I spent a mostly enjoyable two days at a small prestigious university near Boston this past weekend, exploring the music of nine young composers—three undergrads and six post-grads. I say “mostly” because I had to perform the post-grad works on a concert, and it was effing hard.
I’m a member of a professional vocal ensemble based in NYC. We have a regular concert season, though we occasionally do educational gigs like this, and they’re usually a lot of fun. However, for last weekend’s event the composers were primed ahead of time to make our lives kind of miserable. They were provided several months in advance with the ranges of the singers involved, and were apparently told that within those ranges the six* of us could perform anything the composers threw at us.
I could have predicted the outcome of this. What ensued was a body of five more or less excruciatingly difficult pieces for vocal sextet and one for quintet, which I got to opt out of, thank God, because I needed the rest.
Let it be said that all the pieces were quite fascinating. Texts used were Rilke (in the original German), Whitman, e.e. cummings, somebody I forgot, and a young poet named Jose Ballesteros who is evidently someone to watch. I absolutely loved his work.
One of the works for sextet was a very avant-garde (in my opinion a sort of old-fashioned avant-garde, if there is such a thing) performance piece, with a “text” by the composer herself. It began with us walking around the darkened stage with our cell phones glowing so we wouldn’t bump into each other. (Literally—that’s what the composer directed. I thought at first that the cell phones had some kind of significance, but no.)
The music consisted of random mutterings, sharp outbursts and fragments of eerie melody, “goat trills” (which are hard to do and tiring), and in my case, an endless section of repeated high C sharps. I wish I'd thought to count them, but I estimate there were about thirty of them.
The work built to a climax right before the end in what the composer indicated was to be “an orgy of despair,” involving screams, sobs, wails and vomiting noises, lasting some 13 seconds which is a long time in a situation like this. I didn’t participate fully in the orgy because in the next piece I had to sing a soft high D (please tell me where else in choral literature this occurs), and I didn’t want to stress out my apparatus.
My personal opinion is that if you want to make a piece of music depicting a violent human emotion, you don't write on the manuscript: "Scream and wail (and/or vomit) in despair here for 13 seconds." You compose some actual evocative music. But that's just me...
I doubt any of these pieces will end up in the standard repertoire for chorus, though some were more singable than others. Still, it was an interesting exercise for both the singers and composers, and we got to hang out together, conspicuously consuming food and stimulating beverages. We singers took advantage of the social time to gently apprise the students that there are certain protocols in vocal writing. For instance, in my case, just because a singer can sing physically sing thirty high C sharps within a minute or two doesn’t mean that she necessarily wants to. Or that anyone wants to hear her make the attempt.
One of the more fun parts of the weekend was the short reading session we had with the three undergraduate composers. Ironically, all of us singers thought that two of the pieces we read could conceivably get some traction in the choral repertoire. It seems the youngsters were writing stuff they actually wanted to hear, instead of making us run the vocal gamut to see if we came out intact.
Next on our agenda: a concert featuring the winners of our 5th Composers Competition. (I just glanced at the all the music, and there are no high Ds in it.)
*The full ensemble is usually sixteen.