Search - Frederick Hemke :: Simple Gifts

Frederick L. Hemke is the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence and Louis and Elsie Snydacker Eckstein Professor of Music in the School of Music, at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Dr. Hemke is internationally recognized as an adjudicator, a master teacher, and a concert soloist. Douglas Cleveland currently serves as a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington School of Music and as Director of Music at Plymouth Congregational Church in Seattle, Washington. Mr. Cleveland is internationally recognized as a teacher and performer. The decision to use the traditional Shaker tune Simple Gifts as a unifying idée fix was derived from many visits to Shakertown and several other similar communal religious communities that flourished in nineteenth-century America. While the original use of singing and dance in many of the worship services of these sects was certainly religious, I was fascinated by the role music played in permitting transcendence from the rigors of everyday life. The idea of using Simple Gifts became the means of expressing the celebratory way in which music could reflect the release from tremendously complex and often overwhelming struggles and worries that are inherent in every individual?s life. The intent of the music selected is to suggest both the struggles and the solutions to these eternal issues. The titles of the compositions often suggest a religious context, but that is not the reason for their inclusion. The works have been selected to suggest that any simplicity in life can only be realized through the working through and conquering of its many and varied inherent complexities. Folk music and originally composed can and often does provide available, intuitive and expressive vehicles to assist us as unique individuals who are traveling on life?s journeys. Simple Gifts are a necessity for our complex world.