C. Assemblages of cornetts (curved hybrid brass/woodwind instruments) and sackbuts (early trombones) comprised what was the standard brass ensemble of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras of Western music.
WCSE’s membership has modified and grown considerably since its inception in 1997, performing extensively and in high demand in the Eastern U.S. with some of the more prominent historic vocal and instrumental groups in the American early music community. Its repertoire is vast, exploring nearly every possible style, period and region where early brass sources were represented, including music from the Italian, German, Polish, Bohemian, Moravian, Scandinavian, Spanish, and English courts, as well as the Americas. In the summer of 2001, WCSE produced its first recording of music by Giovanni Gabrieli and Heinrich Schütz. In August 2003, they were invited to be the featured ensemble at the Historic Brass Society Festival at Yale University (New Haven, CT). WCSE was also featured in the 2004 CD recording Mass in Honor of the Immaculate Conception in music by Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Marenzio, and Ugolini, in collaboration with the choir of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. Another one of their recordings of a canzona by Claudio Merulo circulated widely to numerous North American universities in 2005 as part of the anthology for Craig Wright and Brian Simms’s music history textbook Music in Western Civilization.
WCSE performed at the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival, and more recently was the featured ensemble for the Washington Bach Consort’s Christmas with the Consort in December 2016. The ensemble continues to provide their unique, mellifluous, and historically informed sound for numerous choirs who want to enrich their programming through the glorious forgotten practice of colla parte (“doubling the choral parts”) or providing Stadtpfeiffer (“town piper”) fanfares and flourishes for ceremonial occasions.
About
The Chamber Choir at Princeton is the smaller sibling of the Princeton University Glee Club, and forms part of a large network of choral and vocal groups on our campus which includes the Glee Club, Chapel Choir, Playhouse Choir (for theatrically-inclined singers), a Vocal Consort Certificate program (for students interested in one-to-a-part singing) and as many as fifteen a cappella groups. Led by Gabriel Crouch since 2010, the choir has grown significantly in size and in ambition and has distinguished itself in some notable collaborations and invited performances: The complete motets of JS Bach with the Leipzig vocal ensemble ‘Calmus’ in 2014, performed in both Princeton and Leipzig; headline performances for the conference of the American Handel Society of Dixit Dominus and a new German language edition of Messiah in 2017; the forgotten masterpiece Black Christ of the Andes by Mary Lou Williams with pianist Cyrus Chestnut; and in 2022, a performance of Francis Poulenc’s epic cantata Figure Humaine, which earned the choir a place in the closing concert of the 2023 National Collegiate Choral Organization (NCCO) in Atlanta, performing the same work.
As with all our choirs at Princeton, our singers receive no credit for participation, and the vast majority of them are normally found in departments far removed from Music!
Gabriel Crouch is Director of Choral Activities and Professor of the Practice in Music at Princeton University. He began his musical career as an eight-year-old in the choir of Westminster Abbey, where his solo credits included a Royal Wedding, and performances which placed him on the solo stage with Jessye Norman and Sir Laurence Olivier. After completing a choral scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was offered a place in the renowned a cappella group The King’s Singers in 1996. In the next eight years, he made a dozen recordings on the BMG label (including a Grammy nomination), and gave more than 900 performances in almost every major concert venue in the world. Since moving to the USA in 2005, he has built an international profile as a conductor and director, with recent engagements in Indonesia, Hawaii and Australia as well as Europe and the continental United States. In 2008 he was appointed musical director of the British early music ensemble Gallicantus, with whom he has released six recordings under the Signum label to rapturous reviews, garnering multiple ‘Editor’s Choice’ awards in Gramophone Magazine, Choir and Organ Magazine and the Early Music Review, and, for the 2012 release ‘The Word Unspoken’, a place on BBC Radio’s CD Review list of the top nine classical releases of the year. His recording of Lagrime di San Pietro by Orlando di Lasso was shortlisted for a Gramophone Award in 2014, and his follow-up recording – Sibylla (featuring music by Orlandus Lassus and Dmitri Tymoczko) was named ’star recording’ by Choir and Organ magazine in the summer of 2018. His most recent release is Mass for the Endangered, a new composition by Sarah Kirkland Snider released on the Nonesuch/New Amsterdam labels, which has garnered high acclaim from The New York Times, Boston Globe, NPR’s ‘All Things Considered’ and elsewhere.
Michael McCormick, originally from Oneida, New York, serves as the Choral Specialist at Princeton University. He graduated from Westminster Choir College with a B.M. in Music Education (summa cum laude) where he was named an Andrew J. Rider Scholar, and received an M.M. in Choral Conducting from Rutgers University where he was awarded a Robert E. Mortensen Fellowship. In addition to his work at Princeton, Michael serves as the Music Director and Organist at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, NJ and Music Director of Ars Musica Chorale in Ridgewood, NJ.
An experienced choral singer, Michael has performed with some of the leading choirs and orchestras in the United States, such as the Westminster Choir, Philadelphia Symphonic Choir, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. His collaborations also include professional engagements with Spoleto Festival USA, Downtown Voices, Norfolk Chamber Choir, St. Bartholomew’s Church NYC, and St. Vincent Ferrer Church NYC. His solo engagements include works by Joseph Haydn, Arthur Honegger, Lili Boulanger, and Claude Debussy with the Rutgers University Kirkpatrick Choir and Glee Club, and Riverside Choral Society. As a conductor, he has served as a Conducting Fellow at the International Conductor Training Program at University of Cincinnati, Conducting Apprentice at Berkshire Choral International, and will serve as a Conducting Fellow with the Norfolk Chamber Choir at the Yale Summer School of Music in August, 2024.
A native of Taiwan, Dr. Joyce Wei-Jo Chen is Assistant Professor of Historical Keyboards at the University of Oregon. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Music (Historical Musicology) and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Humanities at Princeton University. Under the guidance of Wendy Heller, Joyce is currently working on her dissertation, “Musica Experientia/Experimentum: Acoustics and Artisanal Knowledge in the Global Seventeenth Century,” which explores the intersection between science, music, and aesthetics involving instrument-making, sensory experience, and the development of acoustical theory. For this project, Joyce spent 4 months working as an apprentice at Zuckermann Harpsichords International—the last harpsichord manufacturing factory in the United States— in Stonington, Connecticut. In addition, she just finished building her first harpsichord from a Troubadour Virginal Kit.
As a solo harpsichordist, Joyce has performed throughout the United States, France, Belgium, and Taiwan. Joyce received the 2018 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts and was a featured soloist in the 2019 Emerging Artist Showcase by Early Music America. Joyce is releasing her first solo harpsichord album featuring English virginalist music in 2024/2025. Joyce holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Harpsichord Performance from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley.
Outside academia, Joyce is a dedicated church musician with over 12 years of experience. As an organist specializing in the baroque repertoire, Joyce recently received the Colleague certification from the American Guild of Organists.
Dušan Balarin is a Peruvian, New York-based, soloist and accompanist on lutes, theorbos and early guitars. His passion for inventive artistic explorations has led him to perform with an eclectic array of leading artists and ensembles in the fields of Early Music, Jazz and contemporary orchestral and chamber music. Notable collaborations include; Masaaki Suzuki, Lionel Meunier, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Rachel Podger, Bruce Dickey, Stephan MacLeod, ARTEK, TENET, Paul Watkins and Phil Setzer of the Emerson Quartet, Tessa Lark, Reginald Mobley, and Nicholas Phan. In addition, he regularly performs with historically-informed ensembles such as The Washington Bach Consort and Early Music New York.
Dušan attended the Juilliard School as a graduate recipient of the Historical Performance Scholarship where he rigorously performed with Juilliard 415. Before settling in New York, he apprenticed with virtuoso lutenist Nigel North and received his MM in Historical Performance with the highest of honors from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University.
Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble
Considered one of the premiere ensembles of its kind in North America, the Washington Cornett and Sackbutt Ensemble (WCSE), directed by Michael Holmes, consists of historic brass instrument specialists based in Washington D.C. Assemblages of cornetts (curved hybrid brass/woodwind instruments) and sackbuts (early trombones) comprised what was the standard brass ensemble of the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras of Western music.
WCSE’s membership has modified and grown considerably since its inception in 1997, performing extensively and in high demand in the Eastern U.S. with some of the more prominent historic vocal and instrumental groups in the American early music community. Its repertoire is vast, exploring nearly every possible style, period and region where early brass sources were represented, including music from the Italian, German, Polish, Bohemian, Moravian, Scandinavian, Spanish, and English courts, as well as the Americas. In the summer of 2001, WCSE produced its first recording of music by Giovanni Gabrieli and Heinrich Schütz. In August 2003, they were invited to be the featured ensemble at the Historic Brass Society Festival at Yale University (New Haven, CT). WCSE was also featured in the 2004 CD recording Mass in Honor of the Immaculate Conception in music by Monteverdi, Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Marenzio, and Ugolini, in collaboration with the choir of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington D.C. Another one of their recordings of a canzona by Claudio Merulo circulated widely to numerous North American universities in 2005 as part of the anthology for Craig Wright and Brian Simms’s music history textbook Music in Western Civilization.
WCSE performed at the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival, and more recently was the featured ensemble for the Washington Bach Consort’s Christmas with the Consort in December 2016. The ensemble continues to provide their unique, mellifluous, and historically informed sound for numerous choirs who want to enrich their programming through the glorious forgotten practice of colla parte (“doubling the choral parts”) or providing Stadtpfeiffer (“town piper”) fanfares and flourishes for ceremonial occasions.