John Burge

Commissioner: Cantaré Children’s Choir of Calgary, Alberta, Catherine Glaser-Climie, Artistic Director

Premiere: Cantaré Children’s Choir, Catherine Glaser-Klimie, conductor, Knox United Church, Calgary, AB; October 25, 2008.

Complete Work: Please note that this is the first movement of a three movement work titled, A Prairie Tribute.  More information about the complete work and the other movements can be found at:

A Prairie Tribute

Duration: 5' 30" [Approximately 19 minutes for all three movements]

Choral Score Purchase: This work can be purchased directly from this website by making a payment for a bulk order based on the number of members in the choir.  After payment is made using the checkout icon and Paypal, a link is instantly sent to the purchaser to enable the immedatiate downloading of the score's pdf.  The receipt indicates that the choir has permission to make the number of copies paid for.  Additionally, following the online purchase, the choir will be provided with a personalized cover page that states the choir has a photocopy site license to reproduce the number of copies purchased.  Alternatively, choirs are encouraged to contact John Burge directly should they wish to receive an Invoice and/or make payment using cheque or e-transfer as well as to receive a discount for purchases of 25 or more scores.

Program Note: A Prairie Tribute was commissioned by the Cantaré Children’s Choir of Calgary, Alberta, Catherine Glaser-Climie, Artistic Director, in 2008.  Having grown up in Calgary, Canadian composer John Burge was keen to accept this commission.  Coincidentally, 2008 also marked the 10th anniversary of the passing of novelist W.O. Mitchell, a longtime resident of Calgary.  The idea took shape to pay tribute to both the author and the prairies by using the titles of three of Mitchell’s novels in which the prairie landscape features prominently as springboards for the composition.  The entire set is dedicated to John’s mother, Beth Sheppard, who has always loved the writing of W.O. Mitchell.

Scored for SA choir, clarinet and piano, the work is in three contrasting movements.  The first movement, The Vanishing Point, is a wordless soundscape that captures the vastness and sense of mystery that one feels standing on the prairie terrain.  The choir divides into multiple parts to create clouds of chordal sonorities that repeatedly fade into silence while the opening clarinet melody returns in different guises as a kind of unifying thematic gesture.  The text for the second movement, How I Spent My Summer Holidays, was compiled by John Burge from comments provided by the choir members themselves about things that they like to do on the prairies in the summer.  In this movement, the music reflects the carefree quality of the words with an emphasis on syncopated rhythms and an energetically independent clarinet part.  The final movement, Who has Seen the Wind, is a setting of a poem of the same title by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894).  The slow, hymn-like quality of this movement reflects the sacred implications of the text.  The choir actually sings the same music for both verses but the differing dynamics and instrumental accompaniment obscures the obviousness of the repetition.  The movement ends by returning to the overlapping chordal texture heard in the choir at the beginning of the work.

Texts:  [All movement titles are taken from novels written by the great Canadian novelist, W.O. Mitchell (1914-1998) in which the landscape of the prairies features prominently.]

I.  The Vanishing Point

[A wordless soundscape]