Choral Melody

[Auriville Cha]

There has been increasing awareness in recent months and years to the growing problem of choral elitism. Much smarter and more talented masters of music than I have tackled this issue with profound prose. It seems that most of us can agree on one thing, choral elitism is an obstacle to the future growth of choral music.

One problem in redefining choral standards of success is that we all WANT to be leading a program that sees tears welling in the eyes of our audiences as we tenderly present a Whitacre or Lauridsen. We want to dazzle with a piece of Byrd polyphony and bring down the house with a Hogan. These are noble goals and should continue at the highest level. It is clear that incredible musical inspiration is created for both singers and audiences when excellence is achieved. However, we do not exist simply to create the next generation of professional singers.

My favorite part of VCM is that a simple mission permeates every aspect of the organization: to inspire people through music. If you follow one of the groups on social media you will see the familiar hashtag, #singtoinspire.

I would like to encourage every director to follow the lead of some of the top musical groups in the world with this simple rule: meet a group where they are and measure success from there!

If you have a group of complete beginners that cannot match pitch or follow rhythms well, inspiring musical excellence could mean building a song about everyday occurrences such as a rainstorm or riding a bicycle using body percussion and mouth noises. One simple call-and-response melody with a group of singers (or even the audience!) completes an impressive polyphonic masterpiece. The opportunity to CREATE music and have it come together into a cohesive and pleasing piece can change a singer's world.

Erik Jacobson is the General Manager of VCM USA, the choral music foundation supporting the work of VOCES8. He directs the Kalamazoo Male Chorus and will soon begin work as the Executive Director of the Michigan School Vocal Music Association. Erik spent time as the Executive Artistic Director of Milwaukee Children's Choir and taught high school choir for five years.

I have observed that many choirs include arrangements of popular songs in their programs. This has always sparked my curiosity. Having such a broad catalog of works written for choir, why include pop songs in a concert? Well, after some careful thought and observation, I think there are two answers to that.

The first reason has to be familiarity. People like to hear things they know. A good arrangement of a song that is already in the general public consciousness can be very effective, as the arrangement of Africa that the City Angel Chorale took to the American Idol competition demonstrated.

The second reason must be melodic interest. Choral works, in many cases, rely on polyphony, that is, several melodies going ot at the same time. At first, it is easy to follow the melody, but as you have 3 or 4 voices going on at the same time, you can easily get confused and lost in the work.

So I have focused, in many works, to provide this melodic thread above any other consideration, even at the risk of seeming simplistic, just so the listener can connect with the work on first hearing and enjoy a recognizable melody in successive listenings . The idea is to provide melodic choral repertorie that would eliminate the need to import pop songs into choral concerts and provide a complete experience to the audience that would encourage them to keep coming back for more.

I always found that trying to find material suitable for very young choruses was a challenge. If the music was accessible, it was usually not to the liking of my students. And all too often, the great choral literature is meant for students ages 12 and up, so a very young choir has less repertoire from which to choose.

The pieces listed on this page are ideal for young choruses or for classrooms that just want to sing together. I wrote them for my school choruses and the students have loved singing them. Many teachers I know have used them too. The songs are age-appropriate, contemporary and fun to sing. But better yet, they exercise all the skills necessary for an emerging choir. The music is written for unison groups, two parts (S/A) and occasionally three (SS/A). I also write pieces on commission, so please feel free to contact me should you like to have a piece written for your choir or elementary age school chorus. Happy singing!

And even within the Western music scene, there is the idea of Just Intonation: the pure arithmetical tuning of chords, as distinct from our modern 12-tone, logarithmic tuning. This has slowly worked its way into general choral consciousness over the last century or two, having been abandoned only relatively recently, post-Renaissance.

But, as many can attest who have professionally recorded themselves singing, the limitations of human pitch control are something to contend with. These limits are humiliatingly displayed by taking a look at what you thought was a pretty decent take, through pitch analysis software like Melodyne. Was I really that many cents off?

I hope more choir directors might see this and be inspired to invest the time in learning some microtonal repertoire with their ensemble. The rewards can be great: not just from an artistic standpoint, but also for the way microtonal awareness hones intonation skills for standard repertoire.

Having sung both pieces, and quite a few of the *heavier* pieces/composers in a Choral Context, I'd say the problem is not that Beethoven is *completely inept* at vocal writing (As with completely bad writers this would mean the piece never getting performed), or that the complaints about *difficulty* miss the point, but that vocally his compositions are the musical equivalent of what Orwell terms *Good Bad Books*. Or as Birgit Nilsson described it - the 9th Symphony's writing is "Ungrateful".

The *Vocally Tough* thing isn't the problem - there's nothing in terms of stamina or range that Beethoven writes which you don't find in other demanding vocal composers (Puccini, Verdi, Wagner etc) or *Big* pieces (Gerontius, Elijah, Verdi Requiem etc). And this also discounts the Sight-singing defence - A singer of Nilsson's calibre is unlikely to be sight-singing.

The problem is more Beethoven's *inability to understand vocal tessitura, or how the voice produces its sound, negatively impacts his ability to make deliberate artistic choices in writing for the instrument to serve the vision he has*.

I never get the sense in his vocal writing that he's *deliberately wanting to write for the voice to add something to his musical vision*; there's a sense in Missa Solemnis, for example, that he essentially wrote a Symphony/Long-Form Orchestral Work and then went "Shit! I need to add voices to this because I'm being paid to".

The start of the Missa Solemnis Sanctus is a great example - it's a wonderful opening, but the musical texture is completely counter-productive given where the vocal tessitura is in relation to the orchestral. Contrast it with the opening of the Sanctus in Verdi's Requiem (given it's a similar Brassy element/full orchestral texture), and there's more of a sense that Verdi views the voice as an *active part of the overall texture* and therefore understands that you *need to modify your orchestral texture accordingly depending on the effect you want this collaboration to have*. The difference is a much more convincingly magisterial, *sublime* mood in the latter composer than the former.

And I'd contend that the reason this compositional weakness is problematic in a way that it isn't for other artistic forms, and gives rise to the whole "Beethoven is a poor choral composer", is because whenever one writes for the voice the voice tends to have primacy over anything else going on: you can enjoy Beethoven's Concerti on various other levels (motivic, form, key structure etc if you like that sort of thing) without worrying about how well he writes for the Solo instrument - try doing that in Tosca and things quickly fall apart.

As an aside, this is also why Kerman is completely wrong on Tosca's brilliance ( though it is years since I read Opera as Drama) - it works because Puccini has such an understanding of how to write dramatically for the Voice in a way that aligns perfectly with the story he's telling and the mood he wants to create musically.
Taking Act III's beginning as a mini-example, Kerman completely doesn't get it because he's focussed on the motivic nature of the folksong or how the same effect could be generated by any "incidental music" - but that doesn't matter; what matters is how it sets up the following Aria in terms of vocal colour and mood (think how well the Clarinet colour dovetails with the starting phrase of "E lucevan le stelle" or how well the upper woodwind set up the vocal mood-colour of "Recondita" in Act 1), and how well Puccini wrings the emotional drama out of the Tenor Voice in *just* the right climactic moments to get the emotional payoff (where the vowels are in the line, how that placement generates the effect etc). To misquote Kerman - by writing this well for the voice in a Vocal Drama Puccini does meet Kerman's criteria for Opera of exerting the music as the "central articulating function" - he just does it in a way Kerman seems illiterate to.

For all his qualities as a composer, Beethoven cannot approach this level of mastery writing for the voice. His writing always feels *unnecessarily effortful* rather than *artistically demanding* - as a singer you're not thinking *how do I shape the material or explore the possibilities*, you're thinking *what does he even want in terms of colour*, which - paradoxically - I'd argue makes it far from overwhelming or sublime, it just feels like a child bashing the hell out of a Drum Kit. (contrast with Stravinsky's opening in the Rite of Spring - demanding? certainly, deliberately artistic? certainly, worth the payoff? Absolutely).

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