What I Did on My Summer Vacation

As a youngster, I was an avid consumer of summer camps (or perhaps it was my parents, desperately in need of a break from their kids). I can still conjure up vivid memories of late night water balloon fights, capsized canoes (on purpose), arrows gone astray on the archery field, loud singing around the campfire, wayward hikes in the woods...

Who knew that at the ripe old age of [mumble], I would once again have a singular summer camp experience. But that's what my week at the Berkshire Choral Festival (BCF) turned out to be.

On Sunday, July 5, I and some 185 singers from around the country converged on the Berkshire School, a private high school tucked up against the mountains in Sheffield, Massachusetts. This lovely expanse of greenways and burbling brooks has been the main venue for the festival for 27 years.

As I checked into my dorm room, another festival attendee was struggling to drag a gigantic air mattress through the door. "What, you don't have an air mattress?" she asked.

I was soon to discover that the summer camp experience at BCF includes hard mattresses and shared bathrooms. But no one seemed to mind. The frequent attendees had figured out a way to "plump up" their accommodations.

It was clear from the get-go that the main event here was singing. Lots and lots of singing.

So Much to Learn, So Little Time

In my chorus back home, I was used to having weeks, if not months, to learn the music for a concert program. At BCF, we were being asked to learn and perfect an entire concert program in six days and present it to the public.

Wow, I thought, that will be a challenge. I had chosen the first week of the summer mainly because the music was new to me: a recently-composed Requiem by Mack Wilberg, the new music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir; Frostiana, Randall Thompson's settings of seven Robert Frost poems; Norman Della Joio's A Jubilant Song; and Howard Hanson's 150th Psalm.

The other Thompson piece on the program, the beloved Alleluia, I had sung in high school. But that was a long, long time ago. (Although, a few weeks earlier, in an ancient church in Italy, a childhood friend and I had managed to sing most of the Alleluia from memory, so ingrained was it in us.)

So I was intrigued and little concerned about how I—and we—would pull this off. As it turned out, I need not have worried. We had Craig Jessop, former music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, as our guide and goad, and a crack team of choral teachers to help us along.

Come Dance with Me

It takes a special kind of conductor to mold a group of folks who have never sung together into a resonant, beautiful sounding choir in one week. He or she needs to be a consummate musician, but with a heart for teaching—and Jessop is one of those souls.

From the first rehearsal, Jessop emphasized the fundamentals of choral music making: tall vowels, rhythmic accuracy, and especially, attention to the meaning and cadence of the text and the forward flow of the line. As one of the singers noted, "He's a frustrated ballet dancer. Look at how he moves on the podium." And indeed, on numerous occasions, as we struggled to perfect the music, Jessop rose up on tip toes and said, "Come dance with me!"

He was forever pointing his finger toward heaven, an appeal to higher pitch, and delighted to call our attention to the celestial reward of endless overtones when intonation locked in. He used the "1, 2, ti, 4" count singing, a favorite drill of the late, great Robert Shaw, more times than anyone I have sung under. And we needed it.

A taskmaster rarely gets people to follow willingly though. Jessop inspired devotion through his humor, his humanity and his spirituality. In the midst of a particularly tiring rehearsal, he invoked Shaw about the importance of attending to all the details so that the spirit of the music can come forth. "Shaw said, 'If you want the bird to come down from heaven, you have to clean the birdcage.'"

In Love with Singing

The singers in attendance that week were up to the task of cage cleaning. While the level of innate musical ability varied among the group, I was impressed with the diligence people brought to the endeavor. Most of the sopranos singing around me had come to the festival fully prepared, with notes learned and scores marked. I had not, and scurried to catch up.

I heard very little grumbling about the long rehearsals or drilling of the music. It was as if everyone was in agreement: This was no summer sing. This was serious musicmaking.

Frank Nemhauser, music director of the festival since 1993, says that the dedication of the Berkshire singers really is exemplary.

"The spirit of the chorus is really unmatched," he says. "They are in love with singing...and it is infectious."

I was also impressed with not just the artistry, but the kindness, of the faculty members who spend their summers leading sectional rehearsals, giving voice lessons, conducting master classes, teaching workshops, and generally supporting the singers in every way.

Mezzo-soprano Catherine McKeever, who told me she had had every voice problem in the book, showed me how to breathe in such a way as to take pressure off my vocal chords. Without that intervention, I am sure I would have not been able to rehearse five hours a day and keep my voice going.

I watched with amazement as faculty member Jason McStoots gently instructed a singer who was stumbling through a recital piece to start again. "Sing as if you have every right in the world to be here and that you are offering us a gift." She squared her shoulders, and sang much better.

The Secret: "It Should Feel Like You're on a Cruise"

That intangible spirit of acceptance and inclusion apparently was part of the plan BCF's founder cooked up 27 years ago. John Hoyt Stookey, a New York businessman and amateur singer, had in mind a "choral fantasy camp" and wrote a memo explaining the "cruise nature" of the festival.

Having great conductors and great choral works was a given, but Stookey also wanted the Berkshire faculty and apprentices to make friends with the singers, welcome them in, and make sure shy people were brought into the fold. While the rehearsal schedule would be intense, there would also be time for afternoon tours, sports and recreation activities. The object was to enjoy amateur singing and also to enjoy each other's company.

Stookey found his first group of singers by clipping every newspaper article that had the word choral or chorus in it and sending out notices. Some 85 singers signed up for the very first week in 1982 with Robert Page, then director of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, conducting the Verdi Requiem. The singers told their friends and soon the festival was adding weeks in the summer to accommodate those wanting to attend.

While the heart of the festival still resides in Sheffield, over the years new venues have been added. In 1989, the festival began a great tradition of traveling to Canterbury, England, where singers live at King's College and perform one of the great sacred works in the Canterbury Cathedral. For ten years, beginning in 1994, one of the summer festival weeks was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the campus of St. John's College. In 1997, the festival introduced a week in a small village called Mondsee, outside of Salzburg, Austria. In 2007, a week in Vancouver was added to the mix. Next year, the festival will reside for a week in Montreal.

The festival management has certain criteria for its choice of venues: Does the name of the location have cache? Is it a beautiful place? Is there a symphony orchestra, a place in which to perform, an audience? Is there a cultural richness to the area to which the festival can contribute? Is there a place to live and work? Sometimes this means that singers live on a school campus, sometimes in a four-star hotel.

"We have performed in cathedrals, churches, a hockey rink, a convention center, and last year, in a gorgeous concert hall," says Trudy Weaver Miller, president and CEO of the BCF. "But regardless of where we are situated, an environment is created in which people of vastly different backgrounds can immerse themselves and thrive as musicians. The common denominator is the absolute need to express oneself through singing."

A Natural Part of the Year

People choose their festival week for a variety of reasons. It may be the conductor, the repertoire, the location, or all three. Ten years ago, Peter Sargent, a scientist from San Francisco, chose the Schubert Mass in A-flat with conductor Joseph Flummerfelt, then music director of the Westminster Choir. The Sheffield location worked, too, because it was near some family members. Sargent promptly got hooked on the festival.

A year later, he and Caroline Damsky, who married in 2003, returned for another week at Sheffield. They have been coming ever since, mixing in weeks at Canterbury and Mondsee, Austria.

Both Sargent and Damsky belong to two choruses in San Francisco, so they sing a lot all year around. "We don't go [to BCF] because we are starved for singing," says Damsky. "We go back each year because we had such a great time the previous year that it just seems to be a natural part of the cycle of our year."

More and more, the two are focusing on works that they have never sung or on thematic mixes of music that are appealing. "The Jessop week held such an appeal," Sargent says. "As I continue to fill in the holes in singing the choral masterpieces of Western music, I will probably focus more on the unusual weeks."

"The Best Gift You Could Give Me"

Thirteen years ago, Katherine Becker and her daughter Rachel went to their first BCF festival in Santa Fe. A childhood friend of Katherine's lived there and it sounded like a nice vacation spot.

It was the summer before Rachel entered college, an auspicious moment in a mother-daughter relationship. That week, they performed Mendelssohn's Elijah. Ten years later, after the two had settled into an annual tradition of singing at the festival in Sheffield, just a few hours away from their New York and New Jersey homes, they sang Elijah again. It was the summer before Rachel was to marry Todor Petev, a choral singer from Bulgaria.

"That piece has become a special marker in our lives," Rachel says. "But each year is like that, something special. This is a tradition we don't plan on breaking." Todor is in complete agreement, Rachel says.

"It's like family," Katherine concurs. "It's wonderful to share the same experience. I say to Rachel, 'This is the best gift you could give me...a week of your time to do something we both love.'"

The Bird Came Down

As my Berkshire week drew to a close, I found myself intensely jealous of the people who had been coming back year after year. I vowed to come back every year until I dropped over.

Meanwhile we had a show to put on.

After our last orchestra rehearsal Friday afternoon, I asked Jessop what it was like for him, as a conductor, at that moment. He had given all he could, and we had come a long way, but certainly not to the vision of perfection inside his head. He said, "I feel very good. It's like, okay, you're launching a child, and you are on your own. We've done all we can do. Now we'll just have a great time."

And we did just that.

On a steamy Saturday night, we assembled on stage in the open-air Rovensky Concert Shed with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and an appreciative audience before us. And we sang our hearts out. It wasn't perfect, but it was inspired. The cage was clean enough, and the bird came down.

For me the singular moment came as I listened to the men sing "The Pasture" in the Frostiana. The Frost poem tells of a father inviting his son (or daughter?) to spend a few moments with him, a few moments likely to turn into long, memorable hours. It is a sweet, simple call to life and to relationship, and a perfect coda to a week that I hoped would be repeated many times.

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
I shan't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother.
It's so young it totters when she licks it with her
Tongue.
I shan't be gone long. You come too.