About the Program

By John Koegel
Professor of Musicology, California State University, Fullerton

I Am America

Starr Parodi’s I Am America, with text and orchestration by the composer, was commissioned to honor America’s 250th anniversary by Pacific Chorale, Robert Istad, Artistic Director, and was underwritten by Mei-Yen Huang Chang and Charlie and Ling Zhang. The composer provided the following note about her work. “When starting to compose I Am America, I asked myself, ‘What would America want to tell us about itself?’ The land and the ideals, both ancient and new, born of great imagination—that gives us all the courage to follow our dreams. A place where at times it feels like the sky is too big for even the universe to hold it, if we dare to look up. The land and mountains glowing in colors that are too vivid and deep to even be described in words. The oceans lapping and pounding at the shores, both calm and tumultuous, shaping the topography and reminding us that constant change is natural. Americans are created from stardust and molecules that constantly renew, and we are inextricably entangled with each other and the land in this great experiment. I approached composing I Am America from the perspective of America speaking for itself, in its own words as a character in a story would, and in turn holding a place in all of our rich and varied stories. Happy 250th birthday dear blessed America, thank you for all you have given us.”

Parodi is a versatile musician and composer who writes in a variety of musical styles for various mediums, including film and television, the concert hall, and live theatrical productions. Her I Am America presents an episodic, cinematic sweep of deeply felt emotions that emphasizes the need for freedom and justice for all humanity through her beautiful, direct, and accessible music tied to her message of inclusivity. Her message is not political; it is about goodness and the beautiful things about our country and that we as Americans are bound together, both the strong and the meek.

Starr Parodi first came to public attention playing keyboards in the house band on the Arsenio Hall Show. She has been very active in composing for the Hollywood motion picture, television, and streaming industries, winning numerous awards for her work in the recording studio and concert hall. Her neoclassical work The Joy of the Waters was featured on the 2022 Grammy®-winning album Women Warriors: The Voices of Change. Her orchestral music is regularly featured in Orange County’s own Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach—the first woman to have her compositions performed there in the 93-year history of that beloved institution.

Critical Mass

San Francisco-based British-born composer Tarik O’Regan is “one of the leading composers of his generation” (Gramophone), who writes “music of startling beauty” (The Observer). He grew up in South London, Algeria, and Morocco, studied music at the University of Oxford, and completed postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he also served as Composer-in-Residence at Corpus Christi College.

O’Regan has composed extensively for chorus, as well as for orchestra and chamber ensembles.

O’Regan’s choral work Agnus Dei, the centerpiece of his Critical Mass, was commissioned by King Charles III for his Coronation with Queen Camilla in Westminster Abbey in 2023. O’Regan has a long-standing connection with Pacific Chorale, which has performed a number of his works and for which he has served as Composer-in-Residence.

O’Regan’s Critical Mass (2025), for SATB choir, percussion, harp, and strings, is a co-commission by the Wimbledon Choral and Pacific Chorale. Its premiere was given at Cadogan Hall in London in April, and tonight’s performance is its North American premiere. According to the composer, “Critical Mass is my attempt to linger with the enduring structure of the Mass and with its continued capacity to speak to the world as we meet it now.” The work reflects the spirit of the recent Coronation and combines “solemnity and tradition with the sense of new beginning, full of purpose and hope.” Critical Mass presents a call for empathy and the need to support the common good in these highly divisive times. The fifth movement, the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God), setting the traditional Mass text, is the inspiration for the entire composition, and the other movements were composed around it. For the other Mass Ordinary movements (the sections of the Mass with invariable texts), the Kyrie (Lord Have Mercy), Gloria, Credo (Creed), and Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy), O’Regan asked four of his long-standing collaborators to provide new texts: John Caird, Colm Tóibín, Marcus Omari, and Alice Goodman. He provided his own text for the “Ite, Missa Est,” the concluding words to the people.

O’Regan has commented on the newly commissioned poetry that he set to music: “John Caird’s Kyrie wrestles with our capacity to create and destroy, ending with a plea to be ‘able to create ourselves anew.’ Colm Tóibín’s Gloria then opens not with transcendence but with a low grey sky over Venice, and finds renewal in the ‘light that binds the image to the air,’ as though answering the Kyrie’s search for re-creation with a moment of clear perception. Marcus Omari’s Credo continues this thread, grounding belief in the ‘sacred pulse of presence’ and in the making of beauty ‘for the sun and moon to witness,’ which echoes the Gloria’s attention to light and its generative force. And Alice Goodman’s Sanctus, with its ‘Illuminations,’ returns us to light once more, transposed into the ordinary and the local, where heaven and earth briefly flare into view ‘as far as the eye can see.’”

O’Regan values poetry greatly and his expert text setting is highly effective musically. He plays with language through manipulating multiple levels of rhetoric. His musical style is comprised of multiple strands that help reflect the meaning of the text. His writing is highly rhythmic with the use of complex rhythmic patterns and changes, and is mixed modal in nature, among other compositional strategies. He uses ostinato (repeated) patterns, dense choral textures alternating with interlocking parts and meditative singable lines. Above all, his complex composition palette is put directly to the service of the text and he writes most beautifully for the human voice.

Carmina Burana

German composer Carl Orff’s (1895–1982) Carmina Burana has been performed countless times since its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937. It is his most famous composition and one of the most popular of all large-scale choral-orchestral works; with its famous opening chorus “O Fortuna” (Oh, Fortune) it is instantly recognizable. Composed to German and Latin texts found in a medieval German collection, Carmina Burana celebrates the attractions of nature, the tavern, and love.

Originally conceived of by the composer as a stage work, it is best known as a concert piece. The original epic-scale version calls for a large orchestra (including five timpani) and chorus, with soprano, tenor, and baritone vocal soloists. The version performed tonight, however, is the reduced orchestration for chamber orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists by Paul Leonard Schäffer (2022), which includes all the original movements. This version allows the chorus to be the star of the show and makes the work accessible to a wider variety of community, collegiate, and professional choruses.

The complete title of Orff’s work is Carmina Burana: Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris cantandae comitantibus instrumentis atque imaginibus magicis (Songs of Beuern: Secular Songs to Be Sung by Soloists and Choirs Accompanied by Instruments and Magical Images). German scholar Johann Andreas Schmeller gave the title Carmina Burana to his 1847 edition of the 254 poems and dramatic texts in a medieval German manuscript that had belonged to the Benedictine abbey in the town of Benediktbeuern, Bavaria (although it probably originated elsewhere). About one quarter of the poems in the collection include a form of early musical notation. The collection is one of the most important sources of Latin and German medieval poetry. The poems were written and sung by wandering students and clerics. Their themes include love, drinking, gaming, gluttony, lust, the fickleness of fortune, and joy at the return of spring. The collection also includes a “Gambler’s Mass” and liturgical plays. The parodistic and satirical elements are important features of both the Carmina Burana collection and Orff’s composition. Although Orff musically set 24 poems from the collection, his music is not based on the original melodies included in it.

Carmina Burana has appeared in many different types of representations in live performance, film, and other media, and with dance choreography. The famous opening chorus, “O Fortuna” has been the inspiration for numerous film and video game scores, through direct musical quotation, paraphrase, and imitation. It has also been presented in many different theatrical guises: as allegorical medieval mystery play, music drama, and in French opera director Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s stunning dramatized film version of 1975, with opera stars Hermann Prey and Lucia Popp as the vocal soloists.

Orff divided Carmina Burana into three main scenes: 1. “Primo vere” (In Early Spring) and “Uf dem anger” (On the Village Green), 2. “In Taberna” (In the Tavern), and 3. “Cours d’Amours” (Courts of Love). They are preceded by the opening section “Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi” (Fortune, Empress of the World), with its rhythmically pounding “O Fortuna” chorus, in which the goddess of fate is praised. This well-known choral movement, with its striking clusters of crunchy intervallic seconds, reappears at the end to close and frame the entire work. Before that closing repeat, however, the movement “Blanziflor et Helena” follows the three main scenes listed above.

Orff depicts the awakening of spring in “Primo vere,” sung to Latin texts, and the baritone soloist praises the power of love. “Uf dem anger” sets German texts and evokes a peasant spring festival through the use of dance-like and short choral movements. Scene 2, the theatrical “In taberna” section, set to Latin texts, presents a series of parodies: the baritone soloist imitating an inebriate oblivious to the dangerous condition of his soul, the tenor soloist’s grotesque falsetto singing of a swan being roasted alive, the baritone’s impersonation of a drunken abbot, and the male chorus’ riotous hymn to earthly, sensual enjoyment. Scene 3, “Cour d’Amours” and the following movement “Blanziflor et Helena” contrast greatly with the preceding movements in that they extol the joys of refined, courtly love. The lover (baritone soloist) attempts to seduce his beloved (soprano soloist) with a brilliant florid melodic line; the beloved wishes to light her lover’s desire with her flirtatious song; a double choir sings a wooing song and a song in praise of love and the goddess of love and beauty, Venus.

Above all, Carmina Burana is a celebration of life, love, and memory, reminding us that no matter where fate pulls us, we can choose to embrace the good things in life.