The Song with a Luminous Future

Posted on March 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

This week at Symphony Hall, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus is tackling an unusual piece. It’s the American premiere of a contemporary work co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, first performed in London in March 2023. The piece is titled The Dong with a Luminous Nose, based on the Edward Lear poem of the same name. So for you concertgoers and interested choral bystanders, here’s a peek behind the scenes as we wrap up our study of the piece and head into the final rehearsals.

Why are we singing about a Dong? (And stop laughing.)

Edward Lear is known for his nonsensical poems, limericks, and drawings — call him a more melancholy Lewis Carroll, or perhaps a Dr. Seuss for adults of the late 1800s. More of us may be familiar with his The Owl and the Pussycat… which, once read aloud, may induce similar giggles from the puerile pre-teen in all of us. His works invent nonsense characters like the Bò, the Pobble, the octopod Discobboloses, the Quangle Wangle… and the Dong. In fact, we learned The Dong with a Luminous Nose is a sequel to Lear’s poem The Jumblies, which first describes the titular travelers who then join the Dong on the great Gromboolian plain before abandoning him.

In her program notes, composer Elena Langer describes how Lear’s poem has everything music wants. You’d like a love story? Songs and dances? Fantastical landscapes? The narrative has them all, along with an emotional backdrop of longing and hope, of light and sadness. In singsong verse, the poem tells how the Dong falls in love with a green-haired, blue-handed Jumbly Girl, only to have her vanish over the sea. Her departure drives the Dong to madness. He then spends the rest of his days seeking his lost love with the help of a contraption that attaches a lamp to his nose.

Langer describes her composition as “a cross between a cello concerto, an opera for chorus, and a symphonic poem.” It’s fitting that the work is hard to categorize, because so are Lear’s poems – I’d even say they both delight in being uncategorizable. Contemporary adventures like this one are a refreshing change from the “dead white European men” we’ve already learned to appreciate.

Made-up motifs can characterize made-up words

One characteristic of the poem’s text is how it introduces unfamiliar nouns. For instance, besides the Dong and the Jumblies, you have the Oblong Oysters, the Twangum Tree (not to be confused with the Bong-tree), the Zemmery Fidd, and the Hills of the Chankly Bore.

Langer explains in her program notes that she wanted to instrumentally mirror how Lear makes up words, using normal timbres in unusual combinations. So orchestrally we have sliding strings, the always nifty-sounding flexatone, and woodblocks. We have cello cadenzas with acrobatic leaps, sudden pizzicato moments, and accelerating tremolos (with a notation I’d not encountered before, pictured below). We have time signatures capriciously swapping from 3/4 to 4/4 or 5/4, except when we’re in a waltz-y 3/8. Likewise, the key signature or tonality shifts rapidly to align with the mood as the story evolves. Throughout the piece the cellist often gives voice to the Dong — his excitement, his mourning, his madness, and his ultimate obsession of finding his lost love. The chorus swings between a dark narration, pastoral cavorting during the happy days, and embodying the Dong’s lament and searching.

An example of the accelerating tremolo notation, here from the cello’s final cadenza.

Throughout our study of the piece, I’ve found myself fascinated and challenged by three musical ideas:

The three-note near-octave motif. Many of the bass lines have this distinctive and tricky shape, where the top note is a major 7th (i.e., one half-step short of an octave) above the bottom note. This figure occurs, sometimes in a rising sequence, often to represent the Dong’s struggles and madness.

The increasing intervals motif. As the basses tell the story of the Dong searching farther and farther away for his lost love, our melodic line holds an anchor “do” note and then jumps to larger and larger intervals… a minor second and back, a major second and back, a minor third, a major third, and so forth.

Here’s a leap to a fifth, a minor sixth, a major sixth, and a skip to a major seventh before sliding back.

Tone clusters of superimposed major chords. To represent the Dong’s mood — often when he’s angry or confused — the chorus occasionally splits into twelve parts, with each voice anchoring around major triads that aren’t particularly related to each other harmonically. We tune to each other within each group.

The challenge, as with any contemporary music: learn to unlearn

From the very beginning of each rehearsal, James Burton has modified his warmup exercises with an eye towards these musical challenges. We’ve jumped between ever-increasing intervals. We’ve formed chords then shifted to other chords, and fought to hold notes a minor 2nd away from each other. We’ve tried to ingrain that odd major seventh interval into our heads from the three-note motif.

That three-note motif has been particularly vexing — the natural tendency is to sing an octave, not the major 7th. I’m sure many others have also been banging that interval out at home on the piano trying to retrain our brains to hear it, and drawing up arrows in our scores reminding us it’s not as far a leap as we think it should be.

Because the accompaniment is often so active, the spacing of the notes on the page is not always in line with their duration. Couple that with the shifting time signatures, and it’s easy to get lost within a measure. I wish I could say that my ability to read music was impervious to those variations, but alas, I catch myself holding quarters as halfs, treating eighths like sixteenths, moving my eyes too slowly, and getting caught without breaths (see measure 38, below!) As a result, most of my vocal score now has vertical lines marking the beats, and giant checkmarks reminding me when to drop my diaphragm and grab some oxygen, in unison with my section, before an upcoming phrase.

These challenges are further exacerbated by the rhythmic variations throughout the piece. Getting all the basses to stay in sync for what’s effectively a recitative, when it’s jumping between triplets and sixteenth-plus-dotted-eighth… academically we know how to subdivide and keep that pulse, but at our speed and intensity, all too often it’s an educated guess (such as making sure beat 2 & 4 of measure 32, or the first and last notes of measure 36, below, are not counted as triplets.) Let’s just say in the one existing recording of this piece from the London performance, our knowledgeable ears can hear that chorus struggling to agree on some of these rhythms and entrances. You just can’t be on autopilot for any of it — it demands full concentration and a lot of prep work retraining your instincts.

One page of my vocal score, in all its pencil-marked glory

I personally go through the same stages with preparing any contemporary piece. First I listen to it, and recoil in horror at the nonstandard progressions, unstructured atonality, and experiments in rhythms. Then as I slowly commit to the piece, I get a better idea of the composer’s intent, and I begin to marvel at the genius of decisions made to convey story, emotion, and concepts through the context of the music. By the end of it, I’ve fully bought into the performance, I no longer notice quirks or oddities that would startle a first-time listener, and my family and friends become sick of me explaining why it’s such a cool piece.

The Dong with a Luminous Nose is no different — I’ve gone from snickering at the title to discovering its intricacies and now embracing its word painting and storytelling. I hope many readers get to experience this concert, either live at Symphony Hall or on the WCRB livestream this Saturday.

Leave a comment

Posted in TFC

Tagged , ,

The changing of the Carmina Burana guard

Posted on July 15, 2023 | Leave a comment

This week my wife and I are singing Carmina Burana with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and instead of a guest conductor, the BSO’s own Andris Nelsons is conducting. We can already tell from the rehearsals that it will be another glorious retelling of these irreverent, primal stories of springtime, young love, heavy drinking, and the whims of fate. Having sung the piece in five previous concert runs, and already gone through the process of re-learning it when we performed it seven years ago, I knew there’d be an adjustment period. What I didn’t expect were new insights into the relationship between organizations and their institutional knowledge.

New additions to a group bring new energy but require guidance and training

Like any volunteer organization, TFC members come and go. That has its benefits and drawbacks.

The fresh perspectives of new members are the lifeblood for any living, growing, self-perpetuating institution. New members mean progress.

However, new members may not understand expectations or unwritten rules. Our conductor James Burton and his staff had to repeat familiar speeches, ranging from an impassioned “don’t be late to rehearsal” to logistical chestnuts like off-limit bathrooms and proper behavior while on stage. Andris’s faster tempo choices quickly made it clear how well the chorus needs to internalize the music. James needed extra time to coach us on removing disjointed sibilant /s/’s in the first movement, so that semper crescis and aut decrescis don’t sound like sssssemper cressssstssssissss and aut decressssstssssissssss.

The veterans of any group maintain its tone and character. For instance, the long-standing members of the chorus put together a comprehensive survival guide for the Berkshires. They organized buddies for the dozen or so new members to answer questions. Experienced members mean stability.

Yet veterans often retain “that’s the way we’ve always done it” habits. Left unchallenged, as they were when we were between conductors, those habits lead to complacency and stagnation.

In other words, choruses like ours are a never-ending balancing act between educating the newbies and preventing calcification by the old guard. (I include myself with that label, now, as this is my 25th year in the chorus.)

In a sense, our leaders are new members too

If you think about it, though, it’s not just our first-time-in-Tanglewood singers that are new. This concert represents the first time Andris and James have collaborated with this particular roster of singers and instrumentalists to perform this piece. Oh, sure, our leaders know this piece, but every performance means starting anew, and fixing problems that weren’t there last time, and re-making choices… from whether it’s pronounced “quod” or “kvod” to how long to hold those fermatas.

Both Andris and James have chosen a fairly literal reading of the score, as far as tempi, the timing of dynamic changes and accelerandi and ritardandi, though they (as many conductors these days) have decided not to honor using a smaller coro piccolo for some movements, relying on the chorus to regulate our volume. In initial rehearsals, those choices really threw off not only choristers but also the orchestra itself. It’s hard to resist the autopilot of slowing down here and adding a lunga pausa there because “that’s the way we’ve always done it” with past conductors. So just as we “unlearned” the piece 7 years ago, we had to re-learn it again this week.

The leakage of institutional knowledge

All this had me thinking once again about Rafael Frübeck de Burgos (affectionately known as FdB), who was arguably one of the conductors most intimately familiar with Carmina Burana. His 1966 recording with the New Philharmonic Orchestra is still heralded as one of the best, and he only deepened his understanding and interpretation of the piece over the years. When FdB was preparing it with us in November 2008, he punctuated one of his directives by saying, “When I was discussing this with Orff…” and that certainly left an impression on me that he had the receipts for his decisions!

But here’s the thing. FdB flat out ignored some score markings for his choices. For instance, despite the opening and closing movements being identical, he insisted the last movement should be slightly faster (technically, the score does show a tempo range?) He added big breaks in the middle of sections. He moved where accelerandi and ritardandi would start and end. He gave extra space for the flautist to soar during solos. Each one of these decisions had a clarity born out of experience and his total control of the piece. He infused it (and the chorus) with a curious coupling of passion and precision that came through each of our performances at Symphony Hall, and made it a bawdy, rollicking good time of a sing.

So, what’s lost when there’s a changing of the guard? How much oral history and hidden-beneath-the-markings has disappeared without knowledge keepers like Rafael Frübeck de Burgos around to proselytize them? Just as musicians learn how, say, to observe conventions of the baroque era that aren’t explicitly written in the score, I find myself wondering what’s disappeared over the last two decades. Andris will make decisions, and his decisions by definition are correct because he is the conductor — his opinion trumps all, and we literally follow his lead. It’s certainly better than going on autopilot, which means people “mailing it in” for a performance. Nevertheless, if we’re collectively wallpapering over these older ideas — ones that I’ve certainly grown to love in my own personal head canon for this piece — I hope they are re-discovered for future performances and not lost forever.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

In appreciation of Ives and Psalm 90

Posted on August 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

I’ll have many musical highlights from my 2022 Tanglewood residency — the soaring shouts of the chorus in Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, finally feeling comfortable enough with pronouncing the Russian in Shostakovich’s Third, and the double bass entrance in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that almost brings me to tears every time I hear it before we sing. That said, the most musically satisfying part of the weekend will be our performance of Charles Ives’ Psalm 90 as the prelude to the Beethoven Ninth on Sunday afternoon.

The piece itself, written in 1924, is primarily choral, accompanied by an organ, three racks of bells, and a gong. As a modernist composer, Ives is known for experimenting with polytonality, polyrhythm, and tone clusters… so I won’t lie, I was trepidatious upon learning it was on the program. A casual first listening verifies that, yes, many parts sound cacophonous to an ear expecting predictable cadences and chord progressions. In general, I don’t gravitate to modern pieces that revel in dissonance and gimmicks, and at first glance, Psalm 90 feels like one of those – obscure and intellectual just for the sake of being outrageous and challenging. But I read that Ives claimed this piece was “the only one of his works that satisfied him.” It took immersing myself in it to better understand its laudable cleverness and layered meaning.

First off, I’m a sucker for tone painting, be it lions leaping and worms crawling in Haydn’s The Creation, or the galloping horse in Schubert’s Die Erlkönig. Here, Ives even goes so far as to preview on the page who the musical dramatis personae are. The C major chord is “The Eternities;” a heavily dissonant chord is “God’s wrath against sin,” then followed by some mysterious chords for “Prayer and Humility,” and finally a quiet passage for “Rejoicing in Beauty and Work.” That low C from the organ plays throughout the entire piece, representing God’s constancy (and a great anchor for pre-tuning our tougher entrances.)

A-flat major on the bottom, then C minor, then E-flat major, then G minor…

Throughout, words like anger, wrath, destruction, and flood are accompanied by that heavily dissonant chord to communicate their accompanying ruin. But in preparing us for this piece, our conductor James Burton showed us that the notes in those dissonant chords actually have a very specific internal relationship. Take any three adjacent voices and they form a major or minor chord, laddering up by fifths. By the time you get to the top soprano note, it’s a half-step off of the bass note. Together it may sound like a mess, but it’s intentional and distinctive, and each voice can find anchors above and below to tune to and establish those resonances. Pretty clever, and it recurs throughout the piece despite the constancy of God’s C underneath it.

I underlined the words with stress to try and stay in time with everyone

In fact, what stands out about this piece is how unified and together the chorus must be, listening to each other, never being the first one in or the last one out. Take, for instance, the chanted verses. There’s no written pattern, no conducting… the chorus must feel the collective rhythm of the phrases and stay together. “The days of our years are three score years and ten…” in four beats… okay, go! It fits those verses: humanity musing and reflecting together.

Another innovative moment is in the middle of the piece, where the time between each note goes from 9 sixteenth counts… to 8… to 7, 6, all the way down to one, as the chorus further and further subdivides itself until we reach a giant cluster of notes (on “wrath,” no less)… then by 1 beat, 2, 3, 4, all the way back up to 9, we come back together and find unison. Sounds like there’s a message there, too.

There are other subtleties in the music too, like the verse about “from one generation to another… to another… to another.” The music gets quieter and “drifts,” like each generation inheriting from the previous but evolving… which again Ives notes in the text.

Out of this earlier recitation of chaos come the later verses, bringing us the others from the introduction: first prayer, then beauty. We basses chant on a C for almost the entire ending, mirroring the “God foundation on constancy” from before. There’s one mention of “evil” that sneaks in to interrupt the peace, like a bad memory briefly surfacing to interrupt one’s meditation… but the last few minutes of the piece construct this sublime ethereal beauty that hangs in the air as the chimes echo like distant church bells, with us getting softer and softer until the final peaceful Amen. It completes the journey of mankind causing our own downfall time and time again, yet pulling together to glorify the work we do as one. It’s a breathless experience that reaffirms my faith in humanity, that we will get out of the way of ourselves, each time I hear it.

James himself is conducting the piece for our performance, which has provided the opportunity to cue in specifically on his gestures and exhortations, rather than having to translate that to another conductor. I’m very much looking forward to sharing what should be a nice complement to the B9’s message of joy.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Preparing the Britten War Requiem

Posted on March 24, 2022 | 1 comment

Next weekend the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and the Boston Symphony Orchestra are performing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. My initial trepidation at taking on this modern piece – for the first time, for me – has been replaced with the familiar joy of being fully immersed in learning a choral work until you feel it in your bones. And given the situation in Ukraine, its inherent pleading for peace is a powerful statement for our times.

But first let me say, what a joy it is to be back to singing again, and at performances for the first time without masks since before the pandemic. Mind you, we could be singing a three part harmony of “row, row, row your boat” on stage and I’d still probably find it satisfying. Taking on this great work is all gravy.

If you’re not familiar with the Britten War Requiem, first understand that it’s fairly recent compared to other well-known choral requiem settings. There’s no classical Mozart or romantic Verdi here! Composed to celebrate the consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral after its destruction in World War II, the piece premiered in 1962 in England, and with the BSO in 1963. Like many other 20th century pieces, it explores a lot of non-traditional, dissonant harmonies and chord progressions, including using “the devil’s interval” (a tritone) as a recurring motif. What better way to depict the horrors of war? And while you’re unlikely to walk out of a performance humming any catchy melodies, the complex effect of its many emotional, technical, and tonal layers has left many listeners overwhelmed by the experience.

Getting one’s arms around the piece was, at first, a chore. Just learning what connected to what, untangling the odder chromatic passages, and deciphering how on earth were we to get our next entrance from the preceding notes… it necessitated more than a few evenings at the piano or blasting Cyberbass, score in hand, methodically pounding out the notes and singing along. It was akin to intentionally getting lost in a new city until you learn how to get from here to there. Soon, the geography of the piece made sense – not just the flow of the six movements, but their connective tissue. Learning it became much easier with tips and tricks from our choral conductor, James Burton, who regularly pointed out hidden logic to the harmonies or framed the exercise of finding those chromatic entrance notes within an existing tonal progression. He’d have us convert staggered stretto entrances into block chords, or just sing the first note of succeeding sessions, and suddenly what was “how am I going to find that” became “oh, we’re just singing in G minor, down the scale.” He also relentlessly worked with us on deciphering the rhythms: syncopations, hemiolas, time signatures wavering between 3/4 and 4/4, 6/8 and 9/8, or 5/4 and 7/4… the distinctive elements of its unique sound.

As we head into our tech week and begin working with the maestro (Sir Antonio Pappano) and the children’s chorus, I feel like I finally have the whole piece in my head. My score has pencil markings all over the place: circles and arrows to show me where to get certain notes, vertical slashes to help me keep track of the beat when time signatures change, and tips from James on how to approach sections. My pencil even yells at me to “Count!” and “sing longer” and even “Ignore Greg!” — the last because to my right is a Bass 1 who has sometimes been asked to double tenor entrances, which kept making me think I’d missed an entrance. More importantly, getting all the technical details down means we can start moving past them to the emotional content: the pleading of the Libera me, the fury and destruction of the Dies irae and Confutatis maledictis, the sadness of the Lacrymosa, the peaceful rest of the finale. Let me tell you, the moment in the quam olem Abrahae, after the chorus has sung about God’s promise to Abraham, and then the Wilfred Owen poem diverts from the Biblical story with “But the old man would not so, but slew his son / And half the seed of Europe, one by one” is just chilling.

We’re all looking forward to a great performance of this masterpiece and taking the audience on that emotional journey with us.

1 Comment

Posted in TFC

Tagged , ,

Rediscovering singing

Posted on May 29, 2021 | 3 comments

So, it turns out I still like singing.

You may have thought that a given. Why would there be any doubt? Heck, I’ve got a whole blog dedicated to the subject, and decades of ensemble singing experience. So why is there a question?

Well, yeah. Turns out there was a question.

It had been almost 18 months since I had truly sung with a proper group of singers. That was back in December 2019, as part of my 22nd tour of duty with the Holiday Pops concerts at Symphony Hall.

One insidious aspect of the global switch to video conferencing is that it gave a semblance of normalcy to everyone’s ability to accomplish work. For white collar workers like myself, I could still attend meetings, exchange ideas, and finish deliverables, and a variable fraction of a second delay in the video feed wasn’t a big deal. As many aspiring chorus collaborators learned, that delay completely prevented any hope of collaborative singing. Try it yourself the next time you’re on Zoom — see how impossible it is to synchronize your clapping with anyone on the call. So while the rest of the world limped along, all live performances of two or more groups ground to a halt.

Virtual choirs? We had been warned about their inability to satisfy the singers, but many of us, desperate for our singing fix, charged ahead with a few initiatives anyways. My wife and I gleefully jumped at the chance to be part of a few Holiday Pops virtual performances. We got all dressed up, rehearsed and rehearsed, set up the iPhone cameras, and had a good time producing satisfying solo recordings to be part of the composite performance. We recorded a few duets in our home. We fooled around with multi-track recordings of ourselves. We helped church choirs create virtual anthems, including Advent and Christmas performances… and I got a lot better at Final Cut Pro.

But it was not ensemble singing. None of it was.

When a part of your life disappears for so long, you begin to not notice it’s missing. Humans are good at adapting that way. We adapt to the new freedoms and responsibilities of life after high school. We adapt to the pain in our joints as we get older. We adapt to mask-wearing and extra sanitizing in a pandemic. We adapt to the loss of loved ones. In each case, we adjust to the new reality and try to retain memories of the old one. But like Chicharron’s final death in Coco, those memories fade if not renewed.

And so, like everyone else reprioritizing their lives in the pandemic era, I begin to doubt.

Did I like singing any more? It was a question I mentally asked myself now and then, once the opportunity was taken away. Might this be the right time to hang up the vocal cleats, and retire from the onus of rehearsal commitments? After all, it was rather nice as a family to not spend December 2020 playing schedule Jenga so we could rush back and forth to Symphony Hall and tag team our way through 18 holiday concerts. Not to mention having the summer free, even if travel was limited by the pandemic. Sure, the chorus has been an integral part of not only my life, from proposing to my wife on stage to tons of Symphony Hall and Tanglewood concert, but also my the rest of my family as well. But college was part of my life. Regular hockey and basketball games were part of my life. Various companies were part of my life. Life moves on.

Besides, singing at a high level takes constant practice to maintain, and extra work to catch up if there’s a hiatus. It’s like how professional athletes out of the sport for a few years can’t jump back in without a lot of training or rehab. Since singing is an avocation not a vocation for me, I don’t possess the time or discipline to maintain it on my own.

The pandemic permanently changed a lot of attitudes. Wearing masks during the winter now seems like a great way to avoid the flu. In 2019 I would have said that there’s no way I’d ever want to work remote full time; now we’re considering office/home hybrid schedules. Who needs movie theaters, 100+ cable stations, or live TV? Streaming services solved that problem. I could feel my attitude towards singing changing too.

On top of all this, as the chair of our chorus committee for 2020, my negative associations with the chorus grew as we faced month after month of no good news about singing in the future. All of the drama, none of the reward. The committee tried valiantly to plan virtual events to keep disaffected chorus members connected, because at some undetermined point in the future, we’d jump on the risers again. Hopefully. If enough people were left to do so.

I began to wonder if maybe I, too, was one of those disaffected choristers who didn’t miss singing so much.

Until last Sunday.

Sunday, ten friends, all of us experienced choral singers, assembled at a friend’s house out in western Massachusetts with a purpose. One of our number was getting married in a few weeks. With mask restrictions lifting and fully vaccinated invitees attending, he wanted a choral piece sung as part of the ceremony — specifically, this gorgeous arrangement of If Music Be The Food of Love by David Dickau.

All of us had copies of the music so we could learn notes on our own beforehand, to make the time together as productive as possible. Even then, once we sat in our semi-circle, we spent 5 minutes with our pencils going through the score together and agreeing on phrasing, breaths, dynamics, articulation, and divisi. We had a pre-recorded accompaniment, but someone had volunteered to conduct so we could watch her instead of guessing at timing ourselves. There was comfort in the ritual of marking up the score, like checking the tires for air and tightening the brakes before getting on that bike again.

And then we hit play, and started singing together.

In one of my favorite fantasy novels, there’s a scene in which the heroine has to spar with a friendly opponent. It’s not a big deal for him, but for her it’s the first time she’s picked up a sword since a terrible ordeal that left her physically and mentally crippled, and unable to fight. She had gone through a long process of healing, and suddenly the moment had come upon her to find out if she could do it again:

“With the clash of the blades her mind seemed to clear a little. Her arm moved of itself, countering his first slow strokes[…] If this, then that. The elbow bent so allows the angle here – she met each stroke squarely. It felt as if she were learning all over again: she had to think about almost every move. More came back to her; she tried a thrust past his guard. Blocked: but he looked surprised. So was she. Her body moved less stiffly, the sword began to feel natural in her hand again[…] “Enough.” […] She felt dizzy with relief: she had not dropped the sword, had not run away, had not fainted.”

That’s what I was feeling. No matter how much I had practiced solo, or harmonized with my wife, it was nothing compared to following a conductor and going through the actions of staying in unison with your stand partner, tuning to the other parts, feeling out the rhythm together, and achieving a group consensus of how you would distill the soul of the composer for an audience. It quickly became familiar in an overwhelming rush of unlocked memories. And… we sounded gorgeous. The harmonies, the interplay of the overtones, the legato, the swaying movement of the phrases… it was an in-your-face reminder that recordings never fully capture live performances, that listening is no substitute for creating, and that an experienced group of singers can manufacture joy.

I got emotional. I had to drop out after the first few bars, and then when I tried to come back in on the second page, I got choked up again and had to gather myself.

The rest of the 90 minutes or so was us going about the usual process of turning 80-90% good into 95-98% good. Balance and dynamics issues. Missed notes and cutoffs. Finding better places to breathe. Agreeing on how long a fermata should be, given our tempo was dictated by the recorded accompaniment. Rediscovering those breathing muscles to stretch 4-bar phrases into 8-bar phrases. Given everyone’s experience, we could self-regulate enough to identify problems and implement solutions.

So now I’m all in again. The wedding in a few weeks will already be a cause for celebration: certainly for our friend’s marriage but also for the opportunity to be with 50+ people in one place. Now, we can add another reason: a first live performance in 18 months, and the dispelling of doubt about my love of singing. It may not be till the end of this year that we’re singing as a chorus again. But at the downbeat, I’ll be ready.

3 Comments

Posted in Love of singing

Happy 50th Anniversary, TFC

Posted on April 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, the chorus I’ve called my home since 1998.

Right now I’m sitting here in our den, listening to a WCRB broadcast from October 2018. That night I was on stage with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus singing an Einfelde meditation, followed by Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony (one of my all-time favorite pieces). Listening to the performance warms my heart… as did the virtual toast with 50+ past and current chorus members before the concert.  Together we raised a glass in celebration of all the chorus has accomplished in five decades.

The TFC is special to me. It’s where I met (and later proposed to) my beautiful Tangle-wife. It’s dominated my Decembers for 22 Holiday Pops season. It’s been the destination for countless “adult sleep away camp” summer trips, first by myself, then with my wife, then with our kids. It’s given me a musical focus and an outlet for the creative side of my brain. And this year, by volunteering as the chair of the TFC Committee, it’s become an even more integral part of my life. So the chorus’s 50th milestone can’t help but be a special occasion for my family. It would be a privilege just to sing one concert on stage with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall or out on the Tanglewood grounds… and now my “privilege” is showing, because I’ve lost count of the hundreds of times I’ve mounted the risers to make music with this ensemble.

Today is also a special day for many TFC members and alumni who came to the chorus through John Oliver, the founder of the chorus who led us for 45 of its 50 years, as it’s also the anniversary of his death two years ago. I’ve written extensively about John’s influence on all of us, and how much he personally meant to me as a gateway to choral singing, a philosophical muse , and a musical north star. Many of us owe so much to him for the guidance he provided, both musically and personally. We will always cherish his memory and an underlying foundation for the chorus’s spirit.

Now, under James Burton’s leadership, the chorus’s story continues. We are all growing musically and finding even greater fulfillment through our performances.  The chorus’s reputation is growing, earning us opportunities we’d never had before to sing unaccompanied (or lightly accompanied) on the Symphony Hall stage, or even on the main stage at the Shed.  As a choral unit, we’re pushing our envelope to achieve a precision and uniformity of sound, even when singing for what were once throwaway Pops concerts. The culture of continuous improvement is spreading. I have high hopes for what we’ll achieve in the next decade and beyond, and I’m looking forward to being a part of it.

Because of the global pandemic, we did not get to celebrate the 50th anniversary as originally planned, with a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers as quasi-Easter vigil service out at the new Tanglewood Learning Institute. Like many other events during the pandemic, no doubt it’ll be rescheduled so we can more properly mark the moment. But until then, the broadcast performance, the toasts, the shared memories and reflections, and our “happy 50th” cake will suffice!

 

 

Leave a comment

Posted in TFC

Don’t want to leave “On Leaving”

Posted on November 20, 2019 | 2 comments

This weekend we are performing Shostakovich’s 2nd Symphony again, as part of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s efforts to record the full cycle of Shostakovich symphonies. But the piece I’m more looking forward to luxuriating in is Grigorjeva’s “On Leaving,” a mostly a capella modern composition influenced by 15th-17th century traditions of Russian polyphonic singing and sacred poetry.

You may not be familiar with this composer – I sure wasn’t. Galina Grigorjeva was born in Ukraine in 1962 but now lives in Estonia. Her works often highlight polyphonic layers and Slavonic sacred music, and “On Leaving” is no exception. While the piece briefly features a tenor soloist, a flautist, and some triangles, it is primarily a showcase for the chorus, given its pervasive atmosphere of ancient monk-like chants. She sources the text from prayers in the Orthodox church service book, “[…] on the Hour of Leaving of Orthodox Souls” and “On Burying Lay People.” Though the text is Russian, it might as well be Latin; it has underlying meaning but functions more as a vehicle for the sustained harmonies and interwoven rhythms.

img_6233

Mechanically, the piece demands a massive amount of concentration and intelligent breath control. It’s been a long time since I’ve counted to 8 for double whole notes in a piece, but long quasi-measured phrases call for it several times. Our conductor, James Burton, warned us today not to be fooled by so many white notes — producing them (and handling the breathing) cannot be boring. Each sustained note has to have a direction and a meaning within the local phrasing as well as the overall direction. He’s worked meticulously with us to make sure we are vertically tuned and aligned, that our counting and cutoffs are crisp, and that when we breathe, it’s with intent and purpose.

The combined effect of these opulent, sometimes discordant arrivals is the creation of an astoundingly beautiful meditative space. Even in the more somber parts, the beauty shines through; James described them as “like a dark cloud covering the sunny day.”

img_6235The second movement in particular is challenging (except for us basses, who have the luxury of holding pedal tones throughout). Parts overlap in rhythms of 4’s, 5’s, 6’s, and 7’s to create this many layered buildup of individual phrases stacked like warm covers on your bed in the winter. It reminds me very much of the second half of Part 7 of the St. John Passion by James MacMillan, a composer who also favored melismas and stacks of voices at different related rhythms. In both cases, the singing complexities lead to a transformative effect that’s hard to describe. It overloads your brain so that you stop perceiving individual lines and exist instead inside an expanded head space.

One other note worth mentioning. In our final piano rehearsal, we reached a moment where the chorus fused tightly together, as if we broke through the copious notes and adjustments and aligned to express the piece as a unit. It was exhilarating to finally reach “flow,” not just for this piece but as a chorus as a whole – the last time I felt that strongly was during the Pizzetti prelude performance two summers ago. James praised us for it afterwards, momentarily dropping his focus on technical fixes to encourage us to search for that moment again in performance. And personally, I love that we got far enough past the technical corrections to earn some coaching on how to distill the soul of the composer. There is a spirituality that this piece can’t help but communicate. We are going to change at least one audience member’s life when they witness this piece. I’m looking forward to it.

(We’re performing on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Tuesday evenings, though the Grigorjeva piece is not on the program Friday night.)

2 Comments

Posted in TFC

Tagged , ,

Peace on Earth

Posted on August 26, 2019 | 1 comment

I’ve never been so physically affected by a piece as I was by listening to a stunning performance of Schoenberg’s Friede auf Erden. 

This Sunday marked the closing concert of the Tanglewood 2019 summer season, and per tradition, it included a rousing, crowd-pleasing rendition of Beethoven’s Ninth enjoyed by all.  But that piece was prefaced by a first: the chorus singing on the Shed stage unaccompanied, with our chorus director James Burton conducting.  It was a reprise of Friede auf Erden, the closing number for the Friday prelude concert that I had missed. I was determined to hear it up close. So I waved my chorus pass in the faces of ushers and grabbed a good spot in the back row seats.

The piece is unrelentingly challenging for a chorus to sing — so much so, that Schoenberg was forced to write an instrumental accompaniment to support initial chorus performances. The tonality of the piece is constantly swirling, in complex voice leading dances that literally measure by measure transform from one harmonic space to the next. Triads are superimposed atop other triads.  A note that’s the third in one chord suddenly pivots in context to become the fifth of another.  The recurring word Friede has a theme that’s an odd but distinct juxtaposition of major chords.

Before the concert, I had experienced only brief flashes of the piece through some additional rehearsals that our conductor had arranged during my previous residencies.  He intended them as a jump start for choristers singing in this residency, but non-participants like me could join in. Those sing-throughs reminded me of the parable of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. As the parable goes, since each can only feel one part of the elephant at a time, they can’t truly explain or understand the whole beast. In those rehearsals, James often broke the piece down into two to four measure chunks, and walked through the extensive theory behind the phrases in each part. Here the basses were in one tonality, but pivoted two measures later to a related tonality as flats became sharps.  The sopranos get their entry note here, from this tenor note there; the altos and basses should target tuning to this perfect fifth like so, because they’re leading the way for the other voices to turn the dominant into the new tonic, and so on. James patiently (and excitedly) talked through the harmonic logic like a magician showing an apprentice where to hide the foam balls to make the trick work. I walked away from that with an appreciation of the complexity of the piece… but I only got to feel the trunk and the tusks.

With translation in hand, I sat with rapt attention and quickly lost myself in the piece. An MRI on my brain would have shown it lighting up all over, trying to keep pace with the harmonies, but also suddenly appreciating the powerful story being told. Divorced from the clinical this-then-this nature of the rehearsal segments, the totality of the piece consumed my cognition. At the warmup, James told the chorus singers that above all, they should move the audience. Fully concentrated on what I was hearing, I was subsumed by the emotional subtexts and subtleties that I had no idea were buried in the twists and turns of the harmonics. Somehow James and the chorus were bringing them out.  My invisible internal objects were fully connected as dissonant counterpoints became dramatic storytelling.

Then, at the closing lines of the piece…. how do I explain this? As the powerful choral forces climaxed and came into alignment with a brilliant D major finale, my shoulders started uncontrollably heaving.  There were no tears in my eyes, but my upper body just sort of began convulsing as if I were sobbing.  I felt so shaken by the enormity of the anti-war, somewhat naive message of hope: denouncing the complexity of our world and its faults, the bloody swords and shameful behavior of its population, with angels pleading for us to return to the Peace on Earth message they proclaimed at the Nativity, and us unable to get there on our own… but that some day we will get there, and that peace will once again be glorious. I was overcome for a few moments by the beauty and futility of it all right before the applause started, and then as the applause died I had sort of an aftershock as I returned to our family’s picnic spread.

To my wife, and all the other chorus members of that performance: all the hard work you put into perfecting those chromatic turns, aligning vertically with other parts, chanting text in warmups together, and pushing to get that last 5% of performance perfection… know that it was worth it and you achieved something monumental.  I can’t speak for what Beethoven-loving Romantic-era-craving audience members thought of it, but I was deeply moved. Congratulations.

1 Comment

Posted in TFC

Tagged ,

Suffering, oppression, and struggle

Posted on July 25, 2019 | 1 comment

Russian Soviet Army Fur Military Cossack Ushanka Hat (Black, 60 (L))страданье, гнет, and борьба!  The Russian words for “suffering, oppression, and struggle” sum up the Russian gestalt, as my good friend the Crazy Russian Dad confirmed. (He also suggested the chorus buy and wear these Ushanka hats, but alas, I don’t think they meet the summer dress code.) That is the world we’re entering as our chorus finalizes its preparation to sing Shostakovich’s 2nd Symphony on Friday evening at Tanglewood.

Both our Russian diction coach (Olga Lisovksaya) and BSO conductor Andris Nelsons spoke to us about the Soviet legacy, since both grew up under its shadow. They recounted the brainwashing in schools insisting that Lenin was the country’s god and savior. The two implored us to get past the distasteful propaganda-heavy text and sing the music for what it was. But honestly, I didn’t think that was too hard. Every time we sing a piece we are acting, whether we’re pleading to be spared God’s wrath, gluttonously worshipping false gods, or sadly bidding farewell to our maimed star-crossed king.  Heck, for Holiday Pops, Christian chorus members sing joyful Hanukkah songs and Jewish chorus members sing reverently about the Nativity. Is this that different?

This symphony, however, is odd. The composition includes some “abstract music” with unusual layering effects. It was commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution.  Shostakovich himself didn’t like the results, calling his 2nd and 3rd symphonies “completely unsatisfactory,” as he struggled setting the words to music.  The piece itself is rarely performed, unless a group (such as the BSO) decides to do a Shostakovich cycle. In fact, our choral scores were assembled just for us: the Cyrillic transliterated, the music photocopied, the pages spliced together from disparate parts. 

Having somehow dodged performing Stravinsky’s Les Noces and Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky, I finally had to learn how to pronounce Russian consonants and vowels that don’t exist in the English language (hint: it’s all in how you palatalize your tongue). I learned to be a good little Soviet who can sing the praises of Ленин and his revolution. 

If you’re listening this Friday night, here’s what to expect during these 20 minutes. The first section reportedly represents the chaos before order emerged, as clusters of instruments compete for attention. Then, there’s a meditative section described by Shostakovich as depicting a child killed on the streets. After that, more funky music including some beautiful solos.  And then the triumphant propaganda of the Oktober Revolution by Lenin, jarringly introduced by (I kid you not) a factory siren. In fact, Andris and the orchestra are still debating whether the siren should go full blast or stop at an F# for us to tune to.

While it won’t go down as my favorite Tanglewood performance, it’s been fun to lean into the role of devoted proletarians. At one point, Andris told us he didn’t think we were capturing the fervent adoration of the cult of Lenin when we shout his slogans before the finale, so he gave us this direction in his halting English: “I haven’t partaken of this, but… you know that new cannabis store that opened by the highway, with lines of cars around the block? Act like you’ve been there.” That’s right, baby… we’re high on Lenin this Friday!

1 Comment

Posted in TFC

Tagged , ,

What to expect in this Verdi Requiem

Posted on July 13, 2019 | 1 comment

If you’re a Verdi Requiem fan and are attending the performance tonight (or listening to it on streaming), what should you expect from a performance led by Andris Nelsons?

It won’t be the wildly varied performance led by Maestro Montanero at Tanglewood six years ago. Nelsons is steady and efficient with his tempi, with predictable accelerandos and allargandos, taking space where it’s needed without luxuriating in the gaps.  He lets the Verdi’s composition bring the drama, rather than indulging in it himself.

It won’t be the deliciously dramatic affair six months before that, led by Maestro Gatti, with his choral tricks to help us achieve the effects he wanted. In the prep work, Nelsons presented very few wacky innovations or interpretative variations to make the piece his own. Sure, he wants to evoke terror and desperation in the Dies Irae, to evoke solemn prayer in the Agnus Dei, to evoke tragedy and loss in the Lacrymosa, and a sense of wonder for the Great Amen to close the second movement. That’s all good in my mind — these choices aren’t revolutionary, they’re true to the Verdi Requiem.

In other words, what you should expect is a well-executed, traditionally realized, solid performance of a piece for the ages.

A few places where fans of the Verdi Requiem may notice something special:

  • Vertical tuning. This is an area that our choral conductor James Burton always emphasizes, but I think it makes a noticeable difference in the a capella sections. It’s the mentality of “don’t just sing your note – listen to the other parts and tune to a B-flat minor chord,” or “as the root, you’re the fifth of this inverted chord, basses, so tune it higher.”
  • Stronger marcato on the Dies Irae moving parts.  Nelsons took extra time with the descending voices, and the orchestra parts that double them. He wanted to ensure that in the iconic Dies Irae chant, they swing through with stronger weight at the end of the phrase.
  • A deeper Libera me chant. The one innovation that Nelsons gave us is something I’ve never seen or heard before in six concert runs. He asked any basses who could go down the octave during the restless chanting in the opening of the final movement to do so… and not to restrict ourselves to pianissimo. It certainly gives it a weightier, darker sound.

As for the soloists, I’m a big fan of Ryan Speedo Green, and the gravitas and power he brings to the bass part. The four of them have strengths and weaknesses, and were still learning to be an ensemble together during their first run through on Friday. Hopefully they’ll earn more praise than criticism in the inevitable reviews.

1 Comment

Posted in TFC

Tagged , , ,