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Natural Selection
2009

double SATB chorus
3 oboes 3º doubling english horn 
bassoon 
3 trumpets
organ 
timpani 
strings (6.6.4.4.2)

duration 30'

commissioned by The Cantata Singers
first performance:
The Cantata Singers, cond. David Hoose
Jordan Hall, Boston / May 8, 2009 

RECORDING—first performance
 
SCORE
Pied Beauty
Repeat That, Repeat
Hurt No Living Thing
Wrens and Robins
The Caterpillar
Contemplating a Tangled Bank

PROGRAM NOTE
Natural Selection is a work of celebration—celebration of the natural world and also of Charles Darwin, whose duocentenery was 2009, the year this piece was commissioned. Darwin’s extraordinary insights have enabled us to see the natural world’s variety, abundance, and wonderful strangeness from a new viewpoint and to understand the forces that direct life in a new way. I wanted, too, to add my voice to those counteracting the silliness of ‘creationism’ but without being disdainful of the faith which may support it. Indeed, Darwin himself, at least at the time of writing the passage which I’ve set, saw evolution as the way in which God had chosen for the natural world to unfold.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, and Charles Darwin were contemporaries but they lived very different lives. Hopkins. a troubled Jesuit priest whose deliriously colorful “sprung rhythms” sound like nothing else from Victorian England, Rossetti whose ill-health constrained her throughout her life and whose poetry, simple on the surface and often courting unconventional social and political ideas, is largely written for children or of a devotional cast, and Darwin whose five years as naturalist for HMS Beagle provoked in him a realization of how inheritance directs the proliferation of species on earth.

I like that all of these texts are excited about the richness and unending busyness and beauty of nature, and hope some of this pleasure in life is conveyed in the music. 

A very delightful part of the composing of Natural Selection has been the opportunity to work with students of the Neighborhood House Charter School. Celebrating the 15th year of The Cantata Singers' Classroom Cantatas program these children set to music the Christina Rossetti poems at the center of my own work. I then took their melodies as the basis for my own settings. For the first performance David Hoose, Music Director of The Cantata Singers (and no mean arranger himself) orchestrated the chldren's songs and these were performed by the Boston Children's Chorus and students from the NHCS before The Cantata Singers and orchestra performed Natural Selection, including in its turn my own orchestrations of the same songs.

boston.com article 


REVIEW
Composer Andy Vores used the same poems and melodies in his Natural Selection, for chorus and orchestra, here given its premiere. Written to celebrate the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, it brings together nature-centered poems with a celebrated passage from The Origin of Species. Like the world it celebrates, Vores's gripping piece teems with bustle and activity, and its musical language runs from open tonality to a dusky, dissonant syntax. The Darwin setting, which ends the piece, unfolds in one grand sweep, and featured some elaborate writing for trumpets.
David Weininger • The Boston Globe

TEXTS
Pied Beauty 
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899)


Repeat That, Repeat
Repeat that, repeat 
Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart springs, delightfully sweet,
With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound
Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground 
hollow hollow hollow ground:
The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899)


Hurt No Living Thing
Hurt no living thing:
Ladybird, nor butterfly,
Nor moth with dusty wing,
Nor cricket chirping cheerily,
Nor grasshopper so light of leap,
Nor dancing gnat, nor beetle fat,
Nor harmless worms that creep.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1893)


Wrens and Robins
Wrens and robins in the hedge,
Wrens and robins here and there;
Building, perching, pecking, fluttering,
Everywhere!
Christina Rossetti (1830–1893)


The Caterpillar
Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk,
No toad spy you,
Hovering bird of prey pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.
Christina Rossetti (1830–1893)


Contemplating a Tangled Bank
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) from On the Origin of Species