Caveat Lector

Believe it or not, I’ve been puzzling over Duruflé’s Requiem since last spring’s epic post about it. I wasn’t happy with my own sense of the piece, was dead sure I was missing something.

I’m starting to get it, I think. It’s taken me a while, and a lot of listening to our concert CD, but I’m starting to get somewhere. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve had to confront death by proxy a time or two since then (though I am happy and relieved to report that my friend’s cancer was caught early, she came through surgery with flying colors, and her prognosis is excellent).

What I was missing, I think, was the stance that the composer has the singers taking toward death. Most Requiems treat singers alternately as Greek chorus and evangelist preacher. If you aren’t scared of the final judgment going home from Verdi, there is something wrong with you; Mozart, too, hammers home the enormity of death and the desperation of the last days. Even when Mozart and Verdi admit grief into the picture, it’s a curiously detached sort of grief, a grief too large to be personal, a Greek-chorus grief. Mozart’s Lacrimosa is beautiful, but it laments everyone’s death, the fact of death, not the mundane reality of individual sorrow.

In Duruflé’s Requiem, the singers represent the mourner. Not the funeral officiant, not the stern warning from heaven, not the community, not humanity—the individual mourner learning to cope with loss. That is what I was missing, and it makes everything make sense.

Mourning is messy. There’s more to it than sorrow: shock, anger, helplessness, relief sometimes, restless confrontation with (or even defiance of) personal mortality, fragile moments of pleasant remembrance. Eventually, with luck, mourners accept the death and remember how to live their own lives, but the road to acceptance (or at least resignation) is full of potholes and U-turns and switchbacks.

I won’t go all the way through the movements again, not least because I suspect different conductors have different ideas of the exact emotional content of each one. I do believe this Requiem is about the journey through loss, however, and I’ll remember that should I ever have the chance to sing it again.

Monday was Fairfax Choral Society’s first post-holidays rehearsal, and as had to be, it was a sight-reading run-through. As a group, we’re moderately good sight-readers; we wouldn’t make it as a real Hollywood chorus (do they even get rehearsals?), but we do all right.

The next concert is Hollywood Goes Choral II, a sequel to the highly successful function a few years back in which (I have it on good authority) our esteemed conductor showed up onstage in full Darth Vader drag complete with lightsaber to conduct a Star Wars suite. I’m not sure how he’s going to top that. I suspect he’s going to try.

Harry Potter is inescapable; we’re doing the John Williams hack of Shakespeare’s witches’ incantation. (In case we should miss its origin, Mr. Williams kindly offers the meaningless tempo marking “Witchlike.” Retro me, composers who get too cute.) I think the same thing I thought when I saw the movie (don’t you start with me; it was a with-friends outing), which is that the chorus in the movie was excellent and should have been given better music.

(I don’t think we get to bring toads onstage. Too bad. I could catch some at my condo complex!)

When I told my husband we were doing a piece from That Asinine Sinking-Ship Movie, he turned a look of horror upon me and gasped, “Celine Dion??” Good heavens, no. No, no, no. The gooey-saccharine choral bit we’re doing is bad enough, but if our conductor tried to get FCS to cover something by that woman, half the choir would quit. Including me!

That’s it for music I could live without. The rest is above-average decent stuff. A gentle Welsh-inspired lullaby from a movie I’d never heard of plays to our strengths as a chorus, I think.

As a high school senior, I fell utterly in love with Henry IV Part I. Loved it loved it loved it, wanted to play Hotspur (for all his manifest faults) as a trouser role, wrote about it and its sequels at length on the AP English exam. (They fired us an essay question about father-son relationships in literature. How could I lose?) So of course I went to see Henry V when it came out, and of course I fell in love with its “Non nobis,” and of course I’m just tickled that we’re singing it. So that Sir Laurence Olivier doesn’t feel left out, we’re doing a couple of pieces from his Henry V too.

And then there’s a short ton of Russian: a piece from Hunt for Red October that’s every bit as bombastic as you’d expect (but in a fun, not-to-be-taken-too-seriously way), and Prokofiev by way of Hollywood, the Alexander Nevsky suite. Again, nothing unexpected there: Prokofiev cheerfully ripped off Russian folk music and gave it a nationalistic gloss, just like many before and after him.

(You can take the librarian out of linguistics but… I immediately started scribbling Cyrillic above the transliterated text in my score just to see if I could still write it after $DEITY-help-me more than fifteen years. I can, but I’m rusty. I’m going to try to finish the job, though, because it’s honestly easier to read Cyrillic than a transliteration of it.)

The jewel of the concert is the suite from Triumph of the Spirit, which the composer himself is making the trip to DC to conduct us in. The moviemakers went to the trouble to get words written in Ladino—I rather suspect (based partly on what Howard Shore did to David’s painstakingly-composed words, partly on what I see in the score itself) that the original writing was somewhat maltreated in the composition process, but what’s left is mostly comprehensible as Ladino.

(I’m completely stuck on one word—I checked both print and Web Ladino dictionaries for it and every way I could think of that it could have been misspelled or mis-transcribed, but I came up empty, as did David when I asked him to try to find me a Hebrew cognate. Unfortunately, there’s not enough context for me to make an educated guess about its meaning. I also sent a substantial infodump about Ladino to our conductor, and queried a couple of places where I don’t think the text matches what I understand to be Ladino usage, because I’m persnickety that way—last vestiges of my ill-fated study of Hispanic philology, I suppose.)

It’s excellent music. Well-considered, well-orchestrated, emotional, smart music. I’m very much looking forward to working with its composer, and you should all come to hear it—the concert is March 31.

Normally I leave memes over on LiveJournal where they belong, but this one was so classic I had to crosspost it:

Okay, okay, I admit last Saturday’s concert was not my most shining musical moment ever (just really out of voice for some reason), but this is just cruel!

Last night’s concert was immense fun. Few tempo problems, and a false entrance or two (not from me, for once!), but nothing that messed up the fun, which is all that counts.

Now I’m trying to decide whether I’m feeling rundown because I’m just tired, or because I’m finally coming down with David’s cold. Ugh. Oh, well, at least I made it through the concert.

Conductor instructions one doesn’t hear every day: “Less lyrical, more drunken.”

If you guessed “The Wassail Song,” gold star for you.

Seriously, it was a good rehearsal and it’ll be a fun show. Watch for the shades, that’s all I’m gonna say.

I’ve been very short on sleep this week, partly because of jet-lag, partly because of unhappy knee, partly because of crazy busy, and partly because of an unholy cold David came home with (thank you, crowded airports) that’s been keeping both of us up nights while he coughs his lungs out. It all caught up with me at 6:30 this morning, whereupon I emailed in sick and slept for six hours. Definitely feel better now.

Bum knees don’t like rehearsals with the orchestra. Lot of sitting and standing and sitting again and people nudging past and very close quarters that don’t let the leg rest comfortably and ow ow ow ow ow.

But it did better than I was afraid it’d do, and I think I’ll be able to get by without the cane come Saturday, which is something of a relief, because bringing a cane onstage is just asking for it to fall noisily on the floor at the least opportune moment. (Standing I can do. Getting up from armless chairs can be a challenge sans cane. But I managed.)

This concert mostly survived first contact with the orchestra, so chances are it’s going to be a very good one. Our soprano soloist is a righteous voice, absolutely glorious, and no wibble-wobbling in sight. The whole concert’s worth it just to hear her speak peace unto the—er, that is, sing Handel.

Have to go through the whole rigmarole again tonight; then I get to rest up Friday and most of Saturday. Come see us! You won’t regret it.

One group starts thinking about Christmas even earlier than marketers: musicians. Christmas concerts are invariably a race to learn huge amounts of music in teeny-tiny amounts of time. Was so when I was a bitty high-schooler half my lifetime ago, is so now that I’m a grown ex-Jew who sings Christmas music for fun (though not, alas, for profit). So I apologize for bringing up the holiday season vastly too early.

Even with the rush, though, there’s always time for a good prank… our conductor raised his hands to start us off with a little Handel—and we gave him Handel. Did we ever. “ZAAAAAADOK THE PRIIIIIIIIIIIEST! AND NAAAAAAAAATHAN THE PROOOOOOPHET! ANOOOOOOOOINTEEEED SOLOMOOOOOON KIIIIIIIIING!”

“Yes, yes they did,” he said, that really being all the poor guy could say under the circumstances. “Er, where did you get your pitches for that?” (Our accompanist was in on the prank, carefully plunking out the right chord as though randomly exercising his fingers.)

There’s a lot of Christmas music in the world. A lot a lot. Fortunately, a lot of it is fairly easy, because composers have to scramble at Christmastime too. Much of it is twee. Much is overused. Some of it is cringingly dreadful. Bits and pieces (as long as I’m picking on Handel) create unsavory mental images involving sheep. All of this is only redeemed by the indisputable fact that Christmas has inspired some amazingly good music.

For my money, the best music ever written for Christmas is Tomás Luis de Victoria’s motet O Magnum Mysterium. I can’t even be articulate about how wonderful this piece is. It just is. Go and find a recording by someone good (this one at Marquette manages not to be completely horrible, but I’m afraid they’re not feeling the wonderfulness much). We’re not singing it; I remember it fondly from high school, is all.

As you might guess from the above recommendation (the text of which, if my getting-rustier-every-day Latin will serve, begins “O great mystery and admirable sacrament, that the animals should have [first] seen the newborn Christ lying in the manger”), I prefer Christmas music that emphasizes humility, hope, and shared humanity.

So I’m cool toward the famous Hallelujah Chorus (which also isn’t on the program); it’s great fun to sing, but it’s a bit triumphalist for my tastes. I much prefer “For unto us a child is born,” which we are singing. The text veers between the domestic, immediate, familiar joy of a just-born baby to the immense, world-spanning vision of what this particular baby will grow into. The genius of Handel’s setting (which, being Handel at Christmastime, he cribbed from another of his works) is that the triumphal future doesn’t eclipse the gentle present; except at the very end, we always return to the quieter title line and its almost self-absorbed melisma.

For spine-tingling melodic beauty, you can’t go wrong with “O Come Emmanuel.” The more modern “Still, Still, Still” on our program tries for a similar sense of serenity, and doesn’t miss by too much (which is, admittedly, damning with faint praise—but there’s so much truly great Christmas music that the merely good runs into trouble). We’re doing “O Holy Night,” of course, but that piece is ruined forever for me, because my best friend in high school sang the absolutely definitive, not-to-be-improved-upon rendition in her crystalline lyric soprano long ago. (In passing, though, there is nothing worse than “O Holy Night” done with a big wibble-wobbly vibrato, as it too often is. Ugh, the wrongness. Makes me want to boil my ears out with lye.)

I don’t know quite what I think of classically-trained choirs doing gospel or calypso or the like. Leaving aside that the effect is at best mildly bizarre and at worst wince-worthy, there are serious issues of cultural (mis-)appropriation and stereotyping to think about… but for classically-trained choirs to shy away from that music altogether risks marginalizing plenty of people who deserve to be visible and audible at the holiday table, so—I don’t know. We’re doing a calypso number. It’s a fun sing. Take it for what it’s worth. It’s much better music than this one weird frantic John Williams thing that’s in the program, I’ll happily give it that.

I love me some good English 6/8 caroling, and our program has plenty, even though the silly arrangers go and write it in 3 or 2 to keep the orchestra happy. But we’ve got your gossipy “I Saw Three Ships” and your wassailing song (in an amusingly sly arrangement that features both chorus and orchestra demonstrating a few effects of overindulgence). Also some standard favorites I won’t bother discussing, though I will note that I cannot sing “Ding Dong Merrily On High” now without hearing my coworker Jamie’s parody from last year’s library holiday party: “Ding dong merrily on high, the loading-dock bell ringeth! Ding dong verily some guy, deliv’ries for us bringeth…” So if I break up laughing in the middle, now you know why.

There will be cute little kids singing, and there will be carols for audience participation, and there will be Handel (sans sheep), and there will be “O Come Emmanuel,” and there will not (thank goodness) be a choral rendition of “Sleigh Ride,” and at one point there will be me hitting a high G-natural (trust me, this is an event), and there will be either the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra (with its awesome brass section) or the City of Fairfax Band, and the performance with the band is free (though you should call for a ticket to be assured a seat), so how can you lose? I know it’s dead early to be thinking about this stuff, but save a date anyway, won’t you?

The next Fairfax Choral Society concert is “Music for Royal Occasions” with the Washington Symphonic Brass. (Logistics details here.) Unfortunately, I’ll have to sit this concert out; I agreed to the ETD 2006 conference not realizing that it conflicts with mandatory dress rehearsal (which turns out to be the day before the concert rather than the day of). My own stupid fault; I’ll take my lumps for it. I can still sit in on rehearsals, and I have been.

If you’re expecting pompous bombast from this one, given its title… well, yes, we’ve got that. Fortunately, that’s not all we’ve got. I’m quite looking forward to the concert openers by the Washington Brass, because there will always be a soft spot in my wizened ex-medievalist soul for Hildegard von Bingen.

Gabrieli’s In Ecclesiis is pleasant and gentle enough; we have some work to do to tune it, but we’ll get there. The Purcell pieces, written for Queen Mary’s funeral and shortly thereafter used for Purcell’s own, highlight Purcell’s talent for setting English text, English being a peculiarly horrible language to set music to.

Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” is… look, composers have their own styles, I get that. Handel, though, often feels to me as though he’s outright cribbing from himself. “Huh,” said my next-door neighbor at last rehearsal. “Doesn’t that feel like the Royal Fireworks music?” She hummed along with the piano, and sure enough… whereas I had already noted plenty of Messiah cribs. It’s bog-standard Handel. If you like Handel, you’ll like it. If you don’t, you can at least come up with a drinking game for the too-familiar-sounding bits.

(Could be worse. Purcell was good at setting English text. Handel wasn’t—no surprise, as English wasn’t his native language. This piece doesn’t have any embarrassing “All we like sheep” moments, at least.)

My only complaint about Ralph Vaughan Williams’ graceful “O Taste and See” is that it’s too short. As that is my standard complaint about Vaughan Williams, it can safely be ignored. Listen for this one, as it should be a program highlight if we find a good soloist.

The program’s incipient trainwreck is William Walton’s “Coronation Te Deum.” It’s a tough piece. I admit I don’t like it very much, not for its complexity and difficulty, but because a lot of the hard bits feel pointless—call-and-response that doesn’t work very well, silly rhythm tricks that don’t add anything to the text, bombastic fanfare accompaniment that feels like it has a different agenda altogether from the chorus’s.

I’ll gladly work hard for a piece that feels like good music. This doesn’t. This feels like Walton was trying far too hard to be Cool and Rad and Modern. Not that I won’t work hard anyway. It’s just a harder sell; I have to make myself sit down with my rehearsal CD. I’m tempted to check the music press of the time (it was written for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953) to see if anyone reviewed this piece, and what they thought of it.

The real winner in this program is Tavener’s “Song for Athene,” which was sung for Princess Diana’s funeral. This is a wondrously spooky-ethereal piece that will make you shiver and sidle closer to the person next to you. It expresses deep pain without sensationalizing it, and offers hope without trivializing grief. I am deeply impressed with it, and I think (based on what we did with the Chilcott) that we have the chops to pull it off.

I do wonder a little about its placement in the program; it leads directly into the concert finale, the too-pompous-for-words Parry “I Was Glad.” I might have switched it with the Vaughan Williams, as a welcome antidote to Handel—but it’s not my program, and I’m no conductor anyway.

It’ll be a good show, if we can pull the Walton together.

I walked up to get my name tag just as a new chorus member was arranging for receipt of his music and rehearsal CD.

“What part do you sing?” the chorus manager asked him.

“Soprano,” he said sepulchrally. Everybody nearby broke up laughing.

(Hey, it could have been true. Nobody would figure me for a weak little countertenorish warble…)

Seats get reassigned every year, so I had high hopes of getting off the front row. No such luck. I figure they figure if I’m singing the right stuff, everybody else must be too. Keep the pros close—and the pathetic amateurs closer…

But when Noah lined up the animals for a group photo before embarking, the elephants were in back. I’m just sayin’.

I’m listening to the CD recording of our concert from last May, and dancing about in glee at the amazing amounts of non-suckage I am hearing. Ladies and gents, we sounded good, even accounting for the cleanup I know perfectly well was done on the raw sound.

Rehearsal tonight was fun, even given the inevitable incipient trainwreck. I’ll talk more about the next concert soon.