Program Notes for Pinkham's Wedding Cantata: Draft the First

This is the first draft. I expect to need to prune it down. Comments welcome.

Daniel Pinkham's Wedding Cantata, published in 1956 and scored for mixed chorus and piano, celebrates the joy and profundity of love as expressed through biblical texts drawn from the Song of Solomon. By turns exuberant and poignant, the long, leaping lines and sparkling harmonies magnify the spirit of the texts, while clever formal construction and common musical material meld the four movements into a unified whole. Pinkham accomplishes this with his characteristic brevity.

The cantata opens with Solomon verses 2:10-12 ("Rise up, my love, my fair one..."), set to a joyous, dancing 6/4 rhythm. The piano accompaniment features bright, closely voiced harmonies, generally arranged with added seventh or ninth tones; the harmonies sound familiar, but shine with a sparkling, mystical character that pervades much of the piece. The chorus' opening unison melody, in rising by a fourth, then fifth (appropriately given the text), states a powerful melodic theme that appears in various forms throughout the first and third movements. The second section of the opening movement builds upon the earlier melodic material, this time employing mixed meter, to Solomon verses 6:1-3 ("whither is my beloved gone..."). The text continues the common themes of joy in the beloved, with pastoral imagery.

The musical and textual themes of the first movement return in the third movement, to verse 4:16 (“Awake, O north wind...”); while the third movement features canon and generally simpler accompaniment, it shares an unmistakable similarity in melodic shape and rhythmic character, and opens its themes with the same ascending intervals of fourth and fifth. The conclusion of the third movement brings a dramatic resolution to this set of themes, which the first movement denies us.

In contrast, movements two and four draw from verses 8:7 and 8:6, respectively, and meditate on the profundity of love. Both feature thicker choral textures, with a heightened use of counterpoint, and intense legato over steady duple rhythms. Both employ dissonance in a somewhat more traditional way, though Pinkham refrains from the full resolutions we might expect (of particular interest is the ringing dissonance used in movement two between tenor and bass, shortly before the soprano entrance). The homorhythmic chorale setting of number four (“Set me as a seal...”), and the plaintive insistence of number two’s canon theme (“Many waters...”), paint their shared subject with passionate intensity.

While the pairings of odd and even movements stand out, other aspects unify the piece as a whole. The inner movements both employ canonic singing, providing a sense of overall cohesion. In contrast, the outer movements both contain extended sections of homorhythmic chorale singing, and share some striking harmonic passages; the harmonic progression that closes the whole piece first appears in the conclusion of the first section of the first movement. Most strikingly, and appropriately, the celebration of love unifies the whole.