More than 100 choral voices, 45 instrumentalists and soprano and baritone soloists will perform in the "Study War No More" program. (Submitted photo)
In ‘Study War No More,’ World House Choir pleas for peace
- Published: November 11, 2026
At a rehearsal on the eve of the midterm election, the World House Choir sang out the words of Walt Whitman’s evocation of oncoming battle: “Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!” War arrives in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ cantata “Dona Nobis Pacem” as it does in Whitman’s poem: “Through the windows — through the doors — burst like a ruthless force.”
Ninety years after Vaughan Williams wrote the cantata, the World House Choir will join the Yellow Springs Community Chorus and Orchestra to perform it as part of “Study War No More,” a program of music that yearns for peace, Friday–Sunday, Nov. 13–15.
World House Choir Director Catherine Roma will conduct three shorter works that open the concert, then join the choir’s tenor section for the cantata, which James Johnston will conduct. More than 100 choral voices, 45 instrumentalists and soprano and baritone soloists will perform the work. The words to Vaughan Williams’ cantata will be projected behind the singers.
Vaughan Williams wrote “Dona Nobis Pacem” — Latin for “grant us peace” — in 1936 as Europe, still looking behind at one World War, headed toward the precipice of a second. The composer drew on the Latin Mass and scripture, three poems by Walt Whitman and an 1855 speech by British parliamentarian John Bright, each text bringing a different kind of witness to the piece.
The cantata’s opening notes are almost eerie, with a soprano soloist singing out in otherworldly tones: “Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem” — “Lamb of God, you who take away the sins of the world, grant us peace.” The soprano’s plea is joined by a growing swell of choral voices that unfold into foreboding tones, like a great ominous wave; the brass and percussion break through to whip the piece into the militaristic fury of Whitman’s “Beat! Beat! Drums!” — bombastic, discordant.
The cantata’s score sweeps in and out of meditation and ululation, cinematic in its big, emotional swings. Ellen Bierhorst, a tenor who has sung with the choir for several years, said the piece sounds different from many of the pieces that the choir has sung in recent years, and it took a little while to grow on her.
“It was dissonant, it was weird; I couldn’t get it spiritually,” Bierhorst said. “Now? It thrills me.”
After Whitman’s drums and bugles, the cantata gives way to soft, mournful strings as the piece moves to its third section, Whitman’s “Reconciliation,” sung by a lone baritone: “Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, that the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly, wash again and ever again this soiled world.”
The drums return to accompany Whitman’s “Dirge for Two Veterans,” keeping time for a funeral procession for “two veterans, son and father, dropped together, And the double grave awaits them;” solemn winds and strings, resigned percussion swell and burst alternately between triumph and mourning.
Kana Wisniewski told the News she moved to the Miami Valley from Iowa in July, when she started medical school at Wright State University. Wisniewski said she had previously worked in Iowa with Mary Cohen, a friend of Roma’s who, like the World House Choir director, has led choirs of incarcerated singers in prisons. It was that connection that led Wisniewski to the World House Choir this year.
Wisniewski said she hears in the cantata’s tones something that matches the words, and that she’s struck by how easily the piece can speak to people singing it some nine decades later.
“That’s what’s crazy to me,” Wisniewski said of the work’s continued relevance. “We were asking for peace then. We’re still asking for peace now.”
Roma first conducted the cantata about 35 years ago, around the time of the Gulf War, and returned to it in 2003, as the United States was moving toward war in Iraq. Both times, she conducted her church choir at St. John’s Unitarian Universalist in Cincinnati, with strings, percussion and piano.
She said she was already thinking about bringing the piece to the World House Choir at the beginning of this year, as singers were rehearsing for a spring tribute to Roma’s mentor, longtime musician and activist, the late Bernice Johnson Reagon. She agreed with Wisniewski that “Dona Nobis Pacem” is evergreen in its relevance, but feels that the current time is particularly ripe.
“I started thinking about war, and I wanted to address it somehow,” she said. “I just wanted it to congeal around peacemaking and the carnage of war, depicted in arts.”
The cantata’s old texts have acquired new associations for Roma in the years since she first conducted them; she said a portion of John Bright’s speech’s, given to speak out against a mid-19th-century Britain’s burgeoning involvement in the Crimean War, is particularly resonant, with Crimea again bound up as the site of conflict. In the cantata, a baritone sings out Bright’s words, which invoke the Passover story: “The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.”
After 35 years, Roma said the circumstance in which the singers raise their voices has shifted since first conducting the piece; she sees the Trump administration’s actions involving the Kennedy Center and arts funding as part of an effort to suppress creative expression, including protest — historically a tactic of fascist governments.
“I feel differently now, simply because of the time, that this singing is an act of resistance,” she said.
Roma also noted that “Dona Nobis Pacem” draws heavily on the words of men — thus, in choosing the pieces that precede it, she wanted “to get the women’s voices out, the women’s perception.” The concert opens with “Mother’s Prayer,” by Canadian songwriter Connie Kaldor, who asks if those who peddle and trade in war “have no babies to hold?” Kaldor writes:
And I feel tied to every mother that I see
I can’t watch the war reports on TV
And if I had all the money in this world
I’d buy every gun and throw it into the sea
Kaldor’s song is followed by “The Great Peace March,” a work of musician and activist Holly Near, who spoke and performed at the Foundry last month. The third piece is “Down by the Riverside,” the African American spiritual sung during the civil rights movement, in an arrangement by Rosephanye Powell. The spiritual gives the program its title and puts plainly a promise that will come back near the end of the cantata — that the singer will “lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside and study war no more.” In the words from Isaiah that Vaughan Williams gives the choir, “Nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Roma said she remembers the worldwide protests against the Iraq War in 2003 and the way that momentum ebbed in the years that followed. She said she thinks about the people who have kept working for peace across generations, even when the work seems to bring them back to where they started.
“We’re standing on the shoulders of people who have gone before in the movements for peace and for justice,” she said.
By the end of the cantata, the music has arrived at a major key. Strings, winds, percussion and voices turn jubilant, resolute. The choir’s voices repeat, over and over, a prayer: “good-will toward men.” The instruments fall away. The soprano, with the choir behind her, rings out a clear-voiced plea, as she did at the song’s opening: “Dona nobis pacem.” Grant us peace.
“Study War No More” will be performed Friday and Saturday, Nov. 13 and 14, at 7 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 15, at 4 p.m., in the Foundry Theater at Antioch College. Admission is free; donations are welcomed.
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