The Bay Area Bursts Out Singing
by David C. Meckler
The San Francisco Chamber Singers, Robert Geary, Artistic Director and Conductor; May 10, 1998, San Francisco War Memorial Green Room
Peninsula Women's Chorus, Patricia Hennings, Director; May 16, St. Joseph Cathedral, San Jose; June 14, 1998, San Juan Bautista Mission
There are over 400 choirs in the Bay Area, and some of them are quite active with new music. The San Francisco Chamber Singers and the Peninsula Women's Chorus are excellent examples of involvement with new music. The two ensembles also reflect the high quality achieved by professional and community-based choruses in the Bay Area.
The concerts by the San Francisco Chamber Singers presented of four works by living California composers, with all the composers in attendance. A respectable range of some what is happening in contemporary music was reflected in this program. Mark Winges's Haiku Settings was delicate, beautiful, and modernist. The piece treated several American haiku. Each section opened with the vowel sounds of the following haiku; the consonants were added and the words emerged, much in the way that a printed haiku emerges from the blankness of a printed page. Many contemporary choral techniques were employed in this piece, such as glissandi and the use of sibilants as sounds-in-themselves, but the piece did not come across as a mere catalog of effects. As much attention was paid to the sounds of words as was to their meaning. The piece hung together quite well, in part due to the use of a reference sonority (not a tonic, but a point of reference). This reference sonority was based on fourths and fifths derived from the 5-7-5 numerology of the haiku structure.
Epitaphs, by David Garner, commissioned by The San Francisco Chamber Singers, received its premiere. This four-movement work was a mishmash of various Baroque and 16th century mannerisms, with a few turns that were perhaps Bulgarian in origin. Historical sources were much more artfully digested and on display in Morten Lauridsen's widely performed Madrigali; Six 'Fire Songs' on Italian Renaissance Poems (1987).
Winging Wildly, a new work by Kirke Mechem, closed the concert. While Mechem is a conservative composer, this piece did not look to the past as the two previous works on the program; instead it drew on the potentials of 20th-century tonality for vivid effects and dramatic word painting. The piece used three deftly chosen poems. The first, "Birds at Dusk," by Sara Teasdale, begins as if it is a sweet pastoral poem, but it takes a turn toward private melancholy at the end. The second movement, entitled "The Caged Bird," set the poem "Sympathy" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the poem mostly widely known by the use of its last line ("I know why the caged bird sings!") by Maya Angelou. It is a long text. Mechem handled the challenge of clarity by repeating lines between the male and female voices, and the performers helped with perfect enunciation. The concluding movement used a stirring poem that celebrated the end of World War I. It opens with the line, "Everyone suddenly burst out singing." Irresistible by any composer inclined toward choral music, I think. A phrase in the poem, "and the song was wordless," gave Mechem an excuse (as if he ever needs one!) to indulge in the mannerism that mars many of his choral pieces -- the use of extended passages of "la la la la" vocables. At least it was justified by the text this time, and the overall cycle of three poems was full of emotional and musical contrasts.
The concert was in the Green Room of the Veterans' Building in downtown San Francisco. While this space looks nice, it is rather dead and allows far too much traffic noise to filter in. The performers were not all distracted by this, and gave a superb performance. The diction of the chorus was superb; the words lept into the performance space. Robert Geary's charismatic conducting shaped the individual works as his selection of works shaped the overall program. It initially struck me as odd to begin the program with Haiku Settings, a delicate piece that could seemingly be bruised by bumping up against the non-concert world. However, it was good that this piece fell on fresh ears, and did not have to compete with an immediate memory of the more forceful or even bombastic tonal pieces.
The program performed by the Peninsula Women's Chorus was well chosen. It was a long and generous selection of works, but each piece occupied its own place in both in emotional and stylistic terms. Is there anything that this choir can't do? Although it is a large ensemble of over 60 voices, it gave stylish performances of early music (Hildegard von Bingen, and an anonymous 13th century work), contemporary music of all styles, and even the strident, striking sonorities of Bulgarian/Balkan folk music.
Indian Singing, by Ron Jeffers, is a terrific piece, and received a very convincing performance. This sort of work, which exhorts us to 'heal the Earth' from a Native American perspective, can be quite preachy, naive, sentimental, or redolent of New Age exploitation. However, Indian Singing avoided such pitfalls. For one thing, the text, by Gail Tremblay, was sophisticated and had a broad emotional range. The subtle strategies employed by the composer created variations that many listeners probably didn't even notice, but served to keep us engaged. I noticed them because I had taken a look at the score in advance. The work involves extended narration (somberly delivered by chorus member Priscilla Bates). The narration was one of three compositional elements woven together: repeated rhythm on a frame drum, the narration, and music from the chorus. These elements would enter and exit in various permutations: text alone, text with delayed entry by the drum, solo drum entry with later entrance of the text, an ostinato rising up from the chorus as another element drops out of the texture, and so on. The performance was exemplary. There were many difficult repeated rhythmic figures that the choir executed with absolute conviction. (The rhythms did not strike my ear as referring to any Native American music that I know.)
Three artful examples of a mainstream contemporary practice -- if there is such a thing -- included David MacIntyre's Ave Maria, which turned those very syllables -- Ave Maria -- into a light and bouncing post-minimalist texture. Bengt Johansson's Examine Me (Psalm 139) used an exquisite effect: eight solo singers picking off and sustaining individual notes in a descending diatonic scale, forming luminous diatonic tone clusters. (I thought the group was rushing at the end of the scale, but a quick look at the score told me that that was exactly what the composer called for, a shift from sixteenth notes to triplet sixteenths. This "piano pedal" effect was very precisely rendered, and the performance was just as precise.) The special tone cluster effect fit into the texture and did not poke out now and then as a gimmick. It was introduced early on in the piece, used a few times, and then brought back near the end a few times. It was well timed and well varied, as different modes were occasionally used. This piece had several different textures in it, yet it came across as a single sustained musical line. Hennings seemed to conduct the piece with a focused emotional intensity to produce this unity of effect. Another interesting effect was heard in Salmo 150, by Ernani Aguiar: incredibly rapid enunciation of Latin text. It sounded almost like a guitar strumming. This was extremely well executed by the chorus.
One piece particularly brought out the drama of live performance. This was the Largo from the Dvorak "New World" Symphony (in an arrangement made in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, and recently featured in the film, Paradise Road). The natural micro-theater of this piece was particularly enjoyable. As singers cautiously entered the ambiguous harmonic texture, their faces were filled with concern. As the harmony blossomed into confident correctness, smiles spread across faces like the warmth of a spreading sunrise; gesture was perfectly matched to music.
An excellent match between text and texture was displayed in Odysseus and the Sirens, by H. Garrett Phillips, and Urok, by Lojze Lebic. In the Phillips piece, eight sections of the choir spread out through the performance space, surrounding the audience. Various breezes and lapping waves made their "sshh" and "ssses" until the name "Odysseus" emerged. It is an almost foolproof idea, supported by having the story told both in the program notes and reiterated by the conductor, so the audience was sure to have a narrative interpretation of the special effects. The audience was definitely drawn in by the piece. I was very impressed by the composerly stroke at the end, when the piece had a false ending followed by three simple "ss" sounds trailing off as a very tiny coda. Similarly, the audience was informed that the text of Urok consisted of curses of and magic spells, so the bewitching combination of glissandi, aleatoric effects, speaking, shouting, simple folk-like tunes, and the banging together of sticks and stones (literally!) made perfect sense. This piece received a riveting performance, almost frightening, as the program translated some of the Slovenian text for us: "Take the marrow from the bone! Tear apart the flesh! Tear off the fur!" Fortunately, the audience did not run away (perhaps we felt protected from 'bad blood') and stayed to hear extremely engaging traditional and artfully arranged Balkan music. The choir completely changed its timbre for this music, taking its cue from the wonderfully edgy sound of the two featured soloists, Barbara Saxton and Jeanne Benioff.
These are only the highlights of a program that contained 24 pieces, all of which were performed from memory by the chorus. The fact that the chorus had the music memorized allowed Hennings to conduct with the slightest of gestures, such as coaxing forth a huge crescendo with a series of tiny encouraging nods.
These programs are appropriate to review together because of the relationship between professional and community musicians. At the San Francisco Chamber Singers concert, all four composers were present, and made a few remarks before the performance of their pieces. Kirke Mechem celebrated the fact that, unlike 25 years ago, today there are professional choruses and audiences that support them, and that those choruses and audiences support contemporary music. This is indeed wonderful. Equally wonderful is the vast amount of musical participation in the community at-large, and particularly when the quality is breathtakingly high as heard in the Peninsula Women's Chorus. All of the hours that these women had devoted in preparing the music gave evidence that the "gift economy" that sustains part of the arts world is functioning well.
David C Meckler
as submitted to 20th Century Music,
1 July 1998