I’m ending the last weekday of the Jewish High Holy Days with the final movement of Bernstein‘s Chichester Psalms. You can read about the piece and hear the first movement here. The second movement is famous for a beautiful solo sung by a young boy, singing the popular text “The Lord is my shepherd …”; this serene solo is contrasted by a choral “why do the nations rage …”.

The final movement, however, is my favorite. It opens and closes with music identical to what you hear in the beginning of the first movement, making this a cyclic piece (that’s a fancypants word that just means that musical material you’ve heard before comes back in a different movement or section, solidifying the multi-movement work as a “complete thought” as opposed a separate ideas pasted together for the sake of making a concert. The most famous example of this is the lover’s theme of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.) But after the angular melodic opening (it uses quartal harmony – harmony based on a wider interval (a fourth) as opposed to thirds (the longstanding standard)), the music melts into a gentle swaying lullaby. The meter is 5/4 – five beats per measure; this is also out of the ordinary, but Bernstein succeeds in making it feel completely natural. It also helps prevent the lullaby from falling into a “too-much-of-the-same-rhythm-seasickness”. The melody is deceptively difficult to sing; the close chromatic notes are hard to keep in tune.

After the lullaby, the cyclical quartal melody returns, but soft and sweet, with a feeling of gemütlichkeit. It’s almost like a mother rocking her baby to sleep, and as she puts it down in the cradle, she whispers the words of the psalm, “how good and pleasant it is …”