Promised Land (Advanced Voicing)

Matilda Durham (1815-1901) was an American composer and music teacher. She may be the first woman to publish music in the United States, with the hymn “Promised Land” (1835, Southern Harmony). Durham’s musical style is characteristic of shape-note hymnody. There are abundant parallelisms, open fifths, and a rugged, determined rhythmic energy. The melodies are in the middle voice (tenor), which contributes to the idiomatic sound.

One interesting note about “Promised Land” is that Durham originally wrote it in F# minor. The hymn existed in this minor tonality for about eighty years before it was changed to F major. It is plausible that organists and editors found it easierb to perform and engrave by simply removing the sharps and adding a B . As far as I can tell the tune is exclusively published in a major key today. It is my opinion that something is lost in F major. The intensity, color, and fervent “casting a wishful eye” is replaced with the bland contentment of F. The difficult struggle towards the “promised land” of Canaan is abandoned as though we have already arrived at the “happy land.”

Jennifer Lucy Cook’s arrangement ameliorates this problem by returning Durham’s tune to a minor key. She also elevates the musical source material to a new level of choral artistry, bringing Durham’s compositions to new audiences.

Performance suggestion: Similar to Dufay’s L’Homme Arme Mass, one effective way to perform this work is to sing through the tune once, then begin the arrangement.

-Jonathan Campbell