By KEVIN NANCE
Contributing Writer

Scan the list of composers in the program at many community choir concerts and, more often than not, most if not all will be dead people. And when the name of a living composer does pop up, it’s frequently someone with little or no track record with the group. 

Not so the Lexington Singers and its longtime artistic director and conductor Jefferson Johnson, who also conducts choirs at the University of Kentucky. Building on a relationship years in the making, the choir will give the world premiere of “Aeterna Via” (“The Eternal Path”), a major new work for chorus and orchestra by one of America’s most popular choral composers, Elaine Hagenberg, on Sunday, Nov. 2 at the sold-out UK Singletary Center for the Arts Concert Hall. The Singers will also anchor a large multinational choir, conducted by Johnson, that will give the European premiere of the work next June at Église Saint-Sulpice in Paris.

Hagenberg, an Iowa-based composer whose works have been performed at the Vatican, Carnegie Hall, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Meyerson Symphony Hall in Dallas and other prominent venues around the world, plans to deliver her program notes for her just-completed “Aeterna Via” from the Singletary Center stage. She was not available for an interview, but Undermain caught up with Johnson just a few days before the premiere.

Kevin Nance: I listened to the Carnegie Hall recording of “Illuminare,” performed in 2023 by Manhattan Concert Productions and conducted by James Rodde. I know the Lexington
Singers also performed it last year, and I can see why. It has a big, stirring kind of quality, lots of drama — kind of a movie-score feeling to it.

Jefferson Johnson: Funny you should say that. This new piece has even more of a cinematic feel to it.

KN: How so?

JJ: It tells the story of a woman’s journey, for one thing. The title is “Aeterna Via,” which is Latin for “The Eternal Path.” Actually, she just decided on the title last night, about 15 minutes before our last rehearsal. We’ve all been on pins and needles — what’s the title, what’s the title? She’s gone back and forth on that for months. The seven movements of the piece are “Anticipation,” “Farewell,” “Setting Out,” “Boundless,” “Gone Beyond,” “Plea” and “Homeward.” So it’s the complete cycle of when one takes a journey, which could also be a metaphor for a life.

KN: It sounds a bit like Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey.

JJ: It’s Odysseus-like.

KN: Right, except in this case it seems to center on a female figure.

JJ: Yes, she’s coming from a female perspective. She hasn’t confirmed it yet, but I know that in her personal life and family, there may be some motivations for the piece. Her son just went off to college, for instance, and in some of these movements you sense her as a mom: praying for his safety, trusting that he’ll be OK, then anticipating his return home. I’m reading between the lines on that, but it’s an age-old story.

KN: How did this ongoing relationship between the choir and the composer come about?

JJ: Elaine is one of the most often-performed choral composers in America, most highly sought-after for commissions. You could ask any church choir director, school choir director or community choir director in the country and they would know her name. She’s quite popular. She’s written mostly smaller works, what we might call octavo-length — things that a church choir could use as an anthem in a service, or that a school or community choir could fit into a concert program. Her one extended work, up until now, is “Illuminare,” which was highly anticipated when it came out because people wanted to know what she would do in an extended work. It was very popular, and choral directors also chopped up the five movements of that work and performed them separately, because she wrote them individually. “Aeterna Via,” not so much. This one is continuous. 

KN: And so you’ve been performing her work for some time?

JJ: Yes, at the UK choirs. She’s been on the scene for maybe 10 years, and we’ve been performing her music for seven or eight of those. We’ve had her on campus a couple of times, and she’s gotten to know the work that we do. So when “Illuminare” came out three years ago, I had the idea to do that with the Lexington Singers. We performed it last year. The amazing thing is that last year there were 154 performances of “Illuminare” in America. ASCAP tracks this stuff, because composers get paid based on the number of performances. A hundred and fifty-four performances of a major work in a single year at least doubles what the Brahms Requiem would get, what the Mozart Requiem would get. If you think about 50 states, that’s three performances per state in a single year. It’s a lot. But we sent her our recording, which she listened to in the Atlanta airport. She sent me an email right off the bat and was effusive in her praise. She said, “This is fantastic. I especially liked the way you did this; I liked that interpretation” and so on. Then she said she was working on a new piece, and would the Lexington Singers be interested in a) being part of a consortium that would commission the work — I said yes — and b) would you be interested in being the anchor choir for the European premiere in Paris in May 2026? I said, “Let me think about it — OK, yes!” So that’s what we’re doing. It’ll be a multinational choir and a professional orchestra mostly composed of Parisian players. It’s going to be at Saint-Sulpice, one of the really beautiful churches in Paris.

KN: I’ve been there. An old and famous church, and it’s one of the locations in Massenet’s opera “Manon.”

JJ: Then, backing up, Elaine said she wanted to workshop the piece with four choirs that she had relationships with, and I said we could do it in the fall. She said, “If you do that, you’ll be the first. You’ll give the world premiere.” And I said, “We’re on.” It’s been a bit of a bumpy road, I’ll be honest with you. There was a time a few months ago where she said, “It’s not going to be ready. There’s no way I can have this work to you in September.” I said, “Let’s not give up on it yet. How much can you have in September?” She said, “First movement, second movement, maybe third movement.” I said, OK. So she’s been sending it to us piece by piece, movement by movement. We got the last movement, number seven, about two weeks ago. 

KN: You’re down to the wire.

JJ: You haven’t heard it all yet. [Laughs.] The orchestration was just finished last week. I got the conductor’s score through email on Saturday. I went straight to Office Depot to copy it and went home and just pored over this thing, because I’ve got to know this backwards and forwards by Friday, our first dress rehearsal. So there’s a little bit of stress, but it’s super-exciting. We’re going to give the world premiere of a piece that’s going to have legs like crazy.

KN: You think?

JJ: Well, all of her music does. She writes music that’s accessible to the ear. It’s not in an idiom that’s like [makes the tortured sound of discomfort]. It’s beautiful. It’s also rhythmically interesting, in part because she writes in asymmetrical meter, which is challenging.

KN: Say more about that.

JJ: Asymmetrical would be like 7/8 instead of 4/4. Instead of “one, two, three, four,” it’s like “one and two and three and a one and two and four five six, one two three four five six seven, one two three,” and so on. In one movement, she mixes a measure of 7/8 with a measure of 4/4, which is basically 8/8, eight beats in a measure. So it’s seven beats, then eight beats, then seven beats, then eight beats.

KN: Sounds hard to learn as a singer, especially on such a short time frame. 

JJ: [Laughs.] Yeah. It’s pretty tricky, and we don’t have a long time to live with it. It’s like, “Here it is, let’s learn it tonight, and we’ll polish it next week” — except that now, there is no next week. [Laughs.]

KN: How would you describe the music?

JJ: I think cinematic is the first word that comes to my mind. It’s very cinematic, in feel and in sound. I’d call it broad, expansive. Some people will hear some Americana, like Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” — which is great. If you’re going to be influenced by somebody, Aaron Copland is a good one. Other people may hear echoes of John Williams or other prominent film score writers. 

KN: What’s the orchestra like?

JJ: It’s pretty small, in part because of budgetary reasons, because community choirs tend to have very small budgets — tiny, tiny, tiny, sometimes nonexistent. A lot of community conductors are volunteers. So she had to keep the orchestra small. I’ve got two French horn players, one oboe, one flute, a very small string group, a piano, a harp, a trumpet and a trombone. So it’s a bare-bones orchestra, but she manages to get a really full sound, very lush. What you heard in “Illuminare,” I would say multiply that by, what, X, to get the sound in this new piece. It’s fuller, richer, broader. I think it’s awesome. 

KN: In “Illuminare,” she toggles between big, faster movements and slower, more intimate ones.

JJ: Yeah. The other thing about “Aeterna Via” is that major works for chorus and orchestra generally have longer movements, but these are short, four to six minutes each. So it’s a 30-minute piece in seven movements. That is, I think, a nod to the 21st-century sensibility of “Brevity is better, let’s don’t get too long with anything.” It seems to work. She has to be very succinct, and she gets a lot done in seven movements.