How does one sing Bach?

Probably apocryphal, but nonetheless interesting:  at the height of his career, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was asked by a young singer, “What must I do to learn to sing like you?”  To which the baritone replied, “Sing Bach.”  We revere Fischer-Dieskau for his magisterial performances of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Wolf; but he sang a lot of Bach, as well, and has left us many recordings of his artistry.  His Bach impresses mightily, even with the changes in performance practice since the height of his career. How so?

Voice:  Fischer-Dieskau's’s voice is clear, focused, vibrant and slender, with a flexible, easily controlled vibrato.  It is not large, but he covers a broad pitch range, with adequate control of volume at both the top and the bottom.  His mesa di voce (ability to pass through the entire spectrum of volume and color on any pitch, without breaks or hitches) allows him to make the most of what he has, in terms of expressiveness.   His coloratura, as well, is flexible and clear, and capable of moving along evenly at lightning speeds.

Ear: Fischer-Dieskau has very good intonation— no matter the difficulty of written intervals or the speed at which they must be executed, his basic pitches are very clear.  He is aware of slight variations relative to tuning systems, adjusts to accompanying instruments, and, even up to the end of his career, was wonderfully reliable.

Brain:  High intelligence is not always a characteristic of singers, but Fischer-Dieskau is far smarter than your average bear.  One can hear in his singing that he understands musical structure, large- and small-scale; that he knows how to build intensity through tempo, vocal color, articulation, and dynamic change; and he clearly has a long-range, architectonic vision, not only of individual phrases, but of movements and of multiple-movement works.  As well, he understands and pronounces languages accurately and with a poet’s sensibility, and his poetic sense is matched by a corresponding sense of vocal line and color.

Fischer-Dieskau is on my mind because one of my ensembles is working on Winterreise, and we use his recording with Gerald Moore as a reference.  I finding myself telling the singers, when they get into trouble, “Just do it like Fischer-Dieskau does it.  Of course it is difficult and challenging, but it can be done; listen to how he does it.”  And last week I found myself saying the same thing in Chorale rehearsal.

Those who are not so crazy about Fischer-Dieskau complain that the voice, though well used, just doesn’t amount to much.  They also find his approach rather cool and cerebral, too carefully planned rather than passionate and compelling.  They would prefer more spontaneity, more risk, and more flamboyance.  One might say they want a different balance between singer and composer-- they like a singer for whom the music is a vehicle, rather than a singer who commits himself to serving the composer’s larger musical and intellectual vision.  One never fails to sense Fischer-Dieskau's complete commitment to the materials--music and poetry-- on the page.  If those materials are intrinsically demanding and transcendent, one can be sure that Fischer-Dieskau is doing his best to bring them alive for the listener

I think there is never any doubt that Bach himself is at the center of any performance of his music-- and his music is very difficult to perform.  One admires performers of Bach for their ability to get close to Bach, rather than for their personal traits and idiosyncrasies.  Bach requires the skills and characteristics Fischer-Dieskau exemplifies—and he requires that those skills and characteristics be completed devoted to accomplishing the difficult tasks he proposes.   One frequently hears Bach’s vocal music referred to as “instrumental” in nature, but I would disagree with this;  I find it, rather, just to be terribly demanding, and difficult to pull off convincingly.  Bach sets a bar which singers despair of reaching.  One really must set a Fisher-Dieskau-like standard for oneself—which brings us back to F-D’s original statement:  “Sing Bach.”  If one can learn to do an adequate job of it, one is ready for nearly anything.

Why did Bach, a Lutheran, compose a mass?

I attended a small Lutheran college.  My freshman choir sang 4-5 movements of the Mass in B Minor, and at some point during the rehearsal period this question occurred to me, and would not let go:  Masses are Catholic; why did Bach compose one?  Like many of my fellow college students, I grew up in a fairly segregated atmosphere;  most Catholics lived on one side of town and attended Catholic school.  The rest of us, primarily Lutherans, attended public school.  The two groups were not, strictly speaking, enemies, but on fundamental matters we did not have much to do with one another.  I never set foot in the Catholic church; we stayed clear of masses, along with priests and nuns and the Virgin Mary.  I assumed no kinship between what we Lutherans did on Sunday, and what the Catholics did.  Bach was a Lutheran—he was “ours,” and we claimed him, though we knew little about him beyond the chorale harmonizations we sang from the Lutheran hymnal.  College courses in religion and music history broadened my knowledge of the mass as a liturgical structure and as the basis for extended musical form, but my viewpoint remained pretty parochial.  Not until I moved to Chicago for graduate school did I begin to understand that the Lutheranism I knew bore only a faint resemblance to that practiced in Bach’s time.

Lutherans continue to claim Bach—some refer to him as the “fifth evangelist”— and others stress a symbolic father-son relationship between him and Martin Luther:  Luther clarified the faith, and Bach set it to music.  The Golomb dissertation to which I referred a few weeks ago even posits a “Lutheran” approach to the interpretation and performance of Bach’s music.

By all accounts, Bach was deeply religious.  Although his professional responsibilities throughout his life included obligations to secular as well as religious authorities, and his surviving compositions reflect this career duality, the evidence reflected in his letters, in his professional trajectory, and in the very nature of his activities in liturgical composition and performance leave little reason to doubt his fundamental piety and spirituality. There is little doubt, as well, that he was thoroughly Lutheran in his theology.  But Lutheranism as Bach experienced it was more than theology—it was the state church, a source of power and preferment, and it shared a good deal of space with secular authority.  When Bach compiled the first half of his mass—called the Missa, it consisted of the Kyrie and Gloria sections of the Ordinary— he was not only working comfortably within the traditions of the Lutheran Church (which continued, post-Reformation, to refer to the Eucharist as the “mass”), he was also seeking advancement from the court at Dresden, to whom he presented his Missa as a gift, in 1733.  This limited (but complete) work, approximately one-half as long as the completed Mass in B Minor, did indeed receive a liturgical performance by the Dresden kapelle, and ultimately won for Bach the worldly preferment and protection he was seeking.

The larger question about Bach’s purpose is reflected in his “completion” of the Mass in the last years of his life.  He in some respects pulled back from the day to day responsibilities of his position in Leipzig, and put his energy into the completion of major, somewhat theoretical works: Musical Offering, The Art of Fugue, and Mass in B Minor. In these works, he seems intent not only on establishing his own legacy, but in creating a veritable encyclopedia of western European musical styles, forms, and procedures.

It seems clear that Bach never intended his Mass for liturgical use—clocking in at two hours without a break, it is simply too long.  Rather, it appears to be what Bach scholar Christoff Wolff calls the summa summarum of Bach’s artistry.  Wolff goes on to say, “We know of no occasion for which Bach could have written the B-minor Mass, nor any patron who might have commissioned it, nor any performance of the complete work before 1750.  Thus, Bach’s last choral composition is in many respects the vocal counterpart to The Art of Fugue, the other side of the composer’s musical legacy.  Like no other work of Bach’s, the B-minor Mass represents a summary of his writing for voice, not only in its variety of styles, compositional devices, and range of sonorities, but also in its high level of technical polish. “

Performances of the work reflect not only our perceptions of Bach’s beliefs and intentions, but our personal entry to the work.  The first complete productions of the Mass, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, stressed its magisterial qualities—depicting Bach as an extraordinary man who communed with God on a level beyond human emotion and expression.  Near-universal acceptance and practice of the Christian faith, which influenced all thought and politics of Bach’s time, still held a great deal of sway 100 years later.  Bach was seen as an almost sacred prototype for the heroic figure later realized in Beethoven— the first complete performance of the Mass, in 1859, was actually inspired by the success of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.  Many modern performances stress, instead, Bach’s humanity, his imperfection, his kinship with musical tastes and procedures of his own time.  This latter approach has invited participation by musicians who do not profess any religious creed, yet find the work to be universally compelling and uplifting. I suspect the Mass may be the most comprehensive, unifying work by any composer— Bach’s attempt to depict the universality behind both his private spirituality and the religious expression of his time.  Albert Schweitzer described the work as one in which the sublime and intimate co-exist side by side, as do the Catholic and Protestant elements, all being as enigmatic and unfathomable as the religious consciousness of the work’s creator.

Behind/beyond the B minor score

A first glance at a good Bach edition reveals time signatures, clefs, and a lot of notes—little else.  No color words; no tempo indications; no dynamic markings; no crescendos, decrescendos, ritardandos, accelerandos; very little to delineate phrase, articulation, emotional content; almost no ornamentation. Bach, like his contemporaries, depended upon training, convention, habit, shared tradition, to fill in these aspects of performance practice; he neither composed, nor copied out his scores, with the thought that musicians 250 years later would wonder about his intentions.  Modern musicians, if they wish to perform Bach’s music artfully and accurately, have to rely upon a kind of musical archaeology to build a backstory, upon which to base a convincing interpretation.

As a case in point, let us consider the Et resurrexit movement, #6 of the Symbolum Nicenum section of the Mass in B minor.  We see a ¾ time signature, which implies three quarter notes (six eighth notes) per bar [1 & 2 & 3 &]; we see tutti orchestra, including three trumpets and timpani, implying a forte dynamic; we see the “Et resurrexit” text, which in the context is likely to imply a brisk, upbeat tempo and mood; and the instruments have staccato marks in bar 2 (only), suggesting a light articulation (the singers have no marks). Beyond this, we make sense of Bach’s difficult, complicated music on our own.   And I have experienced, myself, performances in which players, singers, and conductors simply do their best to get through what they see on the page, heave a sigh of relief when they reach the end, and hope it is followed by something a little slower and simpler.

Singers have information instrumentalists don’t have:  they have words.  And it has been through my own attempt to sing these words with accurate accentuation, that I have come to question the interpretation, or non–interpretation, I describe above.   Two text phrases in particular have long intrigued me:  “Et resurrexit” itself, and “cujus regni non erit finis.”  Both first occur at identical, expository points in the music, with identical rhythmic placement , i.e. [1/&/2/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit //fin/-i/ni/-is/3/&].  This always bothered me-- the natural word accents would fit much better if these identical 3-bar passages were performed in a 6/8 meter [1 & &/cu/-u/jus // re/-e/gni/non/e/rit // fi/-i/ni/-is/&/&].  Looks complicated here—sorry I don’t have the technology to diagram this more clearly; the patterns sound straightforward enough when spoken or sung.  A background in singing late renaissance and early baroque secular music leads me, through the inherent accentuation of the words, to expect, and look for, some alternation of the two meters, 3/4 and 6/8—and sure enough, the score abounds in instances of this.  One recognizes the characteristic rhythmic pattern of the Courante, a popular courtly dance of the period, and one which figures prominently in secular suites, by Bach and others.

An hour with Google yields the following:

“Courante was a court dance popular in Europe from about 1600 to 1800. In a stylized form, its music was usually the second movement of the Baroque suite. It was danced by couples using small springing or gliding steps. The musical form had two types: the Italian corrente was in fast triple metre, with quick running figures in a texture of accompanied melody; the slower French courante was conrtrapuntal in style, with shifts between 3|2 and 6|4 metre.”  (Word IQ.com)

“The “Et resurrexit” displays some of the characteristics of the Courante with its triple meter often bisected by a division of the bar into two groups of three quavers.  …probably began life in the context of secular cantatas, in which dance forms are particularly idiomatic.

“Bach used all the most basic devices of his age—the dance form, the ritornello form, tonal development, voice-leading—but combined them in such a fashion that it is often impossible to decide which has precedence at any one point.  There is clearly the overriding flavour of a dance, but at no point is a single dance form heard in its entirety. “  (John Butt, Bach: Mass in B Minor)

And much, much more.  Google is great.

These comments, and many more, reflect a constantly evolving tradition regarding the sources, and performance practice, of Bach’s works.   Performers, facing the score with which Bach himself provides us, cannot afford to neglect this tradition, and simply trust that the innate power of the music, as well as our own imagination and energy, will carry us along.  Countless listeners, musicians, scholars, hover about us, a cloud of witnesses to our particular attempts to bring this score to life.    We have to make choices, impose our own preferences, to produce coherent interpretations;  but we owe it to this tradition, to make informed choices.

What others do with the B Minor Mass

I spent much of the past week reading a dissertation related to Chorale’s current B minor Mass project: Expression and Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception--An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record, by Uri Golomb, King’s College, Cambridge, 2004. This has been an informative, entertaining read for me—I have sung Bach’s music under several of the conductors Golomb discusses, including Helmuth Rilling, August Wenzinger, Robert Shaw, Georg Solti, and Peter Schreier; and I have listened closely to recordings by several more of them, including Philippe Herreweghe, Nicholas Harnoncourt, Gustave Leonhardt, Joshua Rifkin, and John Eliot Gardiner. Golomb systematically categorizes these conductors, and many others, by date of performance (he covers recordings 1950-2000); by ensemble type and size (from the grand symphonic interpretations of Von Karajan, Solti, and Klemperer, to the one-on-a-part performances by Rifkin and Andrew Parrot); by historic vs. modern instruments; by interpretive style (romantic, “Lutheran,” Historically Informed [HIP], and a few others). He also compares the various conductors and ensembles in their versions of specific movements-- describes them according to chorus type (and under that heading, discusses the use of contrast between concertists and ripienists—soloists and tutti chortus—in choral movements), intensity, structure of dynamics, verbal and musical rhetoric, degree and type of articulation, tempo—you name it; this is an exhaustive document. One is amazed when, in his concluding chapter, he suggests that he has only scratched the surface, and identifies further areas of study.

Golomb does see a general trajectory—from a Romantic, 19th century approach, through the radically reduced textures and “lightweight,” human-scale procedures of the HIP movement, and into the recent return to a more personal, expressive, dramatic, even neo-romantic style, within the context of HIP techniques and timbres. So broad-based a study is able to include, and account for, many idiosyncrasies and disparities along the way; and, just as interesting, Golomb compares what the various conductors, themselves, write and say, with the often contradictory evidence presented on their recordings. I am particularly interested in what Helmuth Rilling has written, and said in interviews with the author: I have sung the Mass several times with Rilling in the past sixteen years, and have experienced firsthand the stylistic evolution Golomb describes in just this one conductor. I also sang a good deal under August Wenzinger, a pioneer in the HIP movement, at the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute in the seventies and eighties, when the “light-weight” HIP movement was at its zenith, and heard conversations and arguments among my fellow-participants about Wenzinger’s “old-fashioned,” Romantic approach.

An important question the author and his subjects deal with, is—what is Bach's intent in composing the B minor Mass? And what should be the intent of modern performances of it? Is it actually a single work, or is it four separate works, never intended to be performed as a unit? Is it, and should it be, music for Lutheran worship, which Lutherans will instinctively understand better than others-- or is it music with universal appeal and meaning? And another, important question Golomb only hints at, but which permeates his study-- how should performers themselves feel about this music? Do we approach it is an immense mathematical problem, as a collection of historical styles and procedures, or as an emotionally and spiritually compelling journey? Do we commune with God—or with a human and imperfect Bach? Is this a work of such scope that it should be undertaken only by skilled professionals, or does it lend itself to valid performance by amateur forces?

I find the content of this dissertation to be not only informative, but also liberating-- if the most thoughtful and skilled musicians of our time differ so in their approaches to this work, then Chicago Chorale and I, with study, respect, and hard work, can stake out our own territory, our own approach, and be in good company. When, as a singer, I first moved from the Wenzinger approach to the Shaw approach, and then to the Rilling approach, I thought my head would split in pieces—Who was right? Where did my loyalties lie? How could I reconcile the differences I perceived, and not be ridiculed by adherents to one approach or another? My goal, as singer and conductor, has always been to serve the music as best I could—but each of these conductors has claimed that same goal, while also claiming a superior personal position. I have never had the nerve, or the ego strength, to maintain, “This is the way it has to be. God or my superior instincts came to me in a dream and told me I was right.” I rely on tradition, the best teachers I can find—and then, finally, on whatever it is that made me choose to be a musician, and remain one. Bach is a good partner in this venture-- his music is so rich, so many-faceted, it has room for just about anyone. On April 3, you will hear what I—and Chorale—are able to do with this stupendous work, this time around.

Luther College Choir concert

The Luther College Choir performed last night at Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church, the third stop on their 10-concert winter tour. This is their first tour under a new conductor, Allen Hightower; alums, parents, and general choral enthusiasts in the audience had their ears turned up full throttle, to hear how he would do. Even the choir’s conductor emeritus, Weston Noble, who had led the group for fifty-four years, and had established it as one of America’s leading collegiate choral ensembles, was in attendance. A high-pressure situation for Hightower and his choir—to which he, and they, responded beautifully.

Full disclosure: I graduated from Luther myself, and taught there for three years; I know a lot about their choral program, and am inclined to admire them. That said, I have heard, and sung with, many fine ensembles since leaving Luther, and have a broader base for comparison and criticism than I once had. I expect to feel somewhat patronizing when I listen to what I assume to be naïve, sincere college students from small towns throughout the upper Midwest, singing their hearts out for lots of extra-musical reasons. I was/am one of them, and recognize the type. Then I hear them, and am struck anew with admiration, at their level of singer-for-singer individual talent, at their skill and discipline, at their commitment to creating a unified sound and approach in their music. As a unit, the choir is wonderfully balanced, top to bottom; section by section, their sound is clean, refined, rock-solid in intonation and rhythmic clarity. And their repertoire is of a higher level than one usually hears in a college choir, especially one which reflects an Evangelical religious heritage (in this case, Lutheran)—they sang Britten, Brahms, Bruckner, Gibbons, Howells, Mendelssohn, Tallis, and several other composers, with clear lines, expressively shaped text, stylistic awareness, and straightforward confidence.

Choirs like this don’t just happen. To speak of Luther and its closest peer institutions: the Norwegian immigrants who came to the United states brought a strong tradition of choral singing with them, and developed it, in their colleges, churches, and communities, as a reflection of ethnic and religious pride and identity. It was something they could do better than their neighbors, something that put them on the map, something that tied their new home to the home they had left. Every little country church and country school district had its choral program; and those singers fortunate enough to attend college tended to gravitate toward colleges founded by Norwegian Lutherans—St. Olaf, Luther, Concordia-Moorhead, Augsburg. The colleges, on their part, soon discovered that this choral emphasis was extremely important in establishing a positive public identity, in recruiting students, energizing their constituency, and raising money, and placed a very special emphasis on their choral programs. Early on, the habits of extensive rehearsal (Luther rehearses five days a week, and three hours a day during the month preceding their tour), memorized repertoire, and remarkable adherence to the guidelines and disciplines demanded by conductors, became habitual. And as these colleges have become mainstream, their choral programs have not lost these basic characteristics. Each school also has an extensive music education program, which sends graduates into the field, to prepare the next generation of singers for its choirs. And where do these singers go after they graduate from college? Many, back to small towns; many to Minneapolis and Saint Paul, which have become virtual meccas of choral music.

Nothing can replace the habit of singing well, and being surrounded by good singing, from an early age. The skills of listening, reading, producing clear tone, expressing emotion with ones body, fitting ones voice to the voices that surround one—this fluency reflects a lifetime of exposure and experience. The concert I heard Saturday was almost breathtaking in its presentation of the level to which relatively normal people can aspire, if they are carefully nurtured in the skills and spirit ,which let music thrive. As I age, I become ever more grateful to have grown up in that world, which has made my world, since, possible.

Mass in B minor and Winterreise

Both ensembles I conduct are preparing major works: Chorale presents the Bach Mass in B minor April 3, while Chicago Men’s A Cappella is learning selections from Schubert’s Winterreise for a March 11 concert. The two works occupy similar positions in the canon of Western art music-- each at the pinnacle of its respective genre; and they occupy these positions because of the all-encompassing nature of each composer’s achievement. Though I have prepared and presented each work several times in the past, I have never prepared them simultaneously; and they compete constantly for my total involvement, heart and soul.

Bach effectively spent his entire career composing Mass in B minor-- it consists of complete movements, and fragments, from throughout his compositional life, recomposed, reworded, reconfigured, stitched together with newly composed music -- Bach scholar Christoph Wolff calls the mass a “specimen book,” a collection of examples of genres and techniques which covers not only Bach's personal history, but the history of Western music. In the process of compiling this music, Bach seems intent on summing up what he has learned, and what he believes his successors should learn. The Sanctus was first performed in 1724; movement 4 of the Credo, Et incarnatus est, is though to be the last music he composed, dictated to an assistant because Bach himself was blind, in 1750; the rest of the music reflects the experience of the intervening 26 years.

Winterreise occupies a similarly late position in Schubert’s tragically short career-- he corrected the proofs of Part II on his deathbed, in 1828. In all, Schubert composed over 600 songs; one presumes he had learned a great deal by the time he got to Winterreise, not only about composing single songs, but about planning and compiling cycles, and that Winterreise, like Bach’s Mass in B Minor, is a compendium of what the composer knew about his craft. Certainly, performers, composers, and critics since Schubert’s time have regarded this song cycle with the same sort of awe and reverence that Bach’s work inspires.

Performers and audiences alike are confronted with the daunting task of unpacking these works-- James Joyce said, “One needs my education to understand my books,” and a similar problem confronts the musician who dares approaches Bach and Schubert. But both works are so much more than the sum of their erudition, skill, and historical references. One sets aside a well-written textbook for another day; one lives and breathes Bach and Schubert—they take over, inside and out, waking and sleeping. Such is the creative, emotional, spiritual energy of these composers, I often feel like Jacob, wrestling all night with two angels—they don’t let go, and neither do I.

I read somewhere that Bach shows us what it means to be God, Mozart shows us what it means to be human, and Beethoven shows us what it means to be Beethoven; I agree with the Bach part, at least, and I put Schubert right there with him. Beyond the notes, the rhythms, the historically informed performance practices, one experiences these works as living beings, as manifestations of God in the world—and though they disturb me and rob me of my rest, they also demonstrate that we humans are better than we think we are, and convince me that it is always worth it to keep moving ahead, not just out of habit, but because we, like Bach and Schubert, are capable of holy things.

Kyrie eleison– Lord have mercy

A typical Bach score is black with notes. Harmonies outlined in the basso continuo rarely rest, and the pitches above them change constantly to keep up. Performers become accustomed to this-- one is always on the move, aiming for the next harmonic arrival point, then taking off again once it is reached. The overall effect is—page after page of notes, thousands of them; how does one organize them? Where does one begin in breaking them down into comprehensible groupings, in assigning emphasis, ebb and flow, in such a way that they all make sense, all get heard, all matter and contribute positively, without just canceling one another out in a cloud of sound? The first movement of the Mass in B Minor, Kyrie I, immediately plunges us into this “Bach problem.” After a 4-bar, homophonic introduction, the movement unfolds in thirteen independent musical lines, in addition to the continuo line. We singers aren’t accustomed to thinking much about instrumental lines-- we see five vocal lines, and figure our job is to make sense of those; it surprises us to learn that the instruments do more than just accompany us, and have their own, independent lines, weaving in and out of what we are doing. Fundamentally, there is no hierarchy; each line contributes equally to Bach’s structure and texture. We need to find hierarchy within our own lines—periods of higher energy, balanced with periods of relaxation; figures which require pointed, staccato or marcato emphasis, and figures with require legato; passages of a more soloistic character, and passages of background accompaniment. If we don’t find hierarchy within our own parts, relative to the rest of what is going on, we end up sound like a beehive on a warm day, lots and lots of buzzing.

A Chorale member mentioned that he had sung the B Minor with a college group, about sixteen years ago. Quoting him as nearly as I remember; “We just tried to sing the notes; we never did anything with all this articulation stuff.” I know what he is talking about: Chorale has worked through ten (out of sixteen) choral movements in the past two weeks, and even with a high percentage of singers who have previously performed the work, we struggle to find pitches and rhythms; vocal quality, articulation, phrasing, would be complete non-starters, were I not constantly stopping to point them out and work on them. It is not much help that our Bärenreiter piano-vocal scores are “clean”—they include very little that Bach himself did not notate in his own scores, and Bach did not customarily notate much in the vocal lines. The instrumental lines are fairly marked up, following Bach’s own score and parts, and many of these marks have been transferred to the piano reduction in the singers’ scores—but singers are not prone to look down to the piano line: following their own line is about all they accomplish at this point. So we transfer the markings to the vocal parts in rehearsal, and then rehearse characteristic phrase articulations, ornaments, etc.; we also listen to recorded examples, which I bring to rehearsal (we work with recordings by Gardiner, Herreweghe, and Rilling). In last week’s rehearsal we accidentally played the opening of Kyrie I excerpted from a recording by Robert Shaw—and it clearly was not what we were after; everyone in the choir immediately realized this. That in itself was a victory—we grasp the direction in which we are headed.

Taken by themselves, these articulations can seem pretty mechanical and not awfully graceful; they have to be performed with understanding and within the context of the vocal line, and this is extremely difficult-- Bach demands a great deal. I see and hear from the singers a certain satisfaction when they feel they have “got it down”—and at that point I realize how very far we have to go, to internalize these gestures and allow them to mean something, rather than just perform them mechanically. They have to flow; they have to alter in emphasis and adjust to the volume, the surrounding parts, the intensity of individual passages; and this requires far more than mechanical competence and repetition. But the mechanical accomplishment is a good first step; the rest will follow as the singers become more and more immersed in the music and it’s meaning, in the weeks to come.

Into the Bach B minor

Chorale has embarked on its arduous journey through Bach’s B Minor Mass. Our concert will take place at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel on April 3; that gives us fourteen formal rehearsals (plus fourteen weeks of each singer’s private time) to learn, or relearn, many thousands of notes, to get them into our voices and into our ensemble sound, and to reach some understanding, for this go round at least, of the way in which the work hangs together, from beginning to end. This is not a light undertaking; the ensemble does not exist, that is not challenged to its furthest limits, in coming to some accommodation with Bach’s intent, and his means of getting there. No group, no conductor, accomplishes the ultimate interpretation or performance-- there is no one right answer, or even set of answers. I am reminded of the story about the elephant and the blind wise men: not a one of us can really know this elephant. Chorale has chosen to perform with an orchestra of period instruments—and this decision immediately erects some fences around our definition of the elephant. Period instruments play one-half step lower than modern instruments, which changes the timbre of the work, and alters the challenges for the singers. Period instruments are nowhere near as loud as the modern instruments to which our audiences, and our singers, are accustomed; they cannot sustain individual tones and phrases as modern instruments would, and must accomplish expression, articulation, and line, using different resources. Altogether, they make a far different sound, and have a far different impact, than modern instruments do. Chorale must bend toward the orchestra: the orchestra, even if it wished to, cannot bend toward us. Our volume must match theirs; our articulation, our phrasing, our coloratura, our tempos, even our vocalism, must lean in their direction, if we are to come up with a valid, unified performance. Along the way, we must constantly bear in mind that this is the sort of orchestra Bach had at his disposal—the “period” in question is his period. In committing ourselves to working with such an orchestra, we explore, by default, some version of Bach’s assumptions about vocal sound, and hope to discover aspects of the mass which would not be evident, which we might not consider, were we working with modern instruments. We do this as much for ourselves, for our own pleasure and edification, as we do it for our listeners.

This is not to say that I, or members of the choir, eschew performance of Bach’s music on modern instruments. Bach speaks as brilliantly through Glenn Gould as he does through Gustav Leonhart. The fact that Chorale utilizes women’s voices, rather than boys, immediately declares our accommodation to modern circumstances; and this is only the first entry on a list of things that would not have occurred to Bach. Modern players and singers, through the second half of the 20th century and now into the 21st, have learned a great deal about baroque style, affect, and articulation, which they adapt to modern instruments and vocal categories—and in many instances they are able to synthesize new and creative approaches to the performance of Bach’s music, which speak authentically to modern audiences.

Chorale wants to do more than present a concert. We want to take a journey. Some of the singers, who have not previously sung the work, will spend the next fourteen weeks in survival mode, just trying to stay on the trail; others, who have sung it before, will be freer to look at the scenery, freer to enjoy the details and gasp in delight, rather than in fear, at the incredible features we will encounter along the way. My own greatest wish for the singers is that we all come to understand, through this experience, that the B Minor Mass is not only the best we humans can come up with, but that it is transcendingly good, and that we are a part of this transcendent goodness; that there is more to us, more to hope for and plan for and celebrate, than the brutality, the violence, the hatred, which we daily confront in one another. A human being, one of us, composed this monumental and life-transforming work; just knowing that, should make us better people.

Francis Poulenc: Salve Regina

Francis Poulenc’s motet, Salve Regina, is strikingly different from the rest of the music on our December concerts. The other composers clearly intend to do large things, and to make large impacts; Poulenc, like Schubert, best expresses himself through finely-wrought miniatures, in which each note carries a world of meaning. I have been interested to read that Poulenc studied Schubert’s Winterreise at an early age; I encounter similar challenges, and beauties, in singing the songs of the two composers— the music is more harmonically generated, than contrapuntal, and the melodies almost invariably dictate harmonic movement, with remarkable economy of materials.  And in this vocal music genre– both composers elucidate language with wonderful, unforced ease.

Poulenc has been described as “half monk, half delinquent” (”le moine et le voyou”), and much is written about manifestations of these aspects of his personality, in his musical composition. An important part of his story is his pilgrimage to the Black Virgin of Rocamadour in 1936, subsequent to the death of a close friend, which is said to have led to a rediscovery of the Roman Catholic faith in which he was raised. I think it would be a mistake to consider his life and personality, however, without giving major weight to the fact that he lived through two world wars. Certainly, his solo song output during the war years was extraordinarily influenced by what he and his nation, and his nation’s poets, were living through– the cycle Calligrammes, songs like C, settings of the poetry of Robert Desnos, reflect profound pain, suffering and loss. Poulenc did not live in any sort of bubble; he was aware of, and influenced by, the tragedies and sorrows of his world. I have to think that the growing assertiveness of the “monkish” side of his character, and the importance of religious music in his later compositional output, are, in addition to personal change,  manifestations of the seriousness that settled on the entire European and western world, consequent to the horrors of World War II.

Whatever the reasons– Poulenc turned toward sacred choral composition after 1936, and wrote some very good music—both small, exquisite works like Salve Regina, and larger, more ambitious pieces, like Mass in G, Gloria, and the opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites. They impress through their delicacy of feeling, their darkness and suggestion of nameless tragedy, as well as through their sensual beauty. One searches far and wide to find music of this period that comes even close to Poulenc’s, in sheer beauty of expression. I suspect the reason one doesn’t hear more of it, is, that it is just terribly difficult to pull off.

So—our Poulenc motet will last less than five minutes– but those will be a loaded five minutes.

Recording Sessions

Chorale’s arrangement with composer Stephen Paulus, guarantees us the exclusive right, for two years, to record the work we recently commissioned from him, And Give Us Peace. We want to get our recording out there, so that other choirs and conductors, interested in a new work by Paulus, can have a chance to hear it; but one motet does not a CD make, so we find ourselves planning a CD which will feature this work, along with others, both from this fall’s preparation period, and from last spring. We hope to have this new CD, with the working title “Os justi,” ready for distribution in April. Its theme is Advent, and it features the two principle characters of that season, John the Baptist and Mary, mother of Jesus. It will include Paulus’ work, the Vespers portion of Rautavaara’s Vigilia, Poulenc’s Salve Regina, Bruckner’s Os justi , Verdi’s Ave Maria, and Vox clamantis in deserto, by Clemens non Papa.

Following immediately on the heels of our performances this past weekend, we have spent two evenings, six hours in all, at Monastery of the Holy Cross, in Bridgeport, recording the Poulenc, Paulus, and Rautavaara portions of the CD. We stand, sixty strong, on the chancel steps, and sing to an empty, dark nave, while Mary Mazurek, Mark Travis, and Schuy Jewell, our recording team, huddle over their equipment in a small room off to the side, making magic. Mary has already placed the mic stands and mics, carefully measuring each quarter of an inch to be sure she gets just the right sound. The radiators don’t put out much heat– the monks take a vow of poverty, and we do too, while here; but this does not seem to affect our singing—if anything, intonation is better than it has been on warmer evenings. Now and then a truck rumbles by outside, bringing everything to a halt until the sound fades out; we are grateful this is not May, and that the Sox fans aren’t going crazy out on the street.

I review each movement’s issues before we begin on it– difficult individual notes, dicey intervals, pacing problems, pronunciation and vocal production questions. We sing each movement completely through, then work individual sections, frequently stopping for Mark to instruct us. He is kind but brutal—“Sopranos had a little trouble on bar 28; that might pass in a live performance, but not in a recording;” “Basses, you see a low note and just sort of sing low; the other sections need an actual pitch they can tune to;” “I know that high G is difficult, tenors, but it has to be part of the line that leads into it.” And so the hours pass, and we work through the designated repertoire. Our bass soloist, Wilbur Pauley, is in great form– the rich acoustic of the monastery chapel inspires him to longer phrases, fuller high notes. When his sections are done, Mark tells him, “I’ll call you and you can come in and sing a couple of low D’s for me, if we think these are too scratchy. Just kidding.”

Finally, at 10 p.m., the choir’s work is done. Mark brings the raw takes home and works on them; after the holiday, he and I will get together to review those he has selected, and choose those we agree on. He will then put everything together in rough form, I will review it for accuracy, and he will send it all to Mary, who will put the finishing touches on it and prepare a master disc. Meanwhile, Megan Balderston, Chorale’s managing director, will collect data for the insert; I will write liner notes; Jacob Karaca will negotiate ASCAP fees and get us an assigned number; our graphic artist, Arlene Josue, will design insert and packaging. All will be turned over to the replicator, who will turn it into finished, shrink-wrapped CDs, ready to be sold on line, at Seminary Co-op Bookstore, at our concerts, in the Monastery’s gift shop, and to Chorale’s members. It is a lot of work! But I have noticed over these years that the experience sharpens us, while the finished product pleases those who listen to and purchase the CDs.

Sisu and Chicago Chorale

“Sisu is a Finnish term loosely translated into English as strength of will, determination, perseverance, and acting rationally in the face of adversity. However, the word is widely considered to lack a proper translation into any language. Sisu has been described as being integral to understanding Finnish culture. The literal meaning is equivalent in English to "having guts", and the word derives from sisus, which means something inner or interior. However sisu is defined by a long-term element in it; it is not momentary courage but the ability to sustain an action against the odds. Deciding on a course of action and the sticking to that decision against repeated failures is sisu. It is similar to equanimity, except the forbearance of sisu has a grimmer quality of stress management than the latter.” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Our concerts are upon us. Though our Finnish work, Rautavaara’s Vigilia, is only half the concert, it has consumed more than its share of our time and energy, and it threatens to turn us toward the Finns, at least in terms of this definition. I suspect the work is not so difficult for Finns to sing, as it is for us: it is in their native language, after all, and is paced according to the cadences of that language. We Americans have had to drill the language a great deal, adjust our vocal production toward new sounds, and learn something about the rhythm of Finnish prose. We also have had to become accustomed to the character of Finnish Orthodox worship, at least insofar as it is represented in this piece-- and this is new to all of us. We have worked very hard; it has often felt as though we “decided on a course of action and stuck to that decision against repeated failures”-- sisu all the way.

Over the past months I have written frequently about the composers and pieces on this program; but I have not ventured much into the area of religious expression, except tangentially in the case of Poulenc. And religious expression is really what all these pieces are about-- each grows out of, and reflects, a distinctive tradition, and requires a distinctive approach from the choir. Rautavaara composes a work specifically for the Finnish Orthodox Church, and sharply differentiates it from the Russian church which planted the denomination in Finland-- claims instead descent from ancient Byzantine worship and practice, and interprets it for the present through original and compelling language which can only be described as “Finnish,” an entirely new and unfamiliar language to Chorale. Shchedrin, on the other hand, celebrates the far better known liturgical tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church, especially the musical-liturgical style which flowered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before being quashed by the revolution of 1917. Chorale has sung music of this genre in the past, notably the Rachmaninoff Vespers in 2009; we recognize the style, have worked with the Old Slavonic language—though it is by no means easy for us.

Poulenc’s motet reflects both the neo-classical, rational 20th century French tradition, and the voice of Roman Catholic worship—one hears in the background, the voices of monks chanting in Solesmes style. The relative facelessness of this music reminds one of the choral music fostered by the church in the 15th and 16th centuries-- it communicates on many levels, all of them brilliantly worked out, all of them understated. Paulus’ work, on the other hand, seems to spring from a genuinely American tradition – protestant, evangelical, somewhat theatrical, appealing primarily to the emotions.

I recall, from a college choral methods course, a statement by our teacher, Weston Noble, to the effect that a good choir develops its own voice; and that this voice, though it adapts to various periods and styles, tends to be constant and unmistakable. Perhaps Chorale has such a voice-- reflective of the voices and personalities we attract, reflective of the way I use and direct them. Not a bad thing. But we attempt, within the strictures of that voice, to interpret and reflect many composers, many styles; and we do that through conscientiously seeking to understand who the composers are, what they intend, and the languages in which they present themselves. There is a heck of a lot more to singing, then pear-shaped tones!

Takes a lot of sisu to put on a concert like this one.

December 5: Advent Vespers at Monastery of the Holy Cross

A chamber choir from Chorale, together with the brothers of the Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Cross, will present Vespers for the season of Advent, Sunday evening, December 5, at 5 p.m. Unlike many of the high-octane, celebratory Advent events which occur throughout the Chicago area during the pre-Christmas season (often in conjunction with an afternoon of shopping on Michigan Avenue), the liturgy celebrated by Chorale and the monks is quiet, contemplative, unrushed–- a series of readings interspersed with chanted psalms and choral polyphony appropriate to the readings. This season’s repertoire focuses on a particular historical period and location-- composers include Orlando di Lasso, Francisco Guerrero, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Tomas Luis de Victoria, all of whom were active in Western Europe during the second half of the 16th century. Orlando di Lasso, born in what is now Belgium, is the only Franco-Flemish composer of the group, though the influence of this school of composition is clear in the work of the other composers. After formative years spent as a singer in Italy, he eventually settled in Munich, where he remained until his death. He was a practitioner of the style known as Musica Reservata—roughly, music that involves intensely expressive setting of text, and chromaticism. The motet Chorale will sing, Sibylla Persica, is one of a series of twelve motets in a cycle called Prophetiae Sibyllarum— musical setting of poems based on prophecies of specific sibylline prophetesses which attempt to connect antiquity with the birth, life, and death of Jesus—supposedly, foretelling details of Jesus’ existence.

Guerrero lived and worked in Seville. One of Spain’s greatest composers, he was in every respect a native son-- he studied composition with fellow Spaniards, and left Spain only twice, once to visit Rome for a year, once to visit the Holy Land. He is thought to have focused exclusively on vocal music, both sacred and secular. The Advent motet Chorale will sing, Veni, Domine, et noli tardare (1555) is strongly Spanish in character—a hard quality to define or describe, but definitely different from Palestrina or Lasso; think larger intervals, unexpected melodic leaps, a subtly Arabic sound, and with a vivid and serene spirituality.

Palestrina spent most of his life in or near Rome, but was strongly influenced by the Franco-Flemish style of polyphony—Dufay and Josquin were his models. To modern ears, he sounds somewhat more classically balanced, less emotionally expressive, than the other composers represented in this program; but he has been acknowledged since his own time as the master of Renaissance polyphony. Chorale and the monks will sing alternating verses of the Advent hymn, Conditor alme siderum—the monks chanting plainsong, Chorale singing Palestrina’s polyphonic setting.

Victoria, like Guerrero, was a Spaniard, but unlike his contemporary he spent many years away from home, in Rome. He is thought to have studied composition with Palestrina—he was at any rate acquainted with him, and attended the latter’s funeral in 1594. Interestingly, his compositional style is quite different from Palestrina’s—like Guerrero, he retains his Spanish character, and composes with a mystical intensity and direct emotional appeal, qualities considered by some to be lacking in Palestrina’s music. Chorale and the monks will sing alternating verses of his Magnificat Octavi toni; then at the conclusion of the service the choir will sing the motet Versa est in luctum , which is a movement from his most famous work, and masterpiece, the Requiem Mass for the Empress Maria.

For me, in my personal acknowledgment and observance of the season– this is what Advent is all about. The icons reflecting the candlelight, the darkness obscuring the vaulted ceiling, the shadows behind the arches, and the rich, complex, never-ending acoustics, all pull me from my everyday life and situation, into another existence, another time frame, another way of understanding. Each year, when we sing this service at the Monastery, I wish it could go on and on. I am always sad when people finally stand up and start moving toward the doors. I expect any lover of sacred choral music, and any seeker after truth and understanding, would feel the same way. I hope you’ll join us!

Vigilia: singing down the sun, in the time of winter darkness

Rautavaara: “It seemed to me that the islands floated on air, and more and more colourful domes and towers appeared between the trees. The bells began to ring, the low tolling booms and the shrill tintinnabulation: the world was full of sound and colour. Then the black-bearded monks in their robes, the high vaulted churches, and the saints, kings and angels in icons…These images dazzled my ten-year-old mind and lodged in my sub-conscious....

“The archaic, darkly decorative and somehow merrily melancholy holy texts affected me deeply. By coincidence, the date set for the performance was the Festival of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The proper texts for that day had unbelievable, naively harsh and mystically profound passages....

“I wanted to use the choir in as varied a way as possible. There are numerous solos, most importantly the opening basso profondo; there are also tenor, soprano and alto [and baritone] soloists appearing singly and in pairs. The choir not only sings but speaks and whispers too. It sings in clusters and glissandi (a traditional feature of the ancient Byzantine liturgy). There is also a ‘pedal bass’ group that frequently sinks to a subterranean low B flat; the liturgical recitation features microintervals, and so on.”

Rautavaara’s Vigilia is a strikingly original and unusual piece—I have never heard or sung anything else like it. The preceding comments, from Rautavaara’s descriptive notes (printed in their entirety in our October 17 blog), come closer than anything I can conjure up, to suggest the emotional, musical impact of this work on the listener. Contemporaneous works by “religious minimalists” Tavener, Gorecky, and Pärt, seek to calm, even empty, ones verbal, critical intellect; suppress stress and nervous energy; and inspire passive, peaceful contemplation. Rautavaara’s work, though utilizing many of the same stylistic materials, rather stirs, ignites, disturbs, inspires. Vigilia is really a very exciting piece—to hear, and to sing. “Minimalism,” as a general description, would never come to mind, in describing it.

The contrast between this work and the others on our program, as well-- Shchedrin’s rich, celebratory reference to the famed Russian choral style; Poulenc’s exquisite delicacy and refinement of expression; Paulus’ red meat and potatoes neo-romanticism—could not be more striking. Each composer has a distinctive, compelling voice. You owe it to yourself, to hear this music! Seriously sublime.

And Give Us Peace, by Stephen Paulus

Chorale will present the world premier of And Give Us Peace, by composer Stephen Paulus, at our December concerts. From the composer's website: Composer Stephen Paulus has been hailed as "...a bright, fluent inventor with a ready lyric gift." (The New Yorker) His prolific output of more than two hundred works is represented in many genres, including music for orchestra, chorus, chamber ensembles, solo voice, keyboard and opera. Commissions have been received from the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, The Houston Symphony and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, with subsequent performances coming from the orchestras of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, St. Louis, the National Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Radio Orchestra. He has served as Composer in Residence for the orchestras of Atlanta, Minnesota, Tucson and Annapolis, and his works have been championed by such eminent conductors as Sir Neville Marriner, Kurt Masur, Christoph von Dohanyi, Leonard Slatkin, Yoel Levi, the late Robert Shaw, and numerous others. Paulus has been commissioned to write works for some of the world's great solo artists, including Thomas Hampson, Hakan Hagegard, Doc Severinsen, William Preucil, Cynthia Phelps, Evelyn Lear, Leo Kottke and Robert McDuffie. Chamber music commissions have resulted in works for The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Friends of Music at the Supreme Court, the Cleveland Quartet and Arizona Friends of Chamber Music. He has been a featured guest composer at the festivals of Aspen, Santa Fe, Tanglewood, and, in the U.K., the Aldeburgh and Edinburgh Festivals. As one of today's pre-eminent composers of opera, Paulus has written nine works for the dramatic stage. The Postman Always Rings Twice was the first American production to be presented at the Edinburgh Festival, and has received nine productions to date. Commissions and performances have come from such companies as the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, Washington Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Berkshire Opera Company, Minnesota Opera, and Fort Worth Opera, among others, as well as many universities and colleges. His choral works have been performed and recorded by some of the most distinguished choruses in the United States, including the New York Concert Singers, Dale Warland Singers, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Robert Shaw Festival Singers, New Music Group of Philadelphia, Master Chorale of Washington DC, Vocal Arts Ensemble of Cincinnati, Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and dozens of other professional, community, church and college choirs. He is one of the most frequently recorded contemporary composers with his music being represented on over fifty recordings. A recipient of both Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, Paulus is also a strong advocate for the music of his colleagues. He is co-founder and a current Board Vice President of the highly esteemed American Composers Forum, the largest composer service organization in the world. Paulus serves on the ASCAP Board of Directors as the Concert Music Representative, a post he has held since 1990. Paulus' music has been described by critics and program annotators as rugged, angular, lyrical, lean, rhythmically aggressive, original, often gorgeous, moving, and uniquely American. He writes in a musical language that has been characterized as "...irresistible in kinetic energy and haunting in lyrical design." (Cleveland Plain Dealer) "Mr. Paulus often finds melodic patterns that are fresh and familiar at the same time....His scoring is invariably expert and exceptionally imaginative in textures and use of instruments." (The New York Times)

And Give Us Peace was commissioned in honor of Chicago chorale's 10th anniversary, with the financial support of Chicago's Harper Court Arts Council.  The public is cordially invited to a free, pre-concert talk presented by John Buchanan at 1:30, at which Mr. Paulus will briefly discuss his composition.

Martha Nussbaum's talk

Martha Nussbaum spoke to Chorale and friends last Thursday evening at the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, about the nature of music—particularly vocal music. What a topic. Does music mean anything? How does it mean? How do language and music work together? Is music moral? Can one describe, verbally, the effect music has on us? And why should we make music? Do we need it? Can we get along without it? Several in the crowd had questions and comments following Martha’s talk; many were excited, puzzled, disturbed, stimulated. The questions, and the stimulation, continue now, a week later. Martha not only thinks more deeply and comprehensively than most of us; she presents her thoughts so effectively, that her influence continues after she herself has moved on to other things.

One of Chorale’s long-time supporters, stimulated by the talk and by Chorale’s performance afterward, spoke with me at the close of the evening. She was particularly intrigued by the discussion about the physical sensations that accompany the performance of music-- how music makes one feel, and how these sensations differ from normal experience. Building on Martha’s observation that Hyde Park and the University of Chicago is one of the most verbal places on earth, this listener commented that life in general was pretty tight, pretty dry, pretty competitive in these environs-- that one is always braced to be faulted, to find fault, to both apply and resist pressure. That one feels rather small and hard in the process of living ones life and functioning professionally. And that suddenly, on the radio, in the concert hall, sitting at the piano, one hears, experiences, something that causes ones insides to open up, ones juices to flow—at times, causes one to burst into tears without warning or provocation. I do so understand what she was saying. After years of living and functioning in this community—and more broadly, in the community of educated, privileged people who would seem to be more than adequately served by their culture—I deal daily with the fact that this group of people, as profoundly as any underserved, underprivileged community, needs music. Good music. And needs to experience the making of music themselves. We need not just the communal, cooperative, sharing experience of combining our talents toward a common end; we need MUSIC. And the more profoundly we involve ourselves with it, the more graciously, fairly, generously, we will function in our professional lives, our family lives, the many roles we all take in our cultural milieu. Music may be the only thing that fosters whatever we experience of peace on earth. How important it is, that those who lead us, those in positions of power and influence, those protect and promote us, live in a world in which music plays a dominant role.

Yes, music can be entertainment. It can be background to a pleasant evening. It can brighten the office environment and aid in our grocery shopping. It may even sharpen our intellects. But far more profoundly, it is the matrix in which other things make sense. I believe we CANNOT get along without it.

Driving the choir

In kinder, gentler times, as a general description, “to drive the choir” might conjure images of the conductor, politely, with humor and good will, pointing toward the far horizon, reminding choristers of their responsibilities and generally steering in the proper direction. Then, short weeks before performance time, the metaphor explodes-- the conductor rips off the nice face, pitches his speaking voice a little louder and higher, and really drives the choir—as in, a barking dog nipping at their ankles, occasionally tearing hair and drawing blood, until they are either safely in their pen, or over a cliff and splattered on the rocks below. Chorale has entered the latter kind of drive. This Rautavaara piece is HARD. Every eighth note in the darned thing has its own incomprehensible Finnish syllable-- and these syllables go on without interruption, eighth note after eighth note, page after page. After a while, sixty singers, chattering at once, sound more like chipmunks than like vocally gifted adults intoning a prayerful text. I have to wonder what this is like for Finns—they probably rip thoughtlessly through this stuff, and wonder what the fuss is about. For non-Finns, making sense of this piece for ourselves is immensely difficult. Not for a moment do I, or any of the singers, doubt the work’s value: Vigilia has masterwork written all over it. A word I have come to hate over the past few years is really the best descriptor: AWESOME. Take Pärt, Gorecki, Tavener, Hovhaness, the lot of them, shake them up together, skim off the cream that rises to the top, put it way up North where the sun doesn’t shine, and you have Rautavaara. I am head over heels with this piece.

As if this were the only thing on our program… The Shchedrin movements feel like opera chorus crowd scenes-- huge, long lines, impossibly slow tempi. Music for the rebirth of the world. Our Slavic language coach, Slava Gorbachov, came to rehearsal last week and told us our [l]s were too jolly and light. To satisfy him, we have to choke on our own tongues… And sandwiched between these monstrous challenges, we have this delicate Lalique crystal Poulenc motet—that’ll be a ppp high A flat, sopranos, thank you. Oh, and the Paulus motet—tone clusters down in the grumbly part of everyone’s voice; if they are wrong, they are wrong, and they sound wrong; no hiding behind “atmospheric.”

So the next few weeks will be hell for Chorale. I fear there is no other way to get it done.

Why "The Sealed Angel"?

Though one of Russia’s most important composers of the second half of the twentieth century, Rodion Shchedrin is not well-known in the United States. His “liturgical cantata,” The Sealed Angel, was first performed in this country in May 1990 by the New England Conservatory Camerata and the Longy Chamber Singers under the direction of Lorna Cooke deVaron. Portions of the following are extracted from that performance’s program notes: Rodion Shchedrin was born in Moscow on December 16, 1932. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he took courses in piano with Yakov Flier and composition with Yuri Shaporin. Following graduation, he achieved great recognition within the accepted Soviet establishment. He wrote about current trends in Soviet music in official publications and held several significant posts within the Composer's Union, including chairman of the Russian Federation section. He received numerous awards, and was made a People's Artist of the USSR in 1981. Shchedrin has settled abroad since the break-up of the Soviet Union, and has homes in Munich and Moscow. His early works are written in an orthodox Soviet idiom. In the 1960s Shchedrin began incorporating different styles of music, such as Neoclassicism, pop music and jazz. In the 1970s, he found his personal synthesis. His music spans a broad range of styles, from engaging, folk-based melodies to atonal techniques of the West.

Shchedrin composed The Sealed Angel, also known as ‘Russian Liturgy,’ in 1988, in commemoration of the millennium of the Christianization of Russia. It received its premier that same year, and was awarded the Russian State Prize in 1992 by President Boris Yeltsin.

Shchedrin came from a religious background; his grandfather was a priest, and his parents raised him with knowledge of their historic Orthodox faith. He attended the Moscow Choir School between the ages of 12 and 18, where the pupils were introduced to the great liturgies of the 18th and 19th centuries with secular texts. With this ‘Russian Liturgy,’ which utilizes Old Slavonic sacred texts, he wanted to compose a work which would resume the tradition of Russian Orthodox music that had been interrupted by the 1917 Revolution. The Perestroika of the mid 1980’s seemed to offer this opportunity.

Shchedrin specifies that sections of the short story by Nikolai Leskov (1831 - 1895) called "The Sealed Angel" be read to the audience amid the nine movements which make up the choral part of The Sealed Angel. The texts of the movements are liturgical but have been adapted by Shchedrin. "The Sealed Angel" was written by Leskov in 1872. The story describes a group of people in 18th-century Russia who belonged to the sect called the Old Believers.

In the mid-17th century the Russian Orthodox patriarch Nikon came into violent conflict with the Russian Tsar Alexis. As head of the Church, Nikon decided that all of the Russian religious texts and icons should be cleaned up ridding them of the errors, which have been introduced over the centuries of copying. A group formed known as the Old Believers disapproved of the reform; they regarded the religious texts as sacred documents transmitted from God. In 1656, a church council sanctioned the Nikon reforms and ordered that the Old Believers be banned or imprisoned. Nikon was deposed in 1666, but the Russian church retained his reforms and anathematized those who continued to oppose them. The next major religious reform took place under Peter the Great in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It was Peter who did away with the office of patriarch and changed his title from Tsar to Emperor, the ruler of both church and state. Peter the Great and the rulers who followed began importing foreign art. Models from the West offered new modes of art for religious objects, and the long history of the Russian icon came to an end with the exception of the devout Old Believers. Their icons were painted by their own artists who followed in the footsteps of the old masters. The Orthodox Church and the Tsar's authorities persecuted the dissenters by raiding their homes and coating their icons with sealing wax and taking them away. The Old Believers formed a vigorous body of dissenters within the Russian Orthodox Church for the next two centuries. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Russian government did away with the secular legislation that forbade the practices of the Old Believers and encouraged all the underground units to come out into the open. For many decades, Old Believers flourished, especially in Moscow. They collected old icons and even had them scientifically restored.

Nikolai Leskov himself was a connoisseur and collector of icons. "The Sealed Angel" was written in the studio of an old icon painter. He admired the Old Believers' stubborn tenacity, but he recognized the fact that their fanaticism resisted real progress.

In his story a group of Old Believers are working together to build a stone bridge over the Dniepr River in Ukraine, under the supervision of an English engineer, whom they called Yakov Yakovlevich. The authorities raid the special wagon where the icons of these Old Believers are set up for their worship; they throw wax seals on the icons and confiscate them. The Old Believers are heartbroken at the loss of their beloved icon of a shining angel, which they believe absolutely was guiding their lives. They hire an icon painter named Sebastian, who steals into the side of the monastery where the confiscated icon is held, makes a tracing of the original, and paints a duplicate icon. When Sebastian has finished, a trio of the Old Believers steals the true icon and the artist removes the wax seal from the angel's countenance. After placing a wax seal on the duplicate, they take it, during an evening service, which occupies all within the monastery, to the side chapel to replace the original. As they pass it through the window, they discover that the seal has come off the counterfeit icon. When evening service ends, a remorseful Luka Kirrilov, their leader, confesses to the Bishop their plan and its denouement. The bishop, saying that the Church's angel (the copy) is more holy than the original because it removed its own seal, persuades Luka to join the established Church. Luka agrees to do so and all his fellow Old Believers follow him.

Shchedrin’s work is in no way programmatic, but it does explore the most ancient practices and liturgies of the Orthodox Church in its musical materials. Shchedrin named the work after this story, rather than identifying it as a sacred work, to avoid the state censorship which persisted at the time of its composition.

The complete work consists of nine movements; Chorale will present only the last two.

From Einojuhani Rautavaara's foreword to his All-Night Vigil

“The All-Night Vigil was jointly commissioned by the Helsinki Festival and the Orthodox Church of Finland. It was premiered at divine service in the Uspenski Cathedral in Helsinki, the Evening Service in 1971 and the Morning Service in 1972 [Chicago Chorale will present only the Evening Service portion]. “The All-Night Vigil ultimately stems from a vision-inducing childhood visit to the island monastery of Valamo in the middle of Lake Ladoga just before the Winter War in 1939; after that war Valamo no longer belonged to Finland. It seemed to me that the islands floated on air, and more and more colourful domes and towers appeared between the trees. The bells began to ring, the low tolling booms and the shrill tintinnabulation: the world was full of sound and colour. Then the black-bearded monks in their robes, the high vaulted churches, and the saints, kings and angels in icons…These images dazzled my ten-year-old mind and lodged in my sub-conscious, to re-emerge fifteen years later in the piano cycle Icons (Ikonit) and again three decades later when I was commissioned to set the Orthodox divine service, or All-Night Vigil. The archaic, darkly decorative and somehow merrily melancholy holy texts affected me deeply. By coincidence, the date set for the performance was the Festival of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist. The proper texts for that day had unbelievable, naively harsh and mystically profound passages.

“No instruments are used in divine services in the Orthodox church, not even the organ. Because of this, I wanted to use the choir in as varied a way as possible. There are numerous solos, most importantly the opening basso profondo; there are also tenor, soprano and alto [and baritone] soloists appearing singly and in pairs. The choir not only sings but speaks and whispers too. It sings in clusters and glissandi (a traditional feature of the ancient Byzantine liturgy). There is also a ‘pedal bass’ group that frequently sinks to a subterranean low B flat; the liturgical recitation features microintervals, and so on. In fact, this All-Night Vigil is closer in spirit and expression to the ancient and lost world of Byzantine chant than to the newer Russian chant which was not established as the accepted style until the 19th century.

“The patron saint of this All-Night Vigil, St. John the Baptist, is specifically referred to in the dramatic bass solos 0f the Sticheron of Invocation and the Irmosses. The variation technique I have used binds and structures all sections and songs of the work together into a vast mosaic. In the midst stand two figures: St. John the Baptist and the Virgin, Mother of God. They are surrounded by the apostolic congregation and on the periphery—through the mystery of ecumenical unity—by all of Christendom and all of Western culture.”

Chicago Chorale is now in its sixth week of rehearsing this extraordinary, electrifying work. We have a daunting task—to coach and learn the Finnish pronunciation; to discover and rehearse the word and phrase accents which determine the piece’s constantly shifting metrical structure; to become familiar with Rautavaara’s wholly personal, compelling harmonic language; and, for the soloists, to learn to sing in the cracks between the half and whole steps to which they are accustomed. Along the way, we are discovering that the All-Night Vigil is not some difficult oddity, intended to stump performers and listeners alike; rather, it is fantastic, dramatically engaging work, which achieves, through passages of tender beauty as well as great, tragic power, a grandeur and universality seldom encountered in a purely a cappella work.

Finnish language coaching

I met last week with Chorale’s Finnish language coach, Elina Hartikainen, preparing for our performance of Rautavaara’s Vigilia in December. Elina is fully bi-lingual, and able to address very specifically the difficulties Americans encounter pronouncing Finnish. Working with her powerfully brings to the fore, an issue I have struggled with for years: languages are not just collections of sounds, sorted and ordered differently depending on the language at hand. Speaking only of mechanical sound production—each is an entire physical system, with its own peculiar inner structure, its own shape, its coordination, it’s innumerable details. Gérard Souzay sings his native language, French, beautifully; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau does similarly with German. In one anothers languages, however, each of these great artists sounds peculiarly out of his element, despite extraordinary talent, years of study, and the supposed universality of musical beauty and expression. Classical singers, especially Americans, are expected, with the aid of the International Phonetic Alphabet, to sing all the major European languages perfectly, often four or five of them in a solo performance lasting an hour and a half; does our American-ness make us better at this, than Fischer-Dieskau? Elina tells me that when she returns to Finland and resumes speaking Finnish regularly, she suffers through weeks of laryngitis-- that her entire inner system has to adjust before she can pronounce her native language painlessly and without stress. This reminded me of an occasion, twenty-some years ago, when I sang chorus for an excerpt from Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov—rehearsals with the language coach were excruciating; the depth of sound he wanted from us, combined with forward ring, threatened to ruin my voice before we ever got on stage for the performance. That coach, like Elina, was not a singer; his concern was with the perceived authenticity of the sound, not with translating vocal sensations into the sort of fakes and substitutions a singer uses to “pass.” I felt some despair, going through the Rautavaara text with her-- how would I ever get Chorale to sound like a bunch of Finns? When I sang this work with Bella Voce, several years ago, this fine ensemble accomplished only an approximation of basic sounds, something that bothered me throughout the run of our performances; dare I hope for something better from Chorale’s singers?

Well— two responses come to mind. One: as an unpaid group, Chorale can afford plenty of rehearsal time to coach language; and Chorale’s singers, highly educated and conscientious, will readily apply themselves to this problem. For the other, I refer back to the question with which I ended my first paragraph, above. Does our American-ness make us better at this, than Fischer-Dieskau? Conventional, practical wisdom would have it that, indeed, Americans singers are very good at counterfeiting other languages. Though we are shameful monoglots as a nation, that tiny percentage of us who are classical singers are expected to learn and sing in languages other than English. The majority of the repertoire we sing, in fact, is not in English; from the very beginning of private vocal study, with G. Schirmer’s Twenty-four Italian Songs and Arias, we are taught and coached in something Richard Miller called the “Western International style,” and are expected to develop the flexibility and the ear to be saleable in a variety of languages and styles. We have very little indigenous “classical” repertoire; singing in English, sadly, is a pretty specialized niche for an American singer. Chorale’s singers do not have the extensive training that, say, the members of an all-professional choir would have; but most of them have studied voice, and share in this typical American vocal culture.

Finally, it is far easier for a group of singers, than for an individual, to make a believable sound in an unfamiliar language. Like violins in an orchestra, we fit together as a unit, canceling out the idiosyncrasies of the individuals among us. Effective language coaching for a choir largely consists of focusing on typical patterns of sound production, typical colors and gestures, in addition to individual details. If we can accomplish that, with Elina’s help, I believe we will satisfy our listeners.

If music be the food of love...

My garden is a plot of land about one hundred feet long east to west and four feet deep, sandwiched between an alley to the south and a wrought iron fence to the north. Sunlight is good; water is easily accessible. Other than that, it was a wasteland of post-construction garbage and fill when I began working on it, five years ago—chunks of concrete, old bricks, lengths of rusted rebar, broken glass; random pockets of gravel, sand, and clay; volunteer Chinese elms, ailanthus, and mulberries competing with weeds for the available soil. Cars and trucks had parked on the southern edge of it for years, creating an iron-hard apron about a foot wide. One of my more onerous tasks, in fact, has been to convince drivers to stop parking on what I bravely called my garden. It took, and takes, working like the proverbial dog to turn this wasteland into a garden. Starting with a patch about fifteen feet long in the middle, and working east and west from there over the following years, I have dug and grubbed and hauled, to come up with something resembling friable soil; I collect bags of grass clippings and leaves from the curbs and alleys in the neighborhood; I haul buckets of horse manure from the police stables south of us; I compost in a pile, in a bin, and directly in the “garden” itself. My rules are: spend no money, apply no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, use locally available soil-building materials. I have never hired a backhoe to rip out what was there, leaving a hole into which a hired truck could dump expensive, prime topsoil stripped off a farm downstate; I use what is at hand. Year by year I work this patch of earth, and it responds by coming to life, producing an abundance of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, attracting birds and worms and insects, enriching my life as well as the lives of my family and my neighbors. I feel I am doing very much the same thing my gardening forbears did, first in northern Europe, then on the Minnesota prairie-- of necessity, developing the skills to deal with the givens of a situation, and coming to love that situation, in all its particularity.

Choirs and gardens are very similar. One can garden very differently than I do, and buy/achieve spectacular results; one can also buy, if one has the money and the inclination, the components of a spectacular choir, recruiting and paying large amounts of money for the most talented, skilled, trained singers, then exercising a certain type of leadership and skill in coordinating these expensive components, and creating a winning choir/garden.

I first drifted into, then found myself firmly committed to, the life and ideals described in my metaphor. Chicago Chorale’s singers are hardly so raw as the materials out of which I have built my garden; but they are, like the components of the garden, the materials at hand-- the people who show up and want to sing good music with one another. Making them into a choir is work. But could there be a better work? To combine the disparate and often disconnected materials that surround one, into an interlocking whole, to create community where none existed previously, community committed to discovering and building and sharing beauty, is immensely rewarding and inspiring. There cannot be a more necessary or worthwhile enterprise, than that people come together in this way, to make music well with and for one another, while all around us the world seems incomprehensibly driven toward ugliness and destruction.

I obsess about potential garden materials going into landfills; I also obsess about music that goes unsung, and about singers who go unsinging and unheard. When we work together on the highest level of which we are capable, we know that making music is somehow the salvation of our world. It is not only worth listening to, but worth living for.