Monday Musical Moment: MMM: The Blue Bird

Justin Langham   -  

Happy Monday!

Today, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite choral pieces that hopefully will begin your week on a “high note.” 🙂

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was an Anglo-Irish composer, teacher, and conductor in the Romantic era (ca.1800–1900). When he was still an undergraduate, he was appointed as organist of the famed Trinity College, Cambridge, and at age 29, he helped found the Royal College of Music, where he remained professor of composition until his death. In fact, many of his students went on to surpass their teacher and make their own mark on English Romantic music, including household names like Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

A prolific composer, Stanford penned a huge collection of works, including over 40 choral works, many of which are in a genre known as a partsong. Partsongs typically include settings of secular, or non-religious texts composed or arranged for multiple voices. Most partsongs are sung by a 4-part SATB choir (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass), but they can also be sung by choirs of all men or all women. You can think of a partsong as a song with parts!

One of Stanford’s most well-known partsongs is a beautiful work called The Blue Bird, Op. 119, No. 3). Composed in 1910, the work is a beautiful setting of a poem by British poet/novelist Mary Elizabeth Coleridge called L’Oiseau Bleu, which depicts a bluebird flying over a lake:

“The lake lay blue below the hill.
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.

The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.”

The choir is written in SATB format, including a standard four staves for each part, but Staford also calls for divisi, or “divided,” altos, tenors, and basses, allowing Stanford to create more interesting and beautiful harmonies with seven parts, rather than with only four. This partsong, typical of most in the genre, is written in a strophic form, meaning all verses are sung to the same music with little to no variation, and homophonic texture, meaning the voices move mostly together.

I love this piece because of the luscious, expressive harmonies, but also how Stanford sets the text. The divisi alto, tenor, and bass parts act like the lake, while the soprano is written in an independent role that reflects the bird flying overhead, above the other parts. It’s a lovely effect, and one of the reasons it has been performed so often, both in his lifetime and still today.

I hope this music gives you a moment of stillness and peace as you begin the week.

Justin