By Daniel Hathaway
Ross Duffin and the twenty voices of Quire Cleveland turned their attention to nearly three hundred years of American music on Sunday afternoon at Historic St. Peter Church in downtown Cleveland, visiting some well-known tunes in lesser-known packaging and dusting the cobwebs off some fine music that deserves to come down out of the attic and be heard once again.
Duffin led off with his own four-part arrangement of The Star-Spangled Banner, probably the first time most members of the audience had heard — or even been aware of — all four of its stanzas. The arrangement was artful even if some of Francis Scott Key’s verse is overwrought (and lines like Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution challenged the normally admirable diction of the group).
The antebellum first half of the program included stern Puritan psalms from The Bay Psalm Book nicely softened and varied by Duffin’s arrangements, a set by William Billings and his circle that included the well-known round, When Jesus wept, and I am the Rose of Sharon, plus two amusing choruses about music-making, Daniel Read’s Down steers the bass, and Billings’s Modern Music. [Read more…]
CWRU music professor Ross W. Duffin has made his name as a scholar in several fields, among them, fifteenth-century Franco-Flemish music, English music of the Jacobean period and the study of historical tuning systems. 
