These two delightful pieces come from Aaron Copland’s Old American Songs.  Copland is known for his “American” sound with very accessible lyrics and tunes.
Ching-A-Ring-Chaw is patterned after the old minstrel tradition with rousing lyrics depicting how joyous life can be.  Don’t blink---you may miss the words.
I Bought Me a Cat is equally playful with each verse introducing a new animal sound for the choir to create. For some reason, Copland inserted a wife as the last sound effect.  Hm-m-m……

No American choral concert could be complete without the music of Randall Thompson, who is known as the nation’s preeminent  composer of choral music. He also was highly respected as an educator establishing the great choral masterpieces as standard repertoire in our college and university choruses. The Best of Rooms is a beautiful composition based on the text of Robert Herrick, a poet of the 17th Century. Listen for the long, flowing legato passages that are a trademark of Thompson’s music.

Charles Ives is one of America’s most unique composers. His musical “signature” is multiple tunes being played or sung simultaneously. As the son of a band-master, he grew up hearing band tunes over the sounds of everyday life – this helped create his compositional style. He is also known for pieces that evoke small town American life, as is the case in Circus Band, here offered in a challenging version for piano four-hands and chorus. It has been said that Ives’ music was influenced by his work with a Danbury Connecticut choir, about which he joked that they sounded as if they were singing in two different keys! Hang on!

This is the fnal song in this set of three pieces for choir with texts by James Stephens who was re-writing the old Gaelic poetry of Rafferty. The Coolin was inspired by a folk song. The lyricist, Stephens, is quoted, “coolin” or cooleen refers to a very special curl that used to grow exactly in the middle of the back of the neck of a girl. I think that the growing of that curl is now a lost art.” In this piece you will hear the inner, supple rhythms that mark so many of Barber’s vocal works. Listen closely to the unabashedly romantic text.

This piece, originally for soloist and orchestra, is well known to vocalists, who appreciate Barber’s art songs for their inherent lyricism and romantic expressiveness, a reflection perhaps of Barber’s own experience as a competent mellow baritone. The text is a poem by James Agee, the American writer born in Knoxville, Tennessee, whose prose and poetry was also set by Barber in Knoxville: Summer of 1915 for soprano and orchestra. As you listen, let Barber’s expressivity wash over you in the power of the choir’s voices.