THE PME BLOG

It was so worth it! Pacific Mozart Ensemble should feel proud and humble. Yesterday we accomplished a very rewarding and equally challenging concert program. It was the final concert of “The Little Match Girl”. I took today off because I am so exhausted. Granted, I have extenuating circumstances that made my weekend even more tiring, but this concert was just plain demanding.

The program was well thought out, with intelligent and beautiful music. It featured compositions about women, one a pulitzer prize winner, and also some young composers. It was refreshing to be singing about women and feminine energy during the holiday season, when choral concerts are usually exclusively oriented towards Christmas. It is especially gratifying to perform the work of someone who is developing as a composer. There is a special responsibility to deliver the piece in a way that he or she can experience the realization of their ideas in a live situation. I can only imagine how that informs their process.

Especially gorgeous was Michael Roberts’ “Cast Thy Bread Upon the Waters”. It was my favorite, for personal reasons. It explored the same space as Match Girl, where pain and joy merge, in a musical vocabulary that is perhaps more accessible. Michael was there, and I hope he was pleased. When he stood up to be acknowldged, I felt so humbled to think that he had etrusted us with his music.

Actually, it is hard to say that any one piece was more beautiful than another. They were all wonderful. I had friends in the audience who said that every piece was great. I was surprised that the carols we sang with the audience at the end were what had me crying. Watching the joy in the audience as all 200 people joined us was overwhelming. Also I think I was working too hard to feel much emotion until then.

I wonder if the audience knows that the conductor and singers have their attention on dozens of technical details at every moment to create an experience for them. I stand in the back row, where it is difficult to hear much more than the people on either side of me, so I don’t get the experience of hearing the ensemble the way they do. Also, I am listening specifically for mistakes in the alto section, so we can fix them. The altos had three extra sectional rehearsals to prepare for the concert, which is perhaps a record for us. Modern music is often deceptive. Transitions from one section to the next are unexpected. Tempos change often. Voices alternate between leading and background in unusual and dramatic ways. Tuning can be challenging, as are tone clusters. And then there is just learning the piece, spending whatever time you personally need to be able to stand in the group and hold your own.

David Lang’s “Little Match Girl” is a special challenge with its polyrhythmic and range challenges and the pristine silences. You don’t want to “step in the hole” as we say, that is to sing into a silence, and this piece is built around the silences. It is like racing your bicycle along a street that is filled with potholes and rocks. You might avoid the big potholes but the little rock at the edge of the road makes you wobble or even crash. If you do, you must get right back on the bike and back into the peleton. Not quite, but you get the picture.

The honor of performing David Lang’s “Little Match Girl” was one that no one took lightly. This piece won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for music, an honor shared by the likes of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thompson, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Ornette Coleman and Wynton Marsalis. We gave its West Coast premiere. Talk about pressure. It was gratifying that KQED’s Cy Musiker gave the concert a plug. Those who were there were so lucky. Lang’s piece gave them a unique experience. Everyone I spoke to indicated in words or just with gestures that “Match Girl” opened a wide, wide space in their heart. Often they didn’t have words for what it did, always the best response, if you ask me.

I have been wondering how many man-hours this concert took to produce. This is off the cuff but for me it was perhaps 28 hours of regular and dress rehearsal and 6 hours of sectional rehearsal. Another 20 hours of personal practice, say 6 hours preparing for sectional responsibilities, 3 hours talking with others about our process, 12 hours travel time, 2 hours communicating about the concert with potential audience and dealing with my friends” ticket concerns, 2 hours shopping for ways to better organize my music, 10 hours on the two concert days. I can safely say that I spent the equivalent of two work weeks. Please don’t imgine that I am complaining. Doing this is my great joy. However, multiply that by 50 and add the work of our conductor, administrator, board members, marketer, webmaster, program creator, sound and lighting technicians, hosts, stage manager, volunteer coordinator and volunteers who man the door and sell the albums,… I am sure that I am forgetting plenty of folks…it is an impressive commitment of time all spent to give our audience a brief experience that will move their soul and hopefully open their heart. I am convinced that humans need music and story as much as we need food and shelter.

So today I am a dishrag. The last two weeks I felt tight with worry, lost sleep, and fretted over not finding enough time to squeeze in extra practice so I could NAIL every moment. Was it worth it? You bet!

-Peggy Rock, Alto Section Leader

Technorati : Dave Brubeck, David Lang, Little Matchgirl Passion

It’s coming. Soon. The always-entertaining, uniquely wonderful Jazz & Pop à la PME. You loyal readers of past blogs may recall that the first step in putting the show together involves finding new and existing arrangements, finding members of the group to sing them with you, and finding time in otherwise super-busy lives to rehearse them like mad. Then you audition said arrangements for a friendly crowd of your peers and hold your breath overnight while you await the results. The next morning we have a List of Songs.

The List, which generally runs the stylistic gamut, then has to undergo another kind of scrutiny. This takes place at the always entertaining, uniquely wonderful J&P Retreat, held at the always picturesque, uniquely inspirational Pajaro Dunes vacation spot near Monterey. We’ve been going there for years and love it. For reasons we can’t fathom, they keep letting us come back.

This is not your average I-am-reliving-my-college-spring-break moment. No, indeed. Real work is involved. We sing for hours in our small groups and with the whole ensemble, for our super coach/directors, Lynne and Dick, and for a hired gun, the spectacularly talented and breathlessly energetic Kerry Marsh. They nit. They pick. They fix the broken stuff and pat us on the head when we do it well. We make Progress.

While all this work is going, we’re bonding. This is an essential part of ensemble singing, not some I’m reliving-my-last-encounter-at-Green-Gulch moment. Plus, we don’t have to sit still while we do it.

This is good because we wouldn’t be able to get up and consume large quantities of noshes, which is an essential part of singing as any Peemer will tell you. As loyal readers of this blog will tell you, eating goes hand in hand with singing. Just ask us. Heck, ask Shakespeare (see title of this blog). Clever, huh?

On Saturday night, the bonding, singing and food components come together in a fabulous feast for the senses. We wax rhapsodically about 1) how great the food is (no lie - it’s GREAT); 2) how great the coaching was (and to prove it, we sometimes sing our tunes for each other); 3) the great selection of wines, which most certainly impacts how GREAT we sounded in item 2; 4) how much we enjoy each other in a really GREAT way; and 5) how GREAT this concert is going to be.

You can see all the pictures from the weekend here:
2009 Pajaro Retreat
(Thanks to Dick, Steve and Doug)

But hey, don’t take my word for it. I certainly wouldn’t. Come see/hear/taste for yourself at the upcoming concerts!

Sunday June 7, 2009 at 5 pm
Berkeley City Club
2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley

Friday June 12, 2009 at 7:30 pm
The Green Room, War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco

Saturday June 13, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Finnish Brotherhood Hall
1970 Chestnut at University, Berkeley

- Kate Berenson, Soprano

Technorati : A Cappella, Jazz & Pop, Kerry Marsh

Change has definitely been in the air this year. The biggest, most exciting change, of course, was the election of President Barack Obama to lead this country with new energy and hope for the better. Most of us are still feeling all warm and fuzzy from that change.

Last spring, after PME’s 2008 Fundraiser event, we felt the need to change something in our fundraising format, as well. We weren’t sure what that would be, so the committee went to work in the summer, hoping to come up with an idea that would make the Fundraiser fresh once more. We considered many options and after the usual twists and turns that go into organizing an event (and some unusual ones as well), we locked in to a new venue. The Hillside Club in Berkeley.

Hillside Club was founded in the late 1800s and rebuilt after a fire in 1923. It offers a beautiful, historic setting for our evening themed “Hope Springs Eternal”. We decided to go with family style hors d’oeuvres, inspired by Italian and Mediterranean cultures rich in tradition surrounding food, and table seating. Emily with her team of volunteers has been working tirelessly to bring some new flavors onto those tables on March 14th. Other committee members have secured tasty wines to fill the glasses of our loyal patrons.

As Antonia wrote some weeks ago in her blog entry, the membership went to work looking for musical material to fit the theme. Some even wrote their own. The process of putting together an original piece that incorporates solo or duet lines for every singer in the show, has been a lot of fun and something new and different for PME. Eric’s “Change Song” will definitely bring a breath of that fresh air we are all longing for. The other repertoire includes something for everyone, from beloved classical pieces to spiritual, jazz, pop and even rock classics.

Although limited in size, our silent auction will bring forth some old favorites and some never before seen prizes, such as a gorgeous vacation home in Inverness, or a relaxing stay at a B&B in San Francisco. A lively raffle will allow anyone to test their fate with Lady Luck. Will you be the one bringing home the prizes?

Now, the dress rehearsal is behind us. The final touches are being put into the running of the evening. We just need to make sure everyone knows about this fantastic event ahead…

-Mari Marjamaa

Technorati : Change, Hillside Club, Obama

Save the date for PME’s annual fundraiser, March 14! I have saved the date all right. In the last several weeks, I have been wracking my brain and all the local libraries to find songs that will fit into the theme for the fundraiser, “Hope Springs Eternal.” You probably know that the fundraiser is different than other PME shows. This show has some full group numbers with and without solos, but the rest of the show and songs are brought by individuals to audition, rather like Jazz and Pop. But with the Fundraiser, many of the songs are from Broadway shows. Now, contrary to some people in PME who have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the wonderful solos and duets in shows across the decades, my knowledge is a little thin.

So what do I do? I rely on the jazz standards I know (most of which came from OLD Broadway shows) and then try and update my knowledge about the new shows, of which there are many. Then you have to find the music. So take this for example. A friend suggested doing “I’ll Know” from the show “Guys and Dolls”. No sweat, I thought, and I found a great version of it in a duet book I had and it was in the key of A Major. Oh, but then I listened to the original cast recording and instead of being in A major, it was in F major. “Oh that’s good,” my husband Greg said (who is a bass in PME and my partner in crime), “because the original is a little high for me.” (Ah ha, I thought, it sits a little high for me too!). So I go to my handy, dandy music store to get a download where they can change keys of the songs for you and what do you know? The downloaded music was already in F Major. Hallelujah, I thought. Oh, but wait. There’s no verse, and it isn’t set up as a duet, the words aren’t right, and the piano part doesn’t match the words if I was to try and patch them in. The triplets are all wrong. Oh man! (And then there is a lot of whining and snuffling and calling my friends and yanking of hair.) So what does that really mean…the extra work of playing the chart into Sibelius, the arranging program, and then shifting the key to the desired key. And not that it happens perfectly. As you know with computer programs, nothing is as easy as it is projected to be. So I haven’t done that yet and it could be a couple hours work and that is just one song, and not part of actually LEARNING or practicing the song. But this is what we sometimes have to do to get a song. And then again, there are several people in the group who will arrange the whole song from scratch just to get it exactly the way they want it - and that takes hours.

But there is an ache to get songs to audition. There is a stretch that is wanted, desired, beseeched upon, for a song that is new, unheard, fresh, and sometimes funny or simply known and lovely in a timeless way. The other part of the search for songs is that, not only do the songs have to fit your voice, you have to find the music that you love, and the songs have to be good for the programming. In other words, you can’t have 16 ballads on one program. On the other hand you can’t have every song be happy pappy because then people will feel ill from the sheer sucrose intake. In an uplifting theme, you have to have some dark side, the intensity of not getting what you want, but still wanting it. We are still trying to reach the light, still being hopeful, no matter what the circumstance. But the programming has to have just the right balance, just as we hope to have in our daily life: uplifting and true, hopeful and bright, and yet realistic and not too sweet.

- Antonia Van Becker

Technorati : Broadway, Fund Raiser, Guys and Dolls

So here PME goes with another crazy project. This time our partner in crime is our old friend Dave Brubeck. We’ve been working on some of his new works now for a few years. It all started in 2006 as a part of our 25th Anniversary Gala Concert. Dave (he lets us call him that) along with David Lang and Meredith Monk provided the missing movements in Mozart’s unfinished Mass in C Minor. During our work his Credo movement, he stopped by to check on the proceedings! The collaboration was such a success that Dave started shipping us reams of music to sing. In 2007 we received his setting of Commandments, recording and performing it in our March show. Now we are on to the Canticles.

Now we are on to the big recording project, Dave’s three movement work entitled Canticles (performed in our Winter ‘08 concert). We’re working in the St Albert Priory Chapel in Oakland. The space is beautiful, and almost completely hidden from the traffic in nearby Rockridge. As you can see, I became obsessed with one very cool stained glass window in the back of the Chapel. There is a scene on each side that involves the flames of hell. On the left we see devout, praying individuals ascending away from the flames. On the right we see the damned falling down in to the flames, eventually gobbled up by this crazy cool beast. I especially got into the flames. Ah, but enough about cool windows…

As usual, the chorus is rising to the challenge. This recording is probably the highest quality project we’ve self-produced. Often we produce recordings of our live performance. The live nature of those recordings allow for slight blemishes. In this case, we have to make sure everything is pristine without, of course, sacrificing the passion and intensity the piece requires. A tall task, especially on a Friday night after everyone has been working all week. Amazingly we got through a mountain of material in a very short time and it sounds great!

But enough of my prattling. Here’s a slide show of pics so far:
Brubeck Canticles Recording Pics

-Eric

Technorati : Dave Brubeck, St Albert Priory