Two of our pieces, Poulenc’s Ave Maria, and Pilgrims’ Chorus by Stephen Paulus, started out as opera choruses. Paulus based his 1997 “church opera,” The Three Hermits, on a Tolstoy story about a bishop and the three saintly hermits who enlighten him.  Modest in scope and resource requirements, it is notable largely for it’s choral writing.  Pilgrims’ Hymn, excerpted from the opera and published separately, has gone viral in the choral world—it was even performed at the funeral of President Ronald Reagan, in 2004.  Ave Maria comes to us by a somewhat more complicated route.  It was originally sung by soloists and chorus, with minimal orchestral accompaniment, in Act II, scene II of Dialogues of the Carmelites, Poulenc’s 1956 opera about the seizure of a Carmelite monastery in Compiègne in 1794, and the executions of the nuns who lived there.    It has subsequently been arranged as an SSAA chorus with piano accompaniment; in Chorale’s version, men’s voices sing the piano part.

Music for the Orthodox rite figures prominently in Chorale’s repertoire.  We are singing two settings of Bogoroditse Devo, (Hail, Mary), one by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, one excerpted from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s setting of the All-Night Vigil, a lengthy liturgy intended to be performed during the night prior to a major feast.  Igor Stravinsky, though not widely known for his church music, also composed for the Russian Orthodox Church; we will sing his Otche Nash (Our Father).  Finnish Othodox composer Einojuhani Rautavaara has also composed a setting of the All-Night Vigil, entitled Vigilia; we will sing a short excerpt from this work, entitled Litanian Ektena.

Chorale performs German music nearly every season, from both the Lutheran and the Roman Catholic traditions.  In fact, singers wishing to sing with us are required to sing one piece in German as part of their audition.  On this concert we will present music by two World War II-era Lutheran composers:  Hugo Distler’s haunting motet Fürwahr, er trug unsere Krankheit auf, and two movements from Johann Nepomuk David’s Deutsche Messe, Sanctus and Agnus Dei.  The tenors and basses of the choir will sing the Ave Maria as set by Austrian Catholic composer Franz Biebl—along with Stephen Paulus’ Pilgrims’ Chorus, one of the most celebrated a cappella works of the entire century.

The third “most celebrated” piece on our program is Alleluia, by American composer Randall Thompson.  I vividly remember the day Thompson died:  Grant Park Chorus was scheduled to sing a concert that evening, and right before show time, our conductor passed out copies of the Alleluia; we sang it, without rehearsal, for the usual Grant Park audience of thousands.  Most of us sang from memory, and nearly everyone in the audience knew it, as well; it was that famous a piece.  Rounding out our American group, Chorale will sing the Alice Parker/Robert Shaw arrangement of the Sacred Harp hymn, Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal, both in recognition of these two giants of American choral music, and in acknowledgement of the vast musical resources we have in these collections of early hymnody.

Only three pieces remain to be listed.  The first is a real oddity:  Komm, süßer Tod.  The original is a song for solo voice and continuo by J.S. Bach.  Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt has harmonized it for four voices; Chorale’s presentation, utilizing Nystedt’s harmonization, is organized as an exercise in choral improvisation by Swedish composer and arranger Gunnar Eriksson. It requires five conductors, and comes off differently each time it is performed.  The second, Benedictio, by Estonian composer Urmas Sisask, is so popular in the Baltic countries that it is sung at outdoor festivals by thousands of singers, as a statement of national identity and pride.  The third, the only English piece on our program, is the fifth movement of the Requiem by Herbert Howells, composed in memory of his son Michael.  Chorale does not sing much English music; I find the style to be very particular, and difficult for American choirs to achieve.  But this Requiem is a great favorite of mine, and of the choir, and we have performed it in its entirety twice.

Often, Chorale presents new and unfamiliar works, with the goal of surprising and edifying our listeners—as well as our singers.  There is a lot of worthy music out there, and we look hard for it. But this particular concert is not about that. We expect that nearly everyone in the audience will be familiar with one or more of the works we are presenting, and that some listeners will know almost all of them.  We want to give these well-loved works a hearing in an extraordinary acoustic space, where they can sound in their full glory, and where we can experience, again, the reasons they are so well-loved, and so persistent in the repertoire.   Please join us!  Sunday, May 19, 3 p.m., Monastery of the Holy Cross.

The term itself is Italian, and means “in the manner of the church,” or “in the manner of the chapel.” But Google lists many articles which assert that it means “for voices only,” and this is certainly the definition I learned growing up.  Musicologists assumed, based upon what they saw in musical scores from the Renaissance period, that church choirs sang without instrumental accompaniment.  An implied value judgment accompanied this assumption—pure vocal music, unadorned by the sensual colors and textures of instruments, pleased God more than concerted music did.  The college choral program in which I sang, and others like it, accepted this assumption and made the most of it;  choirs travel more easily and inexpensively if a tour’s success does not depend upon the quality of the keyboards in the venues along the way, and if choirs do not have to bring their own instruments and people to play them.

When I came to the University of Chicago as a graduate student, and began singing in Howard Mayer Brown’s motet choir, I discovered that a cappella probably had little or nothing to do with accompaniment; instruments doubled, or even selectively replaced, vocal lines in church music by such great a cappella composers as Josquin, Lasso, Palestrina, and Victoria.  Howard’s early music performance program included viols, recorders, and other, earlier instruments — even an early organ.  And the performances he organized through the music department, mostly for the benefit of his graduate students and interested antiquarians in the university community, featured these instruments.  I was fascinated by the contribution they made to the overall sound and impact of the Renaissance polyphony we performed.  This was nothing whatsoever like performances of similar repertoire presented by my college choir.

Howard and other musicologists discovered that the developing, retrospective discipline of musicology in nineteenth century Europe, while fostering a renewed interest in Renaissance polyphony, also fostered ignorance of the manner in which this music had originally been performed.  Nineteenth century composers, such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, Reger, and Bruckner, accepted the prevailing belief, and, inspired by the beauty and appeal of the early repertoire, proceeded to compose their own a cappella choral music with the intent that it be performed without instrumental accompaniment. These composers in turn inspired composers throughout Europe and the United States to write in what was actually a new idiom — an idiom based upon historical misunderstanding.  By the twentieth century we have a new musical genre:  the a cappella choir, performing a cappella music.  Texts, venues, and audience expectations have in many instances left the realm of “church” music, but the term itself persists, denoting simply “for voices only.”

The subgenre of a cappella music which Chorale will present in its spring concerts—settings of sacred Christian texts, sometimes but not necessarily intended for use in worship — has inspired composers to scale sublime heights, while challenging singers and conductors to develop an ever more exacting degree of technical precision, vocally and chorally.   The twentieth century could almost be termed “the era of the a cappella choir”—many composers made their reputations almost exclusively through composing relatively short pieces for virtuosic choirs, often presented in concerts which would survey the wealth of unaccompanied choral music available to singers and listeners.   I recall concerts featuring twenty-five to thirty different compositions, and almost as many composers. Audiences would sit through an entire evening, with one intermission, listening knowledgeably and appreciatively.   The composers whose music Chorale will perform demand exquisite control of intonation, of vocal color, of verbal diction, rhythmic articulation, and section-wide homogeneity.  Singers not only have to sing well, they have to listen well, agree closely with one another, and embrace a corporate artistic vision.  The personal latitude allowed an opera singer, for instance, is unthinkable in a good choir; expressivity and vocal idiosyncracy must be uniform across the ensemble.  The composers clearly expect no less. Their music is far too difficult to allow for any “freestyle” singing; and it would make little sense to the listener, were harmonic and rhythmic architecture not clearly delineated, and text clearly projected.

Chorale will present music by composers as generally celebrated as Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Poulenc, as well as by composers known only to choral afficionados, such as Distler, Howells, Sandström, and Biebl.  We will make reference to a number of different national styles, as well as to a number of distinct religious traditions.  All of the music, however, shares an important commonality:  it is written by composers of great skill and integrity, who work hard to share the very best they have to offer.  We are challenged to do this glorious music justice.

“But wait,” you say, “the concert isn’t until March 24.  You still have three weeks!”

Yeah, right.  We had already chosen to perform the St. John, secured our venue, and begun lining up soloists, by a year ago.  Our orchestra contractor, Craig Trompeter, had gotten commitments from key players. Megan Balderston, our managing director, had already fleshed out her grant proposals; choral scores and orchestra parts had been ordered.  I was already studying and marking my score; I had ordered representative CDs from Amazon.  Three weeks is nothing, in the world of concert preparation.

Three weeks out, we have already sent postcards, done a couple of email blasts, and arranged for radio ads.  Our posters are up; we are reposting, in those locations where they have already been covered, or taken down.  Stacks of business cards with our concert information on them are appearing in offices, restaurants, stores, and coffee shops.  We sent press releases to newspapers and radio stations long ago, to get them into the queue in time for our concert.  We have been selling tickets since September; currently, selling tickets is a high priority, for singers and management, both, and consumes us.  But we need also to build and set the stage! Write program notes! Lay out, type and duplicate the program booklet.  We have presented a public rehearsal/walk-through of the work for our more immediate supporters, and a listening guide is in the works.  I have a couple more such talks scheduled in the coming three weeks. We have already been arranged travel and housing for vocal soloists and instrumentalists who are coming in from out of town; inevitably, though, something will go wrong, something will need attention, between now and March 24.

Chorale has been rehearsing the choral parts of the Passion since the week after Thanksgiving.  Currently we are working on transitions: transitions between soloists and chorus, between slow and fast tempos, between our roles as characters (soldiers, priests, crowds) and our role as choir (chorales and choruses).  Chorale has only one day of rehearsal with the orchestra—that’s an awful lot of transitions to be sure of, in advance. We are still refining our pronunciation of the German text; our language coach, Steffen Mueller, will spend an entire rehearsal with us, this week, eliminating errors and reinforcing what we are doing right.  Some will agonize about pronunciation right up until the performance is over, though.

I study the score every available moment, especially the non-choral aspects of it, so that I will be ready for the orchestra and the soloists when we all get together, beginning two days before our concert.  So many tempos to set! So many dynamic levels to clarify; so many transitions.  So many page turns. And I will conduct another, totally unrelated, concert, March 15, with my other group, Chicago Men’s A Cappella; a concert which requires its own version of the responsibilities outlined above.  Of course, I don’t cover all, or even most, of these responsibilities, for either group; I just worry about them.

Oh, and did I mention that neither group’s season ends with these March performances?  I am busy choosing repertoire, preparing scores, and finalizing our roster, for Chorale’s May 17th and 19^tth concerts; and we are actively planning calendar, repertoire, venues, for the 2013-14 season, as well.  In the meantime, I am working with Mark Travis, producer of our upcoming CD of Schedrin’s The Sealed Angel (last November’s concert), listening to proofs and suggesting edits; others in our management are taking care of licensing, packaging, and sales of the resulting product—in moments carved out of our St. John production schedule.

I’ll bet I failed to mention that both Megan and I have children—in my case, four of them, ages 21, 9, 6, and 5; our respective spouses have full-time jobs outside the home, so that we both cover most of the day-to-day childcare and homecare this entails.  Oh—and my wife and I are in the process of buying a house.

It’s all happening NOW.  NOW.  NOW.

See you at our performance of Bach’s St. John Passion, Sunday, March 24, 3 p.m., at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 59^th and Woodlawn.  In real time.

Having chosen a piece, I wall off the emotional nature of the choice process and set about studying the music, justifying it, building a case for my choice and my approach.  I may start with Wikipedia or by asking advice and guidance from a music academic.  I gather and read books, articles, and even dissertations.  I purchase and listen to recordings and read the notes included with the CD’s.  I play through the scores on the piano.  I do all of this before I even order scores for the group, because if a work is available in several editions, I want to be sure to get the one most suitable to Chorale’s needs.  I have to be able to say/write something that is informed and helpful, long before we even begin rehearsing, to be used in our brochure, press releases, and newsletter concert announcements.  Then, during our rehearsal period, I write weekly blog posts, write emails to the choir, and provide information about the piece during rehearsals, usually off the cuff, so I have to have a good understanding of the piece throughout.  Chorale’s singers are smart and educated.  They listen carefully and will question the things I say.  If they feel they cannot trust me, our morale and sense of ensemble will suffer.

I have lived much of my adult life in proximity to the University of Chicago—I attended the University for four quarters and conducted its choirs for twelve years. Although I am no academic, I have been forced many times to justify my choices and statements to people who are, and I always think of these smart neighbors of mine as our audience.  They probably don’t pay as much attention to what I say and write as I think they do, but I don’t want to feel foolish or ashamed when I meet them in the grocery store.  I do what I can to maintain a certain standard—my impression of their standard—and to welcome, fearlessly, their skepticism and questions.

One must tread carefully, with both academics and performers, in preparing and writing about Bach’s St. John Passion. So much has been written, so much has been recorded, and there are radically differing approaches and convictions concerning the manner in which his music should be performed. One risks adding to the confusion and ending up with an incoherent, indefensible performance if one does not embark on this journey well prepared.  It has been my good fortune to have sung a lot of Bach in my life.  I love his music, my talents are suited to it, and I have had a lot of specialized training in performing Baroque music. I have sung his major works, as well as his motets and many of his cantatas, many, many times, under good conductors and with good colleagues.  So I begin my reflection and study from the standpoint of personal experience. I know what his music feels and sounds like to me, and can extrapolate from this some understanding of the problems, as well as the joys, my performers and our audiences are likely to have.

But I need more than personal experience, or the experience of my teachers and conductors, to tackle a problem so huge as the St. John Passion.  So I read a lot.  I began, in this case, with the magisterial biography of Bach by Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach:  The Learned Musician. It is a huge book, a summer’s worth of reading.  I have selectively augmented this with The New Bach Reader, recently update by Wolff, and Laurence Dreyfus’ Bach’s Continuo Group. Another invaluable, aid, has been Hearing Bach’s Passions, by Daniel Melamed.  A scholar whose journal articles and reviews have been extremely helpful is John Butt.  Robert Marshall, formerly a professor at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about Bach’s Passions, particularly about the perceived anti-Semitism in the St. John Passion, and I have had the good fortune to have heard a series of lectures on the same subject, presented by Michael Marissen at the Oregon Bach Festival.  And I have received a great deal of help and guidance from Dr. Uri Golomb, of Tel Aviv University.  I became aware of his Doctoral dissertation, Expression and  Meaning in Bach Performance and Reception: An Examination of the B minor Mass on Record, while preparing Chorale’s performance of the B Minor two years ago, and have corresponded with him since that time.  He has pointed me toward several helpful articles, answered random questions, and made me aware of a recent dissertation by Michael Troy Murphy, entitled Performance Practice of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passio Secundum Johannem: A Study of 25 Years of Recorded History (1982-2007) as Influenced by Events Surrounding the Historically Informed Performance Movement, which includes an exhaustive survey of recordings made during the specified time period.  I also have studied a number of different recordings, notably those by John Elliot Gardiner, Philippe Herreweghe, and Helmuth Rilling.

Altogether, preparing and presenting a Bach passion is a big job.  But it is worth every minute.

Another is far more mundane, at least at first glance:  how do we get it all done, with our personnel and resources?

I worked as a camp counselor during my college summers, near Isabella, Minnesota, adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.  Eleven miles down the road from us, on the Kawishiwi River, sat the Minnesota Outward Bound School. Almost anyone who cared about camping, canoeing, and the outdoors, was aware of the place, though I never knew anyone who attended.  Once, during free time, several of us counselors drove over to the place to check it out. As luck would have it, an enthusiastic staff person met our car, gave us a tour of the facilities, spoke at length about the program, and gave us some literature to take home.  What I learned about the program, that day, has stuck with me ever since.

New students, arriving at the school, were a surprisingly motley crew. Far from looking like Forest Service recruits or L.L. Bean models, many looked out-of-shape, pasty-faced, self-absorbed, whiny, and extremely uncomfortable– one would not have given them a snowball’s chance in hell of sticking with the program (which, as I remember, lasted several weeks), much less of accomplishing all that was asked of them. I had expected to admire them; I had expected to want to be one of them; and they disappointed.  Our guide, without referring specifically to the students we were seeing, told us that all were rated on their skills and physical fitness when they arrived, and then placed in groups– not in high, middle, and low groups, but spread out evenly, so that no one group had an advantage.  These groups, or teams, were then given tasks which required teamwork– the best example I can remember is an obstacle course of sorts, which included some really difficult problems like a high wooden wall over which each team member had to climb, one way or another.  No one person’s accomplishment counted for anything; only the team’s accomplishments mattered, and each team, as a unit, was required to complete the obstacle course.   The more gifted were not allowed to race ahead; the less gifted were not left behind.  If a guy could not get over the wall, his teammates pulled, pushed, and encouraged, until he was over.  Only through working together, and developing an objective, dispassionate view of its situation, could a team hope to succeed at all, much less to win.

Several weeks of this sort of regimen, experienced through a variety of outdoor, wilderness-related activities, was said to have a transformative effect on the students.  Yes, they learned skills and got in shape; but more important, they learned cooperation, teamwork, patience, appreciation of the particular strengths of others. Along with confidence in their ability to cope and solve problems, they learned humility; the program left nowhere to hide.

Richard Vikstrom, former director of music at Rockefeller Chapel, once told me that one could stand on a corner, choose the first forty people that walked by, and make a choir of them.  I believe, back in the early years of the Luther College choir, that is exactly what Weston Noble did:  took whomever he could get, taught them to sing, and developed techniques for making them sound good together.  I expect, in fact, that many choral conductors the world over do this as a matter of course.  Their groups have one or two, maybe a handful, of obviously talented, facile singers; the rest need a lot of help, encouragement, and training.  “Professional” choirs, in some cases, are actually composed of the cream of the crop in their respective locales and literatures.  In most cases, though, the word “professional” just means that the singers can be compelled to show up regularly and on time, and only indirectly refers to a musical product.  Choral conductors, reading my description of the newly-arriving Outward Bound students, must surely see the very image of a season’s first rehearsal:  How am I to get these people to sound like anything?  How will they ever sing Bach? Chicago Chorale has been around for twelve years now.  Those who joined early on have improved, and we attract better-prepared singers, year by year.  But the question always hangs there: will these people be able to sing Beethoven? Nystedt? Shchedrin?  A conductor presents the task, and requires that it be accomplished; but something must happen within the group, some growth must occur, again and again, which connects all the singers, greater and lesser, with their disparate gifts, into a willing team that gets one another over the wall, and in good time.  As with the Outward Bound program, the skills learned are effectively a byproduct of the experience:  the life lessons of cooperation, compassion, humility, patience, and generosity, are the real, fundamental prizes that will open Bach’s world to us, and enable us to share it.

The words began to be intoned (rather than just spoken) at least as early as the 8th century. This chanting of the text may have been freely interpretive in the beginning, but within two hundred years manuscripts began to specify exact notes to be sung. By the 13th century different singers performed specific characters in the narrative (as in the communal readings described above), a practice which became fairly universal by the 15th century, when polyphonic settings of the crowd scenes began to appear, also.  By the 16th century, Passion settings had evolved into a highly developed genre, with a number of different sub-genres, composed by the prominent composers of the time.  Martin Luther disapproved of the entire genre, writing, “The Passion of Christ should not be acted out in words and pretense, but in real life.”  Nonetheless, sung Passion performances were common in Lutheran churches right from the beginning of the Reformation period (1517), in both Latin and German, and by the 17^th century had evolved into the “oratorio passion” sub-genre, heavily influenced by the development of opera, which included instrumental accompaniment, interpolated texts, other Scripture passages, Latin motets, chorales, arias, and recitatives.

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions are the best known of this latter type; but oratorio passion composition by no means ended with his death.  The form continued to be very popular in Germany throughout the 18^th century—Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, composed over twenty settings, himself.  Interest in Passion composition waned during the 19^th century, but took on new life in the 20^th, with major settings by Krzysztof Penderecki, Arvo Pärt, Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, Mark Alburger, and Scott King. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar and Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell contain elements of the traditional passion accounts, as well.

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Oratorio’s close relative, opera, perhaps the major formal contribution of the baroque period, was well known in Lutheran Germany.  Handel and Telemann, Bach’s contemporaries, were celebrated opera composers, and many German courts and cities had opera houses.  The Leipzig town council, in hiring Bach, made their feelings about this modern, non-traditional form clear:  he was instructed to “produce such compositions as are not theatrical in nature.”  He was not to compose any operas, and his music for divine service was not to bear any trace of operatic influence.  Opera had briefly appeared in Leipzig shortly before Bach’s arrival, and the city’s response to it had ranged from skepticism to open hostility.  It is clear that Bach understood the possibilities inherent in operatic styles and procedures, and that his church music compositions, especially his cantatas, had already begun to absorb some characteristics of this art form; it is also clear that in composing his St. John Passion, first presented only ten months after his arrival in town, he chose to disregard the instructions he had been given, and to produce a powerfully dramatic work.  Rather than just recite the words of the narrator and characters, he imbues their music with profound expressiveness, in effect creating an imaginary stage for his listeners on which the story unfolds.  Unlike his procedure in his later St. Matthew Passion, which contains many contemplative arias, Bach limits the number of arias in the St. John, and ties these arias more closely to the action of the narrative, than he does in the later work.

No documents survive which provide evidence of first-hand contemporary reactions to Bach’s St. John Passion.  Thomas Seedorf, in his essay accompanying Philippe Herreweghe’s recording of the St. John Passion, writes, “[T]he many alterations Bach decided on (or was obliged to decide on) in the course of the performance history of the St. John Passion arouse the suspicion, at least, that his musico-dramatic conception of the Passion narrative was not accepted without opposition from the authorities. And can the great preponderance of contemplative sections in the St. Matthew Passion, despite the fact that the text of Matthew’s Gospel is by no means less dramatic than John’s account, be understood as a reaction to the perception of the St. John Passion as too ‘theatrical’?”

It’s some eight storeys high, and every choir’s dream – a great cathedral-like space that embraces the human voice with such warmth and passion that it makes singers feel that this must be at least something like heaven. Its vast walls and arches, constructed of some 72,000 pieces of Indiana limestone, seem made for song, from the magical voice of a lone soprano echoing from the choir loft high in the back to the beauteous harmonies of four and eight and even forty parts (think Spem in alium) rising from the marble floor of the chancel.

It’s in this place that Chicago Chorale is to sing the St. John Passion on March 24, the first choir from outside Rockefeller Chapel’s own choral program to be invited to take part in the new Quire & Place series.  This series, now in its second season, is presented by the Chapel and offers the greatest masterworks alongside contemporary music of outstanding beauty.*

Rockefeller Chapel – the spiritual and ceremonial center of the University of Chicago – is home to three resident choirs, training young singers to perform beloved classics and newly commissioned works alike, and also a celebrated venue for choral groups from around the world to sing. Recent visitors have included the Tallis Scholars, Cuba’s Schola Cantorum Coralina, and the celebrated Cappella Pratensis from the Netherlands, as well as Chicago a cappella and Bella Voce in repeat performances, and diverse contemporary groups from Sweet Honey in the Rock to the Middle Eastern Yuval Ron Ensemble (appearing February 15).

The Chapel has long featured the passion settings of Johann Sebastian Bach in the days leading up to the celebration of Easter, and Chorale’s performance of the St. John takes place on the Sunday known in the liturgical year as Passion Sunday (or Palm Sunday). It leads into a week of liturgical observance that includes this year a performance of Haydn’s Seven Last Words by resident ensemble the Spektral Quartet; Dupré’s Le Chemin de la Croix on the Chapel’s world-famous Skinner organ; and, on Easter Day itself, Vivaldi’s Gloria. Chorale’s St. John thus takes its rightful place in the religious calendar (of a Chapel which serves as a home for people of many faiths), linked to centuries-old sacred tradition as well as being of course a magnificent concert performance in keeping with musical custom of our own day.

Chicago Chorale’s performance on March 24 follows the group’s much lauded B Minor Mass at Rockefeller Chapel two years ago, and their triumphant Vierne/Schoenberg/Bach concert of a year ago, featuring the Chapel’s organ in the Messe Solennelle as well as the hauntingly moving Friede auf Erden sung a cappella by Chorale’s singers from the high gallery. Even though Rockefeller seats some 1,300 people in the orchestral stage configuration to be used for this event, we expect Chorale’s visit to sell out as did these two other recent appearances – time to get tickets!

Elizabeth Davenport is the sixth Dean of Rockefeller Chapel and leads its vibrant performing arts program. A musician since childhood, she sings with Bella Voce, and is delighted to be singing with Chorale in the St. John performance.

* Other concerts yet to come in this Quire & Place season, offered by the Rockefeller Chapel Choir and Motet Choir, feature the Rachmaninoff Vespers with newly commissioned works of Kala Pierson, Shulamit Ran, and student composer Katherine Pukinskis (February 23), and Mozart’s Requiem (April 20).

Photographs by Justin Kern.  See more photos

The point is—this musical setting, in its day, was immediate and purposeful.  Bach focused his extraordinary art, invention, and craft, not on creating “works of art, “ but on enhancing the worship life of his community.  Nothing about Bach’s performances required reverent, museum-quality reconstruction.  And it seems clear, from the casual, offhand way he treated his manuscripts, that Bach never anticipated the interest shown in his liturgical works—masses, cantatas, motets, passions– after his death. We, who study and perform these works nearly three hundred years later, are not Bach’s target listeners; I expect he would be surprised by our interest.  We treat his works with far more reverence, than he did.

I envy those who heard Bach’s works as new compositions– I imagine their anticipation, their pleasure and satisfaction, week by week, as new cantatas were tried out, and as Bach performed new works, or improvised on old ones, at the organ or harpsichord.  Our experience is so different– we hear these works completely out of context, largely divorced from the religious, as well as the social, worlds, for which they were composed.  We hear them as isolated concert works, as “classical music,” something very separate from the music that surrounds us in our daily lives, something that exists in a bell jar, to be appreciated and enjoyed by the enlightened; much as we view paintings and sculptures—once intended for daily use and viewing—in museum galleries.  We focus on their history, on informed performance practice, on musical gesture and rhetorical language; we try, through exhaustive study, to get it just right, and through getting it just right, to understand Bach’s genius and still-living appeal, across centuries of change.  We can never hear him, experience him, as his original listeners did.  No matter how hard we work to duplicate the physical conditions of his original performances, we can never be his original audience.  We are at best successfully costumed re-enactors.

So why put such emphasis and care into our performances of this music?  I frequently ask myself this, and related questions, when studying and performing music of earlier times.  What is it about our contemporary culture that has us always longing backwards, always history-obsessed, while around us everything is barreling into the future?  Were Bach alive now, what would he compose?  and why would he compose it?  A sizable part of me wants to perform the music of now, and support those who compose it, awkward and disoriented though it often seems to be.  I am powerfully attracted to the glorious, beautifully crafted music of earlier eras, only to be pulled up short by the realities of my life here and now; it is not healthy, to despise the present while worshiping the past—it leaves one culturally homeless and disconnected.

I do find that, the more I understand, in preparing his vocal music, what I sense Bach wanted to do—to powerfully reach and change his listeners, for the better—the more I am content to embrace much of what “historically informed performance practice” teaches me; his music just seems to work better that way, and to communicate more directly.  Nonetheless, there is much in my love of this music, and desire to perform it, which I cannot justify or explain, other than to admit that I just like it an awful lot.

Bach’s St. John Passion presents us with the canonic three fronts upon which we must fight for clarity:  language, pitch, and rhythm.  The first is the singer’s peculiar charge, and particular battle:  given a text, we must make that text clear to our listeners.  In terms of this particular work and its role in the liturgical calendar, one could argue that language is the most important element with which Bach works.  We do well to remind ourselves, now and then, that Bach’s job in Leipzig was, at base, to save souls;  and in his urgency to reach his listeners, he uses pitch and rhythm to clarify his presentation of text, to render it all the more effective and compelling.  The words of the Passion story, and their power to change the hearts of his parishioners, were his highest priorities. Not that he ever composes less than glorious music, or that his incredible musical invention and imagination can really be separated from his text setting; but his priority is to get the text out where listeners can hear it and be edified by it, learn from it.

Bach’s text is a compilation from three sources:  the Passion narrative from the Gospel of John, contemporary poetry which explores emotional and theological questions raised by this narrative, and familiar (to his target audience) chorale verses.  Each type of text is important; each requires careful presentation by the performers.  Some conductors and ensembles, honoring Bach’s primary purpose in presenting this work, choose to translate these texts into the native language of the performers and audiences for particular performances; most ensembles, though, sing the Passion in its original German, out of consideration for Bach’s considerable art and skill in setting that language.  The accents, rhythms, and sentence structure of German determine, to a startling degree, Bach’s rhythmic patterns and melodic contours; and these patterns and contours don’t necessarily fit another language so well. Most performers, and listeners, want to experience Bach at his musical best; we are not so compelled by his evangelical fervor, any more, that we are willing to compromise his art.

Nonetheless, it helps me, as singer and as conductor, to assume that the meaning of the text is paramount, and that the rest of what happens stems from it.  It also helps to assume that Bach fully intended that his listeners understand the words he had set– and that he succeeded in bringing this about.  The buildings in which Bach and his fellow church musicians performed were highly reverberant spaces, constructed of stone, glass, and wood; clear verbal expression was very difficult.  Voices could not be too “fruity”—they had to be relatively free of vibrato by modern standards, clear and unwavering in pitch, bright and somewhat “cutting” in quality. They had to be light enough in production that they could easily sing all the coloratura Bach required of them, clearly and absolutely in tempo.  Loud, heavily produced, broadly-colored voices would cloud the acoustic; and details—including all the details which make words comprehensible—would be lost.   A detached, almost staccato articulation would also have been necessary–a legato approach, in choral singing especially, would caused pitches in a reverberant acoustic to smear together, distorting on all three fronts: language, pitch, and rhythm.

German is a good language to sing, in dealing with such requirements.  The consonants are strong, the vowels are clear, and there are “stops” between words—all of which, when presented with a clear, bright, light, detached vocal production, contribute to a text’s comprehensibility in a difficult acoustic environment.  And the accompanying instrumentalists, responding appropriately to the singers’ priorities and needs, provide the same sort of lightness, articulation, and word-influenced accents—in fact, I suspect that an awful lot of what we now expect from “baroque” instrumentalists, in terms of style, articulation, volume, etc., is based not only in the physical nature of their instruments, but in the needs of the singers who collaborated with these instruments almost three hundred years ago, and who insisted that their words be heard and understood. If singers and instrumentalists alike are compelled to perform with this verbal comprehensibility in mind, compelled to communicate the Passion text to listeners, they will of necessity rein in and channel their resources, expending their energies far differently than they would be required to do in concerted music composed a hundred years and more later, when orchestra size and volume, as well as performance halls, had grown and changed to such a degree that composers were confronted with a very different set of priorities.

Whatever the level we reach in our performances, our work reflects certain core disciplines and procedures; we don’t go at this haphazardly, depending on luck and inspiration.  As Robert Shaw often said in rehearsals, the dove won’t land, if you don’t make a good nest for him.  The attached photo says it all:  what happens in performance reflects an immense, unseen investment. These past few days, I have been reminding myself of just what those disciplines and procedures are:

1. Auditions:  though Chorale does not pay its singers, we audition our singers very carefully.  They must have exceptional ears for pitch; they must read music; their tone must be warm, flexible, and easily produced; they must be able to negotiate their vocal registers cleanly.  They must demonstrate that they can think musically, learn and perform significant repertoire, and pronounce sounds that do not occur in English.  And they have to know when and how to back off and put ensemble values first. I am cautious in considering large, colorful voices, whose owners clearly wish to sing opera or other solo work—not because the voices are not good, but because I want to be sure the singers understand and enjoy choral singing.

2. Placement within sections: singers must be positioned where they can sing most comfortably and effectively, and contribute most positively. Each section must finally sing as a unit, whatever the contents of the section, voice by voice; I never want us to sound like a collection of individual voices and personalities.

3. Repertoire:  first, it must be worthy literature– we sing it because it is good, reflecting the highest aspirations of great composers, not because it reflects or inspires particular seasonal, ethnic, or religious sentiments.  Second, it must be repertoire suited to Chorale—to our size, to our talents, to our available rehearsal time, to our audience.  We want to be stretched; we also want to be reasonably sure we will accomplish the stretching. We want to stretch our audience, as well– but want them to enjoy what they hear.  Having chosen to be high-brow, we still want to be within reach.

4. Venues:  the spaces in which we sing are a big part of the overall musical experience, both acoustically and visually.  We seek venues which enhance our sound, and enhance our understanding—for the singers as well as for the audience.  On a practical, and sometimes conflicting, level, we also seek venues we can sell to audiences—there are many beautiful spaces in Chicago to which we cannot attract listeners.  We need paying audiences.  We have been fortunate in finding spaces which satisfy both requirements, and always have our eyes and ears open.

5.  Strong mission:  finally, we need to believe powerfully in what we are doing.  Singers, workers, board members, donors, will not continue to contribute if they are not committed to what we are doing– or if they sense that I am not committed.  We ask a great deal of our singers, knowing they can go elsewhere, or stop singing altogether, if they are not fed by the Chorale experience. We need to provide a milieu in which they feel supported and stimulated on many fronts.  They have to be proud of what they are doing.  Similarly, our many volunteers, singers and non-singers, have to be proud of our product and our ethos; and our board members have to feel that their time and energy is profitably spent.  And everyone involved needs to be confident that we will not fail to reach and maintain a certain level of performance, and that we will always strive to be better than we currently are.  We can’t afford to be less driven, or less idealistic, than we are.

I believe that the best music is made by people who love what they are doing, no matter their day job.  And I am convinced that people who make good music as well as they can, must be the happiest people.  This conviction underlies all of my work with Chorale. I am glad our work is bearing fruit, and that others are being fed.