Orchestral Conducting

Last weekend ECU Symphony along with Chamber Singers performed Mozart's Requiem. What a satisfying performance!! Dr. Bara conducted the amazing performane, and I observed him non compos mentis so as to pick up all I could from my teacher about how to teach and conduct an orchestra. It's a bit of a different language, as you can't turn to the violins and ask for things like, "Violins, could you guys put a little more breath in that sound," or "Cellos, could we find that dome-space resonance in that tone?" So if these tricks don't work, what does? Dr. Bara sang to them a lot, and actually Dr. Jorge Richter, the symphony's regular conductor, sang to them as well - "Trombones, I wonder if we can make your B-flat sound like [insert a b-flat pitch] taww, rather than taaa." Dr. Richter also demonstrated rhythms verbally - "DI-da-da-da, violas...Again!" And Dan gave the players the benefit of the doubt of being able to read music well, but that passage was just a mistake; so his response would go something like, "Careful that your dotted quarters aren't too long, clarinets."

Anyway...another geeked out post.

Today's Tunes...

So, I've been engulfed in my Choral Literature class the past several weeks, and I've heard some amazing music.
Obrecht wrote some fantastic music, Missa Caput in particular.
Palestria...WHOA! Go listen to his Pope Marcellus Mass...at least the Kyrie. Fantabulastic!
Thomas Luis da Victoria...good stuff.
My favorite: Josquin. Absalon fili mi.

I'd heard the music of these guys before, but not in context of what I have learned about their cultural time period. These guys were rock stars!

alright...now that my geek self has passed, Rachel Yamagata has been coming through my speakers. Jazzy girl. Good stuff. Cold Play's X&Y album has been playing in my vehicle. I like his voice, even though he sings with little resonance and solely from his throat. I certainly wouldn't encourage my choir to sing like that, but his voice fits his music well.

Hmm...this is a geeky post, but I am, afterall in graduate school.

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Todays Tunes...

Howard Helvey's arrangement of the spiritual The Time for Praying. Ooo...good stuff. I think I'm going to do this with our church choir.

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Today's Tunes...

So this is a much more fitting title for this section of my blog, rather than confining me to a specific day; we all know how well that worked out.

Today I've listened to Stile Antico, a choir of young British singers which has gotten its name out of a Renaissance idea. I have been listening to their album "Music for Compline" while working on a research & bibliography assignment. You can preview the entire album on Amazon, and I have particularly enjoyed tracks 5, 10, and 16. I think you will particularly like 10.

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Choral Scholars and Chamber Singers

Beautiful concert in a beautiful singing space! Here's the Ave verum corpus (William Byrd) I conducted. This is Choral Scholars, a small volunteer choir from Chamber Singers. You may not be able to readily tell that it's me, but rest assured that you aren't seeing some guy off the street and that it is in fact me...in that case, I guess it IS some guy off the street. THANKS FOR THE VIDEO, RACHEL!!

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Martin Luther

Yes, the monk in the 1500s...not the King Jr., and both equally respectable. But I have been doing a lot of reading lately...comes with the whole grad. school thing...and I came across a Forawrd he wrote to Georg Rhau's Symphoniae, a collection of chorale motets published in 1538. Avid music lover, you might like this as I paraphrase a bit:

 I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ! ... The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them...In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits...A person who gives this some thought and yet does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.

 I was eaing lunch in one of the dining places at ECU while I read this, and I burst out laughing. It was one of those moments where folks look at you and wonder...surely those moments are quite common for me. Hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed sharing!

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Concert FRIDAY

...no this is not another attempt at creating a catchy title in order to help me blog. We have a concert Friday night at St. Paul's Episcopal Church - high ceilings, where the acoustic rolls around forever, stone floors, 52-rank organ that is breathtakingly beautiful, and a beautiful chancel. Great place to sing and be heard...and with that kind of acoustic, you can in some ways be your own audience...
Chamber Singers will sing Calvisius, Brahms, Schumann, Boyce, Paulus, Rutter, Poch, and Alwes. And Choral Scholars (the graduate lab choir for the conducting students) will do a plethora of pieces. I am conducting William Byrd's Ave verum corpus, and hopefully all will work out musically on my part - I'm not at all worried about the choir (and I never really thought I'd say that). Hopefully I can calm myself internally to trust my hands to do everything right and my ears to hear what every beautiful note they sing.
It's going to be a great experience!

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Tuneful Tuesday

Matt actually gets the credit for this - Frank LaRocca's "O Magnum Mysterium"

Handel's Messiah, but only Part the First. I've listened to a few portions of Part the Second.

Poulenc's Gloria...again. I truly recommend getting this. See if your local library has it, and if it doesn't it is completely worth the bucks you'll use on it in iTunes. If at all possible, listen to it with the score (Dr. Simmons might be able to help you out; if you're really ambitious, J.W. Pepper.com can certainly help you.)

I brought back a little bit of the band Vigilantes of Love this morning, a band I started listening to in high school and had a crush on.

We continue our studies of Brahms in Chamber Singers, and more and more I see just how masterful, and surprisingly NOT dark, fatalistic, or sullen as might be the label he gets often.

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Workshopping middle and high school choral kids...

I taught...well, really congealed/ solidified, middle school basses a Patrick Liebergen version of a Handel piece from Joshua (which is really a Liebergen score influenced by Handel), and Morten Lauridsen's Sure On This Shining Night. The kids did really well, especially the high school guys. It was good to get back into teaching high school choral kids again, and I'm excited about conducting the Greenville Choral Society Youth Chorale! Great kids!

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Rehearsal.

Today in Chamber Singers, the group that's doing Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light and Brahms' Schaffe in mir Gott, we rehearsed the Brahms and the Boyce Ave Maria, which I completely undercut and diminished in a post a couple of weeks ago b/c it's fantabulastic. Rehearsal didn't go so well as far as revisited notes. Under pitched and in certain circumstances completely wrong: not-even-in-the-same-zip-code-as-the-correct-pitch wrong. I could sense that Dr. Bara was not well pleased, and he did a marvelous job of not adding his unhappiness to the equation of a bad rehearsal. And he sends an email to each performer to express his disapproval. The first sentence: "Dear colleagues, We are better than today’s rehearsal suggests...." Dagger to the heart. We understand he's disappointed, but this sentence in the context of the entire email tells us that we should be too. "New music [Ave Maria - we've rehearsed it two days] must be approached with zeal, energy, curiosity, and absolute fearlessness. Who’s going be the one to nail it first? To make the first mistake and fix it? Older music must be approached with mindfulness of all that has been learned before, musical sensitivity, a vigilant ear for intonation and tone, and a renewed commitment to make it better piece than when we left it." Aside from all that I learned about being a conductor in this email, this letter enlightened not only an approach to music but an appraoch to life. Translation/ correlation/metaphor for life: We're two weeks into the new school year, the giddiness of newness has subsided...or should have. When do we decide to move from there? Do we decide to move from there? If we don't decide to move on, there is a major problem. When we approach a piece of music, Scripture, marriage, or anything that we love that is of substance to us, anything that captures our emotional attention, when do we decide to move from the "giddiness," the on-the-surface of it into the exertion or excercise or application or utilization of it? Two weeks? Two years? Two days? Two hours? I think when we can answer something like the latter, we've found something profound.

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