Houston Bright

[Robert] Houston Bright (1916–1970) was a composer of American music, known primarily for his choral works. The best-known of these is the original spiritual "I Hear a Voice A-Prayin'," but he wrote dozens of highly regarded pieces over the course of his career, including a number of instrumental compositions. Bright was, among his peers, well known and respected as a composer, choral director, and professor. He spent his entire academic career in the Music Department of West Texas State College (now West Texas A&M University).

Life

Houston Bright was born January 21, 1916, in Midland, Texas. He was the son of a Methodist minister. He attended high school in Shamrock, in the Texas Panhandle (although the 1938 West Texas yearbook showed his hometown to be Plainview). After graduating high school in 1932, he attended West Texas State. He organized a dance band, the "Kampus Katz," in the 1935-1936 school year; the band played locally and also toured Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado during the following summer. While a student he also became known as a classical vocalist, singing baritone; a brother, Weldon, sang tenor.

Bright received his Bachelor of Science degree in music in 1938. Afterward he was the first student to be designated as a "graduate assistant." He received his Master of Arts degree in music education in 1940 and took a full-time faculty appointment at that time. He served as an infantry officer in Europe 1942–1945 and then returned to WTS. Through summer study and a leave of absence, he completed his work for a Ph.D. degree in musicology in 1952 at the University of Southern California. There he studied conducting under Dr. Charles C. Hirt and composition under Halsey Stevens. His dissertation was titled The Early Tudor Part-song from Newarke to Cornyshe.

Bright held the rank of Professor; he taught composition and music theory, and directed the college's A Cappella Choir, which he founded in 1941. The various West Texas choirs (which included a larger Chorale and a women's choir, along with other, smaller ensembles) frequently toured the Texas Panhandle and premiered many of Bright's works. His earliest published compositions are the choral pieces "Weep You No More, Sad Fountains" and "Evening Song of the Weary," both dating from 1949. In 1965 college president James Cornette, honoring Bright's twenty-five years of service to the college, would grant him the additional title of Composer-in-Residence.

Throughout his career at West Texas, Bright was surrounded by musical genius. His colleagues included Royal Brantley, the original musical director and eventual artistic director of the musical drama Texas; band director Gary Garner, chosen by the Texas Bandmasters Association as 1987's "Bandmaster of the Year"; and Hugh Sanders, who served as assistant director of the choral program at West Texas, subsequently succeeded Bright as the college's director of choral activities, and ultimately gained great acclaim as choral director at Baylor University. He also mentored the young choral teacher Alfred R. Skoog, who went on to serve as director of choral activities at Arkansas State University for over three decades.

Bright's professional memberships included the American Choral Directors Association, the Choral Conductors Guild of America, the Texas Composers Guild, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). He also conducted numerous workshops, including two for the Texas Choral Directors Association.

Houston Bright continued composing until his death, of cancer, on December 8, 1970 in Canyon. He donated his original works to the West Texas State Music Library. In 1974, Shawnee Press published his "We'll Sing a Glory" as a concluding opus posthumous.

Books

Musical Works

The works of Houston Bright comprise around one hundred original compositions, including pieces for concert band, choir, piano, and instrumental chamber ensembles. They have been performed not only throughout North America and Europe but in South America, Taiwan, Japan, and Africa as well. Diverse choral and instrumental groups have performed and recorded his music, including the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,[1] the Wiener Singakademie, the American Woodwind Quintet,[2] the Slovak Philharmonic Choir (Slovenský Filharmonický Zbor) of Bratislava, and Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. Most of Bright's scores were originally published by Waring's Shawnee Press.

Wind Band

During preparations for the two-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the United States of America (1776-1976), the National Association for Music Education (NAfME/MENC) appointed a Bicentennial Commission to recognize, and promote the performance of, "significant" works by American composers. Two works by Bright — his Prelude and Fugue in F minor and his Passacaglia in G minor — were so honored in the commission's "Selective List of American Music for the Bicentennial Celebration," alongside music by such canonical U.S. composers as Sousa, Gershwin, and Copland.[3]

Bright's Prelude and Fugue in F minor, in particular, has come to be considered a standard of the wind band repertory.[4] In the 2007 volume Composers on Composing for Band, for example, Dr. Jared Spears (professor emeritus of music, Arkansas State University) ranks that composition as being among "Ten Works All Band Conductors at All Levels Should Study," categorizing the piece as "intelligently written, historically important," and "educationally worthwhile."[5]

Piano

Woodwind Quintet

Brass Quartet

Bright's Legend and Canon was included in a "Selected List of Twentieth-Century Ensembles for Three or More Brass Instruments," published in Music Educators Journal after the composer's death. In the accompanying article ("Music for Brass Comes into Its Own"), Prof. John R. Shoemaker described the works so chosen as "outstanding" pieces of music numbering "among the most important in the literature."[6] The compositions were selected by a group consisting of classical-music critics and members of the National Association of College Wind and Percussion Instructors who were recognized as "specialists in the brass chamber-music field"; their wide-ranging list encompasses a variety of works by American and European composers such as Gunther Schuller, Francis Poulenc, Paul Hindemith, Nicolai Berezowsky, and Malcolm Arnold.

Choir

(select list; arranged alphabetically)

Bright's best-known choral piece, the original spiritual "I Hear a Voice A-Prayin’" (1955), was composed for mixed chorus (SATB); this work proved so popular that the composer subsequently transcribed it for men's chorus (TTBB); a transcription for women's chorus (SSAA) followed, and later an SSAB arrangement (made by Greg Gilpin) for "young and developing" choirs as well. Other well known and widely performed Bright compositions include (to cite but a few examples) "Rainsong," "Never Tell Thy Love," "Three Quatrains from the Rubaiyat," "Reflection," the Trilogy for Women's Voices, and his "Te Deum laudamus."

Most of his musical work was completely original, although he made a handful of arrangements of American folk songs. Several pieces were settings of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, such as "Lament of the Enchantress," "Winter Night on the Mountain," and "Clouds that Veil the Midnight Moon." His choral works often put to music texts by nineteenth-century British and American poets (among them Shelley, Tennyson, Thomas Hood, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Felicia Hemans, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and William Cullen Bryant). Other works set sacred Christian liturgical texts (such as his "Kyrie Eleison," "Benedictus and Hosanna," and "Antiphonal Gloria"); while still others set Bright's own original lyrics (including "Premonition," "Rainsong," and "Summer Evening").

Houston Bright composed, on commission, numerous pieces for high-school choruses as well as for college and festival choirs in several states. In so doing, he wrote largely for student singers and amateur musicians. Yet, according to Nick Strimple[7] of the USC Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, Bright "created several little pieces that have stood the test of time, the musical content making them still appropriate for university and community choruses…"

Citing Bright's Four Sacred Songs for the Night as ranking among his favorites in the choral repertory, Dr. Floyd Slotterback, choral director and professor of music at Northern Michigan University, told an interviewer[8] in March 2001: "Certain pieces kind of stick… I really enjoyed those Houston Bright pieces; the pieces sing well; he treats the voice very nicely. And they're very attractive; I think they'll please people… Good repertoire is just good repertoire, period."

Similarly, in singling out "Lament of the Enchantress," Forrest Daniel, director of the Sisters (Oregon) Community Chorus,[9] observed: "Shelley and Houston Bright, two very good artists. Houston Bright didn't really get his due. He lived in this little town in Texas and he had this magnificent talent."

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Ottley, Jerold D. (conductor); The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. A Jubilant Song: First Recordings of Twentieth-Century Choral Masterpieces. Columbia Masterworks M 34134, 1976.
  2. ↑ Harry Houdeshel (flute), Jerry Sirucek (oboe), Philip Farkas (horn), Earl Bates (clarinet), Leonard Sharrow (bassoon) [Indiana University School of Music faculty]. The American Woodwind Quintet Plays Contemporary American Music. Golden Crest CR 4075, n.d.
  3. ↑ MENC (Music Educators National Conference) Bicentennial Commission (1975). Selective List of American Music for the Bicentennial Celebration — Band. In Music Educators Journal (Vol. 61, Nr. 9), pp. 48-52. (Paid access only.)
  4. ↑ Garrett, Roger [Illinois Wesleyan University] (n.d.). The Best Band Music, in The Clarinet Pages. Retrieved November 9, 2012.
  5. ↑ Camphouse, Mark, editor. Composers on Composing for Band, Volume 3. "With a foreword by Anthony Maiello." Chicago: GIA Publications, Inc.; 2007; pp. 239–240.
  6. ↑ Shoemaker, John R. (1971). Music for Brass Comes into Its Own: A Twentieth-Century Phenomenon. With "A Selected List of Twentieth-Century Ensembles Published for Three or More Brass Instruments." In Music Educators Journal (Vol. 58, Nr. 1), pp. 36-39. (Paid access only.)
  7. ↑ Strimple, Nick. Choral Music in the Twentieth Century. Amadeus Press, 2002, p. 261.
  8. ↑ Marquette Choral Society. Spring 2001 Concert Interview with Floyd Slotterback, conducted by James Livingston. Retrieved April 6, 2013.
  9. ↑ The Nugget Newspaper; Sisters, Oregon; March 9, 1999. High school singers join chorus concert, by Patrick Faughnan. Retrieved April 6, 2013.