Bringing Today's Choral Composers into Your Community

Music festivals typically celebrate composers who are no longer with us. And while the likes of Mozart and Bach certainly are worthy of any homage we can pay them, one wonders, do you have to be dead (usually for a very long time) in order to rate a whole program (or a whole weekend) devoted to your music?

A number of choral organizations, and not least of all, choral composers themselves, have answered that question, "Of course not."

Eric Whitacre has, for years, put on regional choral festivals, mostly on the West Coast, showcasing his choral compositions. One of the most popular and performed composers of his generation, Whitacre has developed quite a love affair with his mostly young fans, who have embraced him as their own personal rock star. And he enjoys nothing more than being able to massage a sea of voices into the vision that he had in his head when composing his music.

Typically, at a Whitacre festival, five or six high school choruses come together, perform individually, and then join a top college or semi-professional choir for a massed concert. "It's a way for me to work with as many young people as possible in one shot," he said.

Whitacre had dreamed of doing a similar kind of thing in Minnesota, where choral singing is revered from cradle to grave. Whitacre asked long-time friend Anton Armstrong, music director of the world-renown St. Olaf Choir, what he thought of the idea. "Great," Armstrong said. "Let's talk to Philip."

That would be Philip Brunelle, the founder and artistic director of VocalEssence. A big supporter of the music of today—VocalEssence has commissioned some 122 new choral works from living composers, and counting—Brunelle and his staff were cooking up plans for the ensemble's 40th anniversary season. A Whitacre festival fit the bill perfectly.

"What I didn't realize was that Philip doesn't sleep and has more energy than all of us combined," Whitacre said with a laugh, "so a month later he calls and says, 'Here's what we're going to do.' He had mapped the whole thing out. He had this concept for a much bigger thing than I was originally imagining."

Dreaming Big: Uncharted Territory

The general plan was to have choirs of different ages singing Whitacre's pieces in a massed concert—the adult VocalEssence Chorus and its smaller professional Ensemble Singers, the college-age St. Olaf Choir, and an honors choir made up of auditioned high school students from all over the state and the region.

Then with Whitacre on hand for the whole weekend to rehearse his pieces with the various choirs, Brunelle and his staff made a list of related outreach events for the choral music-loving community. How about a community sing where choral musicians, young and old, could sing through some pieces with Whitacre? What about having choral directors all over the state come to observe Whitacre preparing the choirs and to engage in a dialogue with him?

And by the way, Mr. Whitacre, how would you like to write a new piece to premiere at the concert?

"It was a festival on steroids," Whitacre said, but in the end, he agreed to all of it. The date was set—still a year and a half out. But it would require every last moment and a Herculean effort by staff and dedicated volunteers to pull it off.

VocalEssence has extensive experience putting on festivals. Its two-week long festival in 2007 celebrating American composer William Bolcom—featuring 13 performances in venues all over the city, plus multimedia and live video—dwarfed in scope and length even the hyper-charged plans for the Whitacre festival. VocalEssence has often collaborated with the St. Olaf Choir, putting on joint concerts every two to three years. About a quarter of VocalEssence members are St. Olaf grads, owing in part to this association, and Sigrid Johnson, associate conductor of VocalEssence, is also on the faculty at the college. "It has been a wonderful place for many of our students, after their time at St. Olaf, to find a challenging and artistically rewarding choral experience," Armstrong said.

But VocalEssence had never assembled a high school honors choir before. "While we have great relationships with the music educators in our community," said Mary Ann Pulk, VocalEssence's managing director, "we do not have a standing program that engages high school choral singers."

What was needed was someone with strong connections with the high school choral directors across the state, who understood the opportunities as well as the challenges. That person was Bruce Becker, who had directed high school choral groups for 20 years and was currently working in music education at the regional level, and a relatively new member of the VocalEssence board.

Becker began by reaching out to his friends and colleagues, veteran high school choral directors who had experience mounting all-state choral activities. "I asked four people, one for each voice part, to be on the dream team," Becker said. "These were people who had a connection with the professional world of singing outside of their classrooms and also had experience working with kids in an effective way."

Finding the Best Students

The dream team's first order of business was to establish the criteria for the audition process. They looked at several models, borrowing the best ideas from the ACDA honors choir projects and all-state choir projects, to create a process that was both simple to implement and rigorous.

They asked students to audition through a CD recording rather than in person, which isn't done very often in all-state circles. Students had to record themselves singing an Italian aria—in Italian—as well as vocal exercises. "We didn't want thousands of students applying," Becker said, "even though thousands would want to apply. We figured that if you could survive the audition process then you already had demonstrated commitment. We could cut to the chase and get the student who was very, very interested. In this way, we were able to hone and laser our search for the very best students."

Despite the rigor, some 400 students sent in audition CDs, quickly inundating the VocalEssence office. Staff cataloged and sorted the recordings and then sent them off to the two choral directors (per voice part) who reviewed them. The students filled 160 slots representing some 90 high schools.

Five kids were chosen from White Bear Lake High School outside Minneapolis, known for its excellent music programs. All of the singers had already sung Whitacre pieces and were huge fans. "He's like the Beatles to us," explained Shane LeClaire, a bass. William Haugen, a tenor, went further. "He's like a god to us. In our age group, choir is like, oh well, choir. But with Eric, choir is CHOIR."

Second soprano Amber Rose Jael made the seven-hour trek by car to Minneapolis from far-flung Badger High School located in a small rural town just 11 miles south of the Canadian border. She had heard Whitacre's music but never sung it. "We have a really small choir, in grades 7 through 12, with only 30 people," she said. "We don't get to do much challenging music, so this is really a wonderful thing to be able to do."

The students were expected to download rehearsal tracks for their voice part, put together by VocalEssence section leaders, and to arrive at the festival with their parts learned.

The proof, of course, would be in the singing. On Friday morning, the students walked from the downtown hotel where they were staying as a group, to the Central Lutheran Church, their rehearsal venue for the weekend. A huge cheer went up when Whitacre took the podium, and then the choir settled down for its first run-through of "Lux Aurumque," one of the pieces they would be performing by themselves in the Sunday massed concert.

After changing up the tempo on the first phrase to test the singers' ability to follow the baton, Whitacre smiled. "I have some new Animal Crackers pieces [set to poems of Ogden Nash]," he said. "I think we can learn them tomorrow for the concert on Sunday. They're even dumber than the first set. Whaddya think?"

Another cheer went up. Then it was back to business.

For Becker it was a high moment. "We knew the choir had potential to be very good," he said, "but you never know until you get them there on the first day and they start making their first sound together."

Forging Community Ties

When the VocalEssence staff first broached with Whitacre their idea for a community sing, he said, "A reading session? People won't come, will they?" The VocalEssence staff had no such qualms. This was Minnesota, after all.

On a cold and rainy Friday night, 250 people crowded into an auditorium at the MacPhail Center for Music in downtown Minneapolis to sing four songs with Whitacre and to ask him questions about his creative process. Among the attendees were church choir members, a strong contingent of students from St. Olaf and other colleges, and young adults in busy careers who had fond memories of singing in their high school chorus and were looking for ways to get music back into their lives.

"I saw fewer than 10 people I knew," said Pulk, managing director of VocalEssence. "It was all new people and it was a young demographic, which was really exciting."

On a cold and rainy Friday night, 250 people crowded into an auditorium to sing four songs with Whitacre and to ask him questions about his creative process—church choir members, students from St. Olaf and other colleges, and young adults in busy careers who were looking for ways to get music back into their lives.

The group delighted in the singing—and in the stories Whitacre told about how his pieces came to be. Even when he explained that he had grown up without religion and that his church was "the movie theater," there were no audible gasps from what one guessed was a largely church-going crowd.

His music sprang from the sacredness of human experience, he told the group, "of love and sorrow and grief and joy, birth, death"—and that is what connects. Just before singing "Lux Aurumque," which many read as an allusion to the baby Jesus in the manger, Whitacre offered that the poem could just as easily be about any baby, any mother beholding her newborn.

In addition to providing a venue for singers to rub shoulders with a real live composer, the community sing fit right in with VocalEssence's strategic goal to forge meaningful connections with other singers and choruses, Pulk said. It was so successful, in fact, that VocalEssence plans to reprise the idea for its upcoming British festival, featuring the work of Simon Halsey.

"When we bring people in of this caliber it is not just about VocalEssence or the people on the stage at the concert having the opportunity to connect," she said. "It is an opportunity to offer something to singers who, in and of their own choruses, would never have the resources to bring someone like Eric in to work with them."

Connecting with Choral Directors

Another group that VocalEssence wanted to reach out to were choral directors, members of the regional ACDA or the Music Educators Association. On Saturday afternoon, choral directors around the state came to observe Whitacre rehearsing the high school honors choir, to engage in a question-and-answer session with Whitacre and his long-time collaborator poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, and to attend a reception sponsored by Minnesota music publisher J.W. Pepper.

As with the community sing group, the choral directors wanted to engage with Whitacre about his creative process. "A better understanding of the piece will always help you teach it and shape it better," said conductor Bill White. "It is invaluable."

The story of the origins of "Lux Aurumque" gave Whitacre and Silvestri an opening to describe their unusual relationship to each other—and to the Latin language that they both love, but for different reasons.

Whitacre found the poem by Edward Esch ("Light, warm and heavy as pure gold and the angels sing softly, to the new-born baby") and loved its simplicity, but didn't want to set it in English. He asked Silvestri, a Latin scholar from a family of Classics scholars, to translate it into Latin. Composing for a Latin text, Whitacre said, gives him a chance to "impose my will on the poetry"—something that he does not feel free to do with poems in English.

"For me, I just find Latin to be this mystical language," Whitacre said. "It is dead mostly, but still the Roman culture is the foundation of so many things that we see and do in our lives. The other part of it is that it has perfect, pure vowels, which I adore."

The word lux, for example, works so much better than the word light for singing. "Lux becomes abstract, almost a bauble or a gem, something you can fixate on," he said. "The thing about working with Tony is he is a singer. I can say to him, 'That is very beautiful what you just wrote but it has to end in umm,' and he finds an incredibly poetic way to give me the vowels and consonants I desperately need."

"I know not to give Eric words that end in 'inc' because they are not singable" said Silvestri. "You want to have a flow of the line. So it is fun for me to try to come up with something that works for singing and also works with the rules of Latin grammar. Believe me, I get emails about that."

Thinking Differently About Marketing

Having a bonafide "choral rock star" at the center of the event presented some unusual opportunities to venture outside of the box in marketing it. Whitacre has purposely made himself and his music very accessible to his fans—first through his own website and then through his pages on the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. So it made sense that the initial marketing would be Whitacre extending a "video invitation" on his web pages.

From there, viral marketing took over to a degree many of the planners had not witnessed before. "By the time our direct mail postcard went out," said VocalEssence's communications director, "we had already sold over 1,300 tickets to the performance. We did not place any newspaper ads." Three weeks before the concert, the 2,400-seat Orchestra Hall was sold out, exceeding VocalEssence's revenue goal for ticket sales by 50 percent. Folks were coming from 29 states and three foreign countries. The event staff quickly convened and decided to sell tickets to the dress rehearsal.

"We needed to have flexibility to say, 'We have something golden' and not say to people, 'Hey, too bad you didn't buy your ticket soon enough,'" Pulk said. "More than 250 people came, and I think they were thrilled to be there and felt like they got behind the scenes. The lesson is to look outside the box."

Out-of-the box thinking continued after the concert. VocalEssence made the live concert recording available online for purchase, via download, three days after the performance. That's 13 Whitacre pieces, including the world premiere of "Nox Aurumque" and among the first performances of his new set of Animal Crackers.

The staff sold download cards in the lobby and on the VocalEssence website with a special code that would allow people to log in and download the performance (one time) to their computers, allowing them to burn it to a disk if they chose. They got quite a few comments from people about what a great idea this was and how they had never seen this before.

It was another opportunity that a tech-savvy artist affords where someone else might not. "Eric has such a different approach in how he connects with his fans than your typical choral artist," Pulk said.

The Main Event

After two days of intense rehearsals, the Sunday afternoon massed concert unfolded like a beautiful tapestry, or, perhaps more accurately, went off like a fireworks display. When Whitacre was introduced, a huge cheer went up, mostly from the high balconies where high school kids leapt to their feet. Thereafter, whenever Whitacre came on stage, there was applause, prompting him to say, "Don't you think this tradition of clapping every time the musicians come back on stage is kinda funny?"

The program included a few non-Whitacre pieces, which for the most part fit into the overall fabric and gave the high school honors choir an opportunity to sing under Brunelle, Armstrong, and Sigrid Johnson. The St. Olaf Choir opened the program with Mendelssohn's "Ehre sei Gott in der Hobe" (Glory to God in the Highest) and a beautiful Scottish ballad, "Loch Lomond." The Choir, by tradition, holds hands as they sing, and their connection to each other, to the music, and to their conductor was palpable.

The opening cast some kind of spell that carried through as Whitacre returned to the stage to direct the Choir in his "A Boy and A Girl," "Water Night," and "The Seal Lullaby." The VocalEssence Chorus & Ensemble Singers then gave a soulful reading of "When David Heard," a piece that Whitacre had written for a dear friend who had lost his 19-year-old son. Based on the biblical text where David learns of the death of his son, Absalom, the work is grief embodied—the wailing, keening, wrenching kind—and brought tears to much of the audience.

The Ensemble Singers then performed "With a Lily in Your Hand," one of Whitacre's earliest compositions, and his well-loved and much-performed "Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine"—a piece that Whitacre said nearly drove him mad composing, as he had to live inside the obsessive mind of Leonardo for long stretches. Closing out the first half was the world premiere of "Nox Aurumque" (night and gold), a darker and thornier companion to Whitacre's "Lux Aurumque," sung by the Ensemble Singers and the St. Olaf Choir.

"Looking at all these kids from everywhere and seeing such incredible excitement for a classical art form—it just gives you hope and makes you realize you are in the right business."

The second half of the program centered on the youthful forces of the high school honors choir. After singing three non-Whitacre pieces, they delivered hysterical renditions of Animal Crackers Vol. 1 and 2, the latter volume hot off the press and committed to memory just 24 hours beforehand. The choir's unfettered tone was a perfect match for "Lux Aurumque" and Five Hebrew Love Songs, the latter based on little love notes that Whitacre's wife had written down about moments early in their relationship.

The combined choirs came together for Whitacre's "Cloudburst," based on a poem of Octavio Paz and inspired by watching an approaching thunderstorm in the desert outside Las Vegas. The finishing touch was "Sleep," based on a Silvestri poem about that ethereal dream-like state right before falling into slumber. A fitting way to say goodnight to an amazing event.

After the concert, a line of people, mostly young, snaked through the lobby of Orchestra Hall to get Whitacre's autograph. A young man from Wisconsin said he had decided to compose music because of Whitacre. "Here, listen," he said, putting his iPhone to my ear. A college choir was singing one of his compositions. It was lush and beautiful, with tell-tale Whitacre-esque chord clusters.

"I find that when young people begin writing choral music, they are fascinated with the possibility of writing for voice," said Brunelle. "The excitement for them is that, of all instruments, the voice is the most vulnerable, you can't hide behind anything."

"Looking at all these kids from everywhere," said Pulk, "high school kids, St. Olaf kids, the kids in the audience and seeing such incredible excitement for a classical art form, it just gives you hope and makes you realize you are in the right business. And we are going to have a future."

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This article is adapted from The Voice, Summer 2009.