And gladness of heart …

I was sixteen years old, a high school sophomore and a trumpet player, selected for the Massachusetts All-State Band. The festival and concert that year were held in Plymouth. My girlfriend at the time was a junior, singing alto in the All-State Chorus.

I have only vague memories of the pieces our band played that weekend and no memories at all of our conductor. But my memories of each composition sung by the chorus and of their exuberant and charismatic director are vivid and enduring.

Every time the band took a rehearsal break, I would run to the room where the chorus was practicing to watch and to listen, not because my girlfriend was there, at least not entirely, but because of the guest choral conductor and because of the music.

The conductor was Vito Mason. I remember him as tall, with dark hair and a commanding physical presence. He would lead the choir through a series of remarkable vocal exercises, not singing, but vocalizing nonsense syllables and sounds, teaching them to follow closely, so closely, the nuances of his gestures, responding to his direction with changes in volume, intensity, timbre, mood. He had them, and me too, literally at his fingertips.

And the music they sang, yes, every piece, enthralled me, but one song, one song in particular, became indelibly imprinted on my soul. He prepped them for the opening of the piece. He would give them only the smallest of hand signals, not giving listeners any foreshadowing of what was to come, and they would suddenly shatter the silence with their bold declamation …

Have ye not known?
Have ye not heard?
Hath it not been told you from the beginning?
Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?

Oh, my! Even now as I write these words, the profundity and power of Randall Thompson’s perfect setting of the Isaiah text— yes, I will say perfect! — rings in my ears and overwhelming emotion wells up within me. From the beginning, from the first unison notes, this song takes hold of me, body and spirit, and will not let me go.

But that is only the beginning. The song performed by the All-State Chorus to close the Plymouth program is actually two songs, the final two sections of a larger work by Thompson entitled, The Peaceable Kingdom. After the short and thunderous opening, “Have ye not known,” comes the longer melodic and hypnotic, “Ye shall have a song,” featuring eight parts, a double choir …

Ye shall have song,
as in the night when a holy solemnity is kept;
And gladness of heart
As when one goeth with a pipe
To come into the mountain of the Lord.

The text is simple, unassuming, almost innocuous, but — oh — the music! Building, ever slowly, but ever surely, soaring, dancing, exulting. I had never in my life known or heard the piece before, but once hearing it my life was forever changed. Then and now, every time I hear the antiphonal phrases, one of the double choirs answering the other, “and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart, and gladness of heart” involuntary shivers run over my body and my heart and mind are consumed by the music, made one with the music. In that moment, there is no music and no me, just the being, being in that place of exquisite and incomparable joy.

I have a recording of that piece, of that concert, of that sublime performance by eighty high school students led by a man they had only known two days that left an audience of parents and friends and music educators, and me, in awe. I listen to that recording still, and every time I do, it is not that I am taken back there again, but I am taken again, in a new moment, to a place I have come to know and to love, a place of pure delight.