Photo by Timothy Zaro.
“This is a thrill.”
The comment rose above the ambient chatter in the tightly packed sanctuary of Wayne Presbyterian Church on Saturday Nov. 4. “Thrill” accurately summed up the palpable anticipation in the stately sanctuary. Twice, in the half an hour leading up to the performance, audience members were asked to move closer together to make room for the newcomers still streaming in.
Under a wood-carved vaulted ceiling, a 150-voice choir from the Wayne Oratorio Society (WOS) and a 40-piece orchestra faced an eager audience in Wayne, Pennsylvania. At last with the appearance of conductor John Grecia, the buzz of excited conversation transformed into applause and then dropped into silence as he raised his baton.
What would draw crowds from multiple states to fill a large church to bursting on a Saturday night? The world premiere of “Creation”, a new oratorio composed by Dan Forrest, commissioned to mark the 75th Anniversary of the WOS.
The creation story of this “Creation” began in 2020, when a donor agreed to fund a commissioned work for the choral society’s upcoming anniversary, then three years away. In considering composers, “Dan Forrest was the number one choice, enthusiastically affirmed by the Oratorio Leadership Team,” recounts WOS Leadership Team Chair BettieAnn Brigham.
Forrest’s award-winning compositions have become beloved in both secular and sacred choral circles worldwide, sung everywhere from Sunday morning choir anthem to Carnegie Hall and the BBC Proms. In addition to composing, Forrest is artist-in-residence at Mitchell Road Presbyterian Church in Greenville, South Carolina and teaches composition at Furman University.
Another Forrest commission debuted in June at the PCA 50th General Assembly, the majestically orchestrated “Forevermore.” In commemoration of the occasion, Covenant Presbytery commissioned Forrest to compose an anthem in collaboration with poet Susan Boersma.
“Hearing the opening bars and seeing a standing-room-only audience mesmerized with it was surprisingly moving for me—I had to swallow hard and blink away a few tears as the first performance began!” – Dan Forrest
Midway through the composition process, Forrest felt inspired to intersperse their original work with verses of “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” Memphis pastor Sean Lucas, who helped coordinate the commission, said, “The result was a remarkable blending of old and new texts as well as old and new tunes into the anthem.”
That mixture of old and new encapsulates what Forrest loves about the PCA, particularly his own church community at Mitchell Road. “I love it that the PCA combines historic faithfulness to the gospel of grace, with a love for arts and beauty that encompasses a wide range of styles…It was an honor to commemorate the 50th anniversary with a new piece of music like this!”
Forrest’s Christian faith figures prominently in his compositions and his approach to his work. His composer website outlines four core beliefs that shape his work, including the belief that “I will make the most beautiful music I can, not because music-making is my ultimate end, but because I want to press my gifts to their maximum potential toward the true ultimate end: glorifying God.”
In tackling the project of “Creation,” Forrest created the longest work he has ever composed, running 67 minutes. He estimates he spent 12-14 months in its composition. The composer was in attendance for the premiere and recalls, “Hearing the opening bars and seeing a standing-room-only audience mesmerized with it was surprisingly moving for me—I had to swallow hard and blink away a few tears as the first performance began!”
The term oratorio may be unfamiliar to some, though most have encountered it in some form, Handel’s “Messiah” being a famous example. A long-form musical composition common in classical and sacred music settings, an oratorio usually involves a choir, orchestra, and some soloists, and often recounts a Biblical story or theme.
In the ethereal opening notes, Forrest manages to transport audiences to Genesis 1, when the world was formless and void and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. Forrest accomplishes this effect through some creative instrumentation “At the beginning, a waterphone and ‘singing bell’ technique on handbells evokes a sense of opening a door to an ancient mysterious place,” he explained. Then seemingly out of nothingness, the voices of the choir rose in a hauntingly tender yet soaring melody—a theme that would emerge and be repeated throughout the piece. Despite their numbers, their voices were hushed in expectant restraint—a mark of their skill as an ensemble. Any choir can be loud, but sometimes a choir can communicate more by what it holds back than by what it expresses. Starting in a hush, gave them room to swell gloriously with the music later on, and swell they did.
“Creation” is divided into twelve sections, or movements. Each one serves as a meditation on some component of creation through the title, text sung by the choir, and most importantly the music. While the movements generally mirror the narrative arc of the creation story, Forrest chose to go beyond merely retelling the story with music. “The angle that eventually emerged was less about being strict with the Creation narrative, and more about exploring all the related themes,” he said. “So the first three movements sort of tell the story of pre-Creation, and picture the Spirit moving and calling across the waters, and then invoke the Aslan narrative from Lewis’s Narnia, one of my favorite pictures of creation happening because the world is sung into existence.”
This movement is entitled “The Lion Sings,” a reference to C.S. Lewis’s description of the lion Aslan singing Narnia into existence in “The Magician’s Nephew.” Bringing the mighty voice of the Lion to life was bass Mark Hightower. “So much of the interpretive work of a singer is to bring the text to life, and there was no text for this particular piece! But I felt the music spoke for itself.” Hightower recalled.
After singing the world into existence, the music then bursts into a delightful rumpus, evoking through music the sounds of animals and pulsating with motion and joy. Forrest called the creation of the animals the “barn dance,” in which the orchestra creates the sounds of horses, birds, elephants, wolves, sheep, lions, and even donkeys.
“All that cacophony is one of my favorite moments, as it’s an exact musical replica of what Lewis described in “The Magician’s Nephew,” where the sound of all the newly created animals gets so raucous that it drowned out Aslan’s song.”
The movements that follow explore features of creation from the magically twinkling firmament in “Music of the Spheres” to the ocean depths “Deep Blue.”
The texts sung by the choir are drawn largely from a mixture of ancient liturgies and Scripture, sung mostly in Latin. Forrest notes that he enjoys composing Latin settings, but found it particularly appropriate for this work. “Peering back before the dawn of time, it evokes the right sense of feeling prehistoric,” he said, “I used English in a few places because the work was commissioned by an American choir, and I wanted them to be able to speak in their own language (and the language of the audience) at times.”
Whether in Latin or English, singing this work for the first time was a glorious culmination of many decades of making music together. For chorister of 47 years Claire Richardson, the week of the oratorio premiere held not only the two performances of “Creation,” but also her 93rd birthday. She recalled the rehearsal when the choir first received the music to rehearse in July.
“Each time I sang any part of the ‘Creation’….I was in awe,” she said.
In looking back over the premiere she reflects, “I keep thinking about how wonderful it is that Dan Forrest shared this wonderful gift of creating a beautiful masterpiece. He was born with a talent which he honed with much work by studying, experimenting, thought and desire. Then [he] shared it with us.”
She also credits conductor John Grecia, “His enthusiasm and wonderful knowledge of blending words and sound to produce a magnificent presentation, with humor, kindness, and determination encouraged me, and I am sure many others, to do justice to this beautiful masterpiece.”
In addition to 93rd birthdays and 75th anniversaries, another date is pertinent to this premiere; 225 years have elapsed since Franz Joseph Haydn premiered his oratorio of the same subject. Haydn’s “The Creation” follows a more linear timeline, drawing from both the biblical narrative and from John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
In his initial announcement of the piece, conductor John Grecia noted that Forrest was inspired to compose his oratorio “based on the fact that there has been no written musical follow-up since Haydn’s monumental work was premiered in 1798.” Even those unfamiliar with Haydn’s work may have sung a portion of Haydn’s “The Creation” in hymn form. The hymn, “The Spacious Firmament,” found in the Trinity Hymnal, takes its tune from Haydn’s oratorio.
One similarity between Haydn’s and Forrest’s treatments of the creation story is that neither includes the story of the Fall, and thereby allowing listeners a lingering look into a world unmarred by sin. For Forrest, the beauty of creation helps inform the larger story of redemption, one foundational to his faith.
“Everyone can agree this world is broken,” Forrest said. “And most everyone can agree that there’s just staggering beauty and wonder in our world; from the structure of DNA to the tiniest organisms to the towering mountain peaks and stunning images from the Webb telescope, from the unfurling of new growth in spring to the washes of autumn color to the shapes of snowflakes, and in human terms from the joy of laughter to the intimacy of human love and the rich complexity of image-bearing. We constantly bear the tension of seeing such beauty and wonder, yet such brokenness and pain.”
It is perhaps this tension that adds such depth to the work. Listeners familiar with Genesis know all too well that the Fall is just around the corner, but the beauty reminds us that glorious redemption is not far behind.
Forrest portrayed multiple attributes of God throughout the work. In his celebration of creation, Forrest displays the character of the Creator, from His mighty grandeur, to His tender love, to His playfulness and whimsey.
For those wishing to hear this new “Creation”, the work is scheduled to make its New York Premiere at Lincoln Center on April 8, and then again in Greenville, South Carolina, on June 8. Music scores will be available in late 2023 and early 2024, for both small and large ensembles, which means that the sounds of this piece could fill many a choir loft in the months and years ahead.