Staying Connected Through Music

From the Director’s Desk

Nearness of You: Staying Connected

From Artistic Director, Rebecca P.N. Seeman:

What a year it's been! We’ve confronted health, racial, environmental, and economic crises that have left us bruised but determined to create real change. We are eager to reconnect and see our friends and family face to face, and to create new connections to forge a better future for everyone, including those who are often barred from the advantages that others of us enjoy. This concert is dedicated to that – connecting with those we already know and love as well as forging new bonds in our communities and across our increasingly small globe. 

As we begin to heal in the warmth of the spring sun, longer days, and the blooming flowers, we remember the people we lost. The Sacred and Profane community has experienced the full arch of life this year – One baby was born in March and another one is on the way next month, two singers who met in our choir were recently married (they’re the ones who are expecting…), members’ elderly parents have struggled or have died, and we lost our longtime beloved bass, Michael Jordin, whom we will forever remember for his remarkable way of connecting with everyone through kindness, food, and of course music. 

This third concert in our remote season includes three new virtual choir videos (compilations of singers’ individual videos woven together by my partner Pete Gontier to tell beautiful cinematic stories) and three remote pieces, where we sing together in real time online, embracing the latency, or lag time, that comes with making music on Zoom. We’ve been grateful for the opportunity to come together on Monday nights as we always have to talk, connect, and sing, even though we are all in our own homes. And we are bursting with excitement to begin singing together and perform for our audiences in person next year!

Keep reading to learn about each work in our Nearness of You concert. You can read the full program notes and text and translations online here.

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Hoagy Carmichael, Arr. Kirby Shaw: The Nearness of You

Text: Ned Washington

We’re excited to feature our Tenor and Bass voices with Kirby Shaw’s heartwarming arrangement of “The Nearness of You”

It's not the pale moon that excites me

That thrills and delights me, oh no

It's just the nearness of you

It isn't your sweet conversation

That brings this sensation, oh no

It's just the nearness of you

When you're in my arms and I feel you so close to me

All my wildest dreams come true

I need no soft lights to enchant me

If you'll only grant me the right

To hold you ever so tight

And to feel in the night the nearness of you.

The Nearness of You, Hoagy Carmichael and Ned Washington’s classic that was debuted by the Glenn Miller Band in 1939, is the perfect way to introduce our concert – just imagine that first hug with your best friend, your grandmother, even someone you’ve never met before! I love Kirby Shaw’s romantic arrangement for tenors and basses, and especially the way our singers weave their way through the chromatic melodies to reach out to “feel the nearness of you.”

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Dale Trumbore: A Way to Be with You    

Text: Dale Trumbore

It doesn't matter if the timing's right,

I'll find a way to be with you.

And on the days when nothing's going right, I'll find a way to be with you.

And if I'm honest

I don't know what to say, except I'm here to stay.

When it's dark and you can't sleep at night, I'll find a way to be with you.

And when it feel like there's no end in sight, I'll find a way to be with you.

Nothing is easy when you are far away but that will change some day.

When our days are ours and time is free, You'll find your way home to me.

And after all these hours are done and through,

I'll find my way home to you.

When the coronavirus pandemic made it impossible for us to sing together in the same place, we were grateful to composers like Dale Trumbore for creating beautiful works for us to sing together online from our remote locations. We had planned to present Dale’s moving work for choir and piano, In the Middle, in March, and when we had to cancel that concert I was happy that we could still explore this gifted Los Angeles-based composer’s music. We brought you her remote work I Hope You’re Doing Well in December, and we’re pleased to present her A Way to Be With You for remote choir tonight.

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Karin Rehnqvist: Natt över jorden (Night On Earth)

Sacred and Profane has been performing the music of Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist since I first began with the choir in 2004. I will be forever grateful that I discovered Karin back in the 1990s when I was researching Swedish music for women’s choir and was led to this remarkable, exciting composer. We’ve remained friends and colleagues, and Sacred and Profane has presented multiple US premieres of her works. Performing her Songs From the North, commissioned for our 40th anniversary in 2018, was one of the great highlights of my musical life. Karin was the subject of our first Composer Connections segment in October 2020, and I encourage you to hear her music and see my interview here. 

Natt över jordan (Night on Earth) is the first in the two-part cycle, Sånger ur jorden (Songs From the Earth). The text by the poet Erik Blomberg addresses Karin’s attraction to poetry that examines the themes of light and darkness as metaphors for human existence. When I was seeking music on the theme of connecting, this piece spoke to me in its connection to nature and to the expanse of the universe. Sacred and Profane has sung Natt över jorden as it was originally intended in previous performances, but it’s been lovely to explore the repetitive ostinatos as they circle each other in our re-imagining of the work for remote choir, presented tonight

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Brian Tate: Connected

Text: Brian Tate

Performance in collaboration with Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers

We enjoyed collaborating with OYC Chamber Singers so much this winter, we’ve partnered with them again to keep the cross-choral music going!

I first became aware of Brian Tate’s music when my University of San Francisco choir sang his setting of the Buddhist Heart Sutra Gate Gate in the honorary doctorate ceremony for the Dalai Lama. That remarkable experience secured a deep place in my heart for this composer who often explores Buddhist themes of interconnectedness in his music, also heard tonight in his Connected. A Canadian composer, singer, and choral musician, Tate leads several ensembles in North Vancouver and sings in the a cappella vocal trio TriVo. I am so happy to continue our connection with the Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers under the leadership of the remarkable La Nell Martin, begun in March in our performance of Ysaÿe Barnwell’s We Are. We are looking forward to more collaborations with OYC when we’re able to sing together in person. Many thanks to our own Kim Webster for her fun choreography! 

Brian Tate writes about Connected:

Connected came from a concept in quantum physics that I have always found quite amazing: in our human selves, we think of ourselves being in “containers,” and we see others as apart from us, different from us, with empty space in between. But when you get small enough, at a sub-particle level, the distinctions disappear – there is no difference between body, skin, air, and the next body. It is all a continuum. Hence the lines “I am you are me,” “something between us that’s greater than air,” “it’s just an illusion of me and you,” “it’s a fact subatomically.” Interestingly enough, this features strongly in Buddhist philosophy going back over two thousand years.

About Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers:

Founded in 1974, the Oakland Youth Chorus (OYC) is the longest running youth chorus in the East Bay. Serving nearly 3000 singers and music students in East Bay programs each year, we focus on creating and sustaining programs of high educational and artistic merit that are accessible to and supportive of children and youth from all backgrounds. OYC welcomes all children and youth, celebrates their cultures and unique strengths, and connects them to each other, amplifying voices for changes needed to bring harmony to our world through music education and community performance. OYC Chamber Singers are made of young musicians grades 6–12, directed by La Nell Martin.

Learn more about Oakland Youth Chorus online at oaklandyouthchorus.org

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Karen Siegel: Meditation

Text: Karen Siegel

May I still my mind.

May I open my heart.

May I be slow to anger and quick to forgive.

May I slow my pace.

May I stop to breathe.

May I hold my child a minute longer.

May I live each day.

May I learn to wait.

May I come to terms with uncertainty.

May I smell the rain.

May I hear the birds.

May I feel the warmth of the sunshine.

Composer Karen Siegel has been one of the true champions of remote choral singing since the pandemic hit in March 2020. Her choral ensemble, C4 (Choral Composer/Conductor Collective), released their first remote concert in April 2020 and has presented seven more remote concerts since. Many of these programs have featured Karen’s expressive and moving works for remote choir – she has become a master of the genre and several in-person performances of these works prove that they will continue to be relevant and often-performed as we return to singing together. In addition, Karen has provided invaluable support to those of us that have had to learn how to do this on the fly – she’s provided technical support and created a list of pieces written for remote choir (that includes works by our own Edna Yeh!). We featured Karen in our third Composer Connections installment (watch online: sacredprofane.org/karen-siegel), in which she and I discussed her music and her inspiration and we shared several of her remarkable award-winning works, many of which highlight important social justice themes such as gun violence, immigration, climate change, and women’s rights. As a fellow Jewish choral musician, I am personally drawn to Karen’s frequent use of semitic musical idiom in her work, elements that you hear both in her Ana el na, which we presented in our December virtual concert, and in Meditation, which we are thrilled to present tonight. I love how the work evokes the experience of meditating in both its expansive and more internal or intimate moments, and the way the choir weaves around and supports the mezzo-soprano solo, beautifully sung by Gretchen Wallacker.

Karen writes in her preface to the piece: 

“Meditation” was inspired by my experience with the COVID-19 pandemic. I wrote the poem in early May 2020, when the NYC region was past the peak but still in the throes of the virus’ impact, and I had been sheltering at home with my family for two months. The poem grew from a meditation that helped me get through that time, and I thank Laurie Goldstein Padrón (ittakesanopenheart.com) for sharing that meditation with me. “Meditation” is intended to be a balm for singers still physically disconnected from their choirs as the pandemic stretches on. It is the piece that I want to sing right now.

This work was created for live remote performance, where the choir members are connected via the internet and audio/video software. The latency inherent in online platforms is incorporated as an artistic element—the work is largely aleatoric, where singers repeat specific phrases purposely out of synch with the others on their voice parts. The solo allows for melody to be heard without getting lost in a swirl of sound. The form of “Meditation” follows a journey from chaos to calm, mirroring the experience of meditating in a time of distress.

“Meditation” exists in two versions, for mixed and treble choir. It was commissioned jointly by the thirteen choirs in the “Meditation” Commissioning Consortium, to be premiered by the Tier 1 choirs September-December 2020 and performed by the Tier 2 choirs January-June 2021 in live remote online performances; with choirs located in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Washington State; and in Munich, Germany.

Meet the wonderful composer Karen Siegel in our most recent Composer Connection to learn about her inspirations, composing for social justice, jewish musical influences, and remote music as a composer, performer, and director. Karen also previews her new piece “Meditation”

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“Nearness of you: Staying Connected“ will be dedicated to the memory of our dear friend, singer, and beloved member of the Bay Area music community, Michael Jordin.

A Tribute to Michael Jordin

David Wikander: Kung Liljekonvalje (King Lily of the Valley) 

Text: Gustaf Fröding

Just a few years after I started conducting Sacred and Profane, I was contacted by Michael Jordin, a local choral bass and clarinet and saxophone teacher, who had heard that I regularly programmed the music of Sweden with the choir. He was interested in exploring his Swedish heritage and he joined us for what was supposed to be a brief period. Fast forward over ten years, and Michael had become a pillar in our bass section, serving as section leader and often the only one able to hit the low, low notes. He had an amazing way of finding the ideas and interests that connected people, all while retaining his own gentle warmth and even a bit of shyness, and Michael’s snack nights became epic celebrations.

He and I connected over so many things through the years – our love for our dogs, good food, the outdoors, and music – both classical choral music and American folk and rock music of the 60s and 70s, particularly Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. We were so happy when Michael recovered after a frightening bout with cancer last summer and was able to join us in our remote rehearsals, even contributing to our virtual choir video of the Haitian song for healing, Frè O. When he became ill again a few months ago, he continued to join us in rehearsals until he was too weak to do so. His death has been a huge blow to everyone in the Bay Area music community that has cherished the years of music-making and conversation with Michael. I am grateful to Barry Stone, longtime S&P supporter, husband of our soprano Kim Webster, and former fellow-bass with Michael in the choir Coro Hispano, for creating this video tribute to Michael, featuring Kung Liljekonvalje, the lovely folk-style piece about flowers in the springtime by Swedish composer David Wikander. Listen closely, and you’ll be able to hear the ring of Michael’s rich bass voice.

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Erika Lloyd, Arr. Vince Peterson: Cells Planets

Text: Erika Lloyd

So far away,

when all will shine

and all will play

hey.

The stars will open up

and all will be

tiny pieces of galaxy,

reflected in you and me…

Cells, planets, same thing…

Bright electric lights

on all the leaves,

and everything

growing from a tree,

water’s blood,

and roots are veins.

I don’t know you

but I like you,

I don’t know you

but I miss you,

I don’t know you

but I need you…

The smallest is

the biggest thing

and in all the world

the love is the love

from me to you…

I don’t know you

but I like you,

I don’t know you

but I miss you,

I don’t know you

but I need you…

Brooklyn-based singer and painter Erika Lloyd is most widely known as the lead for her indie pop band Little Grey Girlfriend. She also sings with the professional chamber choir Choral Chameleon and holds a Bachelors in Vocal Performance and Early Music from Indiana University. The San Francisco-based all-male chamber choir Chanticleer has performed and recorded Vince Peterson’s arrangement of Lloyd’s Cells Planets regularly since 2010, and the work has since become a staple in the choral world. I first became aware of this piece when the singers in my choir at the University of San Francisco adamantly requested it for our collaboration concert with the music group from a high security men’s prison in Boston. The theme of connecting despite physical and social barriers made the work ideal for both that concert and tonight’s program and a lovely way to leave you reveling in the knowledge that we will be connecting more and more in the coming months.

Enjoy this sneak peek of “Cells Planets” featuring the amazing solo by soprano Rachael Roueché! See the whole thing this June 5.

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Don’t miss Nearness of You: Staying Connected

JUNE 5, 2021 | 6PM

BROADCAST ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

This concert is free and open to the public, no tickets necessary

Join our virtual audience and chat with our singers and director from the best seat in the house—your own!

Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter

From the Director’s Desk:

Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter

From Artistic Director, Rebecca P.N. Seeman:

It’s been a year since the world went into lockdown, and a year since Sacred and Profane decided to face the moment head-on and forge a new ambitious path. This second concert in our remote season includes new virtual choir videos (compilations of singers’ individual videos woven together by my partner Pete Gontier to tell beautiful cinematic stories) and a remarkable new commission from Trevor Weston – a remote piece where we sing together in real time online, embracing the latency, or lag time, that comes with making music on Zoom. While we still desperately miss singing together in the same space, we’re grateful for the opportunity to come together on Monday nights as we always have to talk, connect, and sing.

In addition to the current health pandemic caused by the Coronavirus, this past year has made it all too clear that we are in the throes of another pandemic that has raged in our country for over four hundred years – that of slavery and its ugly offspring, racism in both institutional and personal forms. As a choral ensemble in one of the most diverse regions in the world, Sacred and Profane could not remain silent. In June, I signed the Black Voices Matter pledge that calls on choral musicians to program music by Black and Brown composers throughout our seasons. In our December concert, we brought you Frè O, a cry for healing from Haiti, and Stacey Gibbs’ profound arrangement of There is a Balm in Gilead. In this concert – Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter – we amplify the voices of composers who are addressing issues of racism and violence in their music.

We recognize that this is just the beginning of our commitment to anti-racism and that we have much work to do. We acknowledge that we have failed to fully realize our mission to be dedicated to diversity by not considering the diversity of our own community in our selection of music, our choice of musical collaborations, and our care for those around us. We are committed to doing better going forward, beginning with this concert.

Please visit our ADEI page to read our new statement and plan of action for ongoing access, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Read the full Black Voices Matter Pledge at blackvoicesmatterpledge.org.

Keep reading to learn about each work in our Black Voices Matter concert. You can read the full program notes and text and translations online here.

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Rosephanye Dunn Powell: To Sit and Dream (2010)

Text: Langston Hughes

Original Poem Title: “To You”

To sit and dream, to sit and read

To sit and learn about the world

Outside our world of here and now –

Our problem world –

To dream of vast horizons of the soul

Through dreams made whole,

Unfettered free – help me!

All you who are dreamers, too,

Help me to make our world anew.

I reach out my dreams to you.

When I was researching music for this concert last summer, I asked my friend and colleague, La Nell Martin, Artistic Director of the Oakland Youth Choir, for suggestions for Black and Brown composers. She sent me several names, including that of Rosephanye Dunn Powell. I logged into Dr. Powell’s website and discovered a gifted composer, scholar, and singer who had produced a treasure trove that spans several genres and styles of choral music. I fell in love with her evocative setting of Langston Hughes poem To You, in which he returns to the idea of dreaming as a vehicle for imagining an alternative, better world wherein people of color enjoy the same access to happiness, success, and security that White people take for granted. Unlike his better known poem and call to action I Dream a World, which was the inspiration for Dr. King’s famous speech, To You considers the interior intellectual life of a man who is safe and comfortable in his own home, surrounded by his books and the written reports in the news about current events and civil unrest .

When Dr. Powell joined our rehearsal to discuss her piece, we were inspired by her commitment to Hughes’ message and personality, including a piano part that plays tribute to Hughes mastery as a jazz pianist and member of the vibrant Harlem jazz scene in the 1950s and 60s. Dr. Powell also spoke about how she approached the sense of wandering in a dream-space with her wafting melodies and the way those melodies intertwine to evoke coming together in a struggle for justice for which the poem implores. Many thanks to our Jeremy Davidson for leading a detailed discussion of Hughes’ life and work.

Rosephanye Powell joins an S&P rehearsal online to coach “To Sit and Dream” and talk about her choral and compositional insprations.

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Til Ungdommen (To Youth), Arr. Henning Sommerro (1988)               

Original Music: Otto Mortensen (1951)

Text: Nordahl Grieg (1936)

Sacred and Profane has been bringing you the music of Scandinavia for years, but I don’t believe we’ve introduced a discussion about the Scandinavian socio-political experiment to create a society that supports the basic needs of its citizens. The Norwegian poet and musician Nordahl Grieg’s 1936 poem Til Ungdommen (To Youth) calls for a world that banishes war and instead embraces care and love for our fellow humans and the earth that we inhabit. Written when the threat of fascism was very real in Europe and set in 1951 to music by Otto Mortensen, the poem evokes the motivation for the Scandinavian socialist-democratic political system that was adopted soon thereafter, a system to which many people in the United States are now turning for a more positive example of what government can be.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-old Norwegian right-wing terrorist, led a violent crusade against people he considered supportive of Islam and a feminist European society. He set off a car bomb outside government buildings in Oslo, killing eight of his fellow countrymen. Dressed as a policeman, he then managed to evade police, traveled twenty-five miles by car, crossed a river by ferry, and arrived on the small island of Utøya where the Norwegian Workers’ Youth League was holding a summer camp. There he shot and killed sixty-nine more people, some of them at point blank range. His victims included fifty-five teenagers, one of whom was fourteen. Following Breivik’s attack, people in Norway flocked to the streets to sing Til Ungdommen to affirm their support for the values that threaten and frighten people like Breivik.

 Every time I think about the day the news of this attack spread across the world, tears overcome me. As a Swede, I have always been proud that my mother’s country, along with other Scandinavian and European countries, has chosen a more positive, humanity-affirming path than seen in many other parts of the world, including our own country. To see right-wing extremist ideals reemerge in Scandinavia (because we cannot turn a blind eye to that region's own flirtation with fascism in the past) has been enormously upsetting to me. Sacred and Profane is bringing you Til Ungdommen in this concert not only to commemorate the 10th-anniversary of the massacre, but to proclaim our commitment to anti-racism and our rejection of violence as a means to assert dominance over others.

 Many thanks to our resident Swede Tomas Hallin for leading our discussion of Til Ungdommen.

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Trevor Weston: Martyrs (2020)

Text: Anonymous, from the isorhythmic motet by Guillaume Dufay, Psalm 39, Trevor Weston

In the past year, many conductors have turned to Marques L.A. Garrett’s remarkable list of idiomatic and non-idiomatic music by African and African Diaspora composers. Last summer, I relished examining the music of the many composers Dr. Garrett includes. Toward the end of this alphabetical list I arrived at the name Trevor Weston and I started to investigate. I am still left with a gaping question – why was this the first time I was hearing about this composer? Not only had he been engaged in his master’s and Ph.D. studies in composition at UC Berkeley around the same time I was a music student at UC Santa Cruz, but his work had been championed by Marika Kuzma, who was UC Berkeley’s Director of Choral Activities for many years, a former conductor of Sacred and Profane, and the close friend of our one original S&P singer George-Ann Bowers. More importantly, Trevor’s is the kind of choral music that I relish – deeply moving and emotional and at the same time unabashedly intellectual and unafraid to take risks and explore the edges of what choral music can be. I encourage you all to view our Composer Connections series installment on Dr. Weston and his music, which you can watch on our website and YouTube Channel.

Since Trevor’s existing choral music is too demanding for a virtual choir video, I reached out to him to see if he would consider a commission from S&P for a work that could be rehearsed and performed remotely, ideally a piece that addresses the call for meaningful and lasting action regarding police violence against African Americans. He responded that he was working on a similar commission for C4 Ensemble, a consortium of triple-threat composer-singer-conductors, and suggested that C4 might agree to a co-commission. Little did he know that S&P performed C4’s Karen Siegel’s Ana El Na in our December 2020 concert and joined a consortium commission project for her Meditation that will be included in our June 2021 concert, and that I have relied on her innovation and support regarding remote singing since this new reality began last spring. Happily, C4 agreed to a co-commission, and Trevor proceeded to compose two versions of Martyrs that consider each ensemble’s technical requirements. Learning this powerful piece has been an exciting challenge that has stretched us and that we’ve been longing for since we went remote. I am grateful to Trevor for speaking with me at length about music in general and his music in particular and for attending an entire Pacific Standard Time evening Zoom rehearsal all the way from his home in New York City (the same day that the American Academy of Arts and Letters Announced Trevor as a 2021 recipient of its Awards in Music) to coach Martyrs and help us arrive at a more authentic performance of this trailblazing work.

Trevor writes about Martyrs:

 Years ago, I gave a lecture on early Renaissance music and played ‘O Sainte Sebastian’ by Guillaume Dufay. The words summoned the saint to spare the population from the bubonic plague. What struck me about the piece, beyond its beauty, was the use of the most formal and complex form of choral composition at the time, an isorhythmic motet, to comment on an important contemporary concern. In essence, Dufay used his strongest compositional tools to address an important societal problem.

 In the past, I have looked to the Psalms of David when I wanted text to communicate individual human despair. The summer of 2020 combined the COVID plague with numerous examples of African Americans dying as a result of excessive police actions. The fear associated with both issues seemed similar to me; fear that, in the course of going about your day, you could be “caught” by a life-ending intrusion. The inability to breathe is a symptom of both afflictions. The words used too often by those suffering from excessive police force, “I can’t breathe” was also the common complaint of those suffering from COVID-19. I inserted this phrase in the excerpt from Psalm 39 that I used for Martyrs.

 The deaths of most people afflicted by both plagues during the summer of 2020 could have been avoided. A similar response to both situations was disbelief of the severity of the problem or a disbelief in the veracity of the problem. For this reason, I consider the now 210,000+ COVID deaths in the US and the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, et al. as unnecessary and easily avoided. Martyrs have always been a warning to the living to act before and not after the loss of life. I composed Martyrs to honor their lives and hopefully encourage the rest of us to stop future senseless deaths.

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Kim Fowler: Emergence in Four Parts (2020)

Poem and performance by Kim Fowler

Read the full text online here or in our program texts and translations.

One advantage of rehearsing remotely is that singers are able to join us from great distances, and we’ve been able to connect with musicians from Canada to the Southwest, where alto Kim Fowler—one of our newest members—resides. Our weekly online rehearsals create a space for members to express thoughts and feelings, engage in critical discussions of our repertoire’s texts and histories, and digest our tumultuous world together in a format that celebrates each members unique talents. Kim, an accomplished author, shared a performance of her powerful poem Emergence in Four Parts she wrote while processing the national trauma following George Floyd’s death this summer. Her beautifully crafted words touched us deeply, and her description of the creative process as an act of healing resonated with our ethos for this season’s programming: that music and art are expressions of our shared humanity that connect, empower, inspire, and heal us.  

Kim writes:

I am pulled to write about the beauty in the land and in the spirit of humans struggling, celebrating their movement through this life. In my writing and my coaching I want to get to know what breathes below the surface that is waiting to be heard, that offers us riddles to be deciphered through dreams and visions. There is power in transparency.

 Emergence in Four Parts was published in the Winter 2021 issue of Reinventing Home, a digital magazine exploring the concept of home through a wide variety of cultural and creative lenses, from psychology to storytelling. We’re proud to share this impactful work in our program, and amplify her voice and experiences. Many thanks to Kim Fowler for sharing this moving performance.  

Learn more about Kim and her work at kimfowlerauthor.com

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Ysaÿe Maria Barnwell: We Are (1991)

Performance in collaboration with Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers

For each child that's born

a morning star rises

and sings to the universe

who we are.

We are our grandmothers' prayers.

We are our grandfathers' dreamings.

We are the breath of our ancestors.

We are the spirit of God.

We are

Mothers of courage

Fathers of time

Daughters of dust

Sons of great vision.

We are

Sisters of mercy

Brothers of love

Lovers of life and

the builders of nations.

We are

Seekers of truth

Keepers of faith

Makers of peace and

the wisdom of ages.

We are our grandmothers' prayers.

We are our grandfathers' dreamings.

We are the breath of our ancestors.

We are the spirit of God.

For each child that's born

a morning star rises

and sings to the universe

who we are.

WE ARE ONE.

In normal times, I often arrive at First Unitarian Church of Oakland around 6:30 on Monday evenings to prepare the space and my head for that night’s Sacred and Profane rehearsal. If I’m lucky, I arrive early enough to hear the end of La Nell Martin’s rehearsal with her Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers. I’m always impressed by her spirited and supportive leadership that inspires her singers to produce a sound bigger and more powerful than I would expect from a group of young singers. La Nell has recently informed me that she then often stays late working in the OYC offices upstairs and takes in S&P’s rehearsal later on those same evenings. We have gotten to know each other in the space between our respective rehearsals in our talks about the local choral music scene and our lives as women conductors. I’ve been thrilled to know La Nell on the sidelines as the California choral community has discovered her gifts and skills in the past few years and sought her out for multiple presentations at California Choral Directors Associations conferences and events.

La Nell and I have mused about an OYC-S&P collaboration for a few years and the current remote-choir reality in which we now live presented a perfect opportunity to create a virtual choir video together. I suggested Ysaÿe Barnwell’s We Are, and La Nell revealed to me that OYC has a storied past with that now-popular work, as the group was one of the first to perform it and worked closely with Dr. Barnwell.

Some of you may remember Ysaÿe Barnwell as the female bass in the African American women’s a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, which was active from 1979 to 2013. I vividly remember discovering Sweet Honey when I was an undergraduate at UCSC and couldn’t stop playing their records. Dr. Barnwell is also a prolific composer – in addition to writing many of the Sweet Honey’s songs, she has also been commissioned to create music for dance, film, and stage productions, as well as many popular choral works. Dr. Barnwell conducts music workshops, including a workshop she created called "Building a Vocal Community: Singing in the African American Tradition." Her piece We Are was written for the Oakland-based Redwood Cultural Work, a nonprofit organization that supported the LGBTQ+ community, as well as for the Boy’s Choir of Harlem and the Cincinnati-based women’s choir, MUSE.

In our preparation of We Are, S&P discussed the meaning of the text, in particular the idea that we are all imbued with the promise to fulfill our ancestor’s wish for a better world. Our alto Kim Fowler, who we are fortunate to have join our remote rehearsals from her home in Santa Fe, shared with us her four-part poem about her connection to her ancestry that she wrote in the wake of George Lloyd’s murder. Discussions led by Kim, her good friend and our longtime alto Dyana Vukovich, and La Nell about the significance of the text and music deepened our connection to the work and to our own pasts – the photographs you see in our video are of our ancestors. I loved meeting the OYC singers in their Zoom rehearsal a few weeks ago. Each of the singers chose a word to describe what they’re feeling at this time in response to the many things Dr. Barnwell suggests that “we are” in her piece. Singers offered words like “hopeful,” “apprehensive,” and “determined.” Perhaps most striking was when one singer shared that she feels “tired” – tired of spending her school days on Zoom and tired of being placed in the impossible position of representing the Black experience to her mostly white and frequently insensitive classmates. This is an eye-opening lesson to all of us as we delve into this critical work to right the wrongs of the past four hundred years.

About Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers:

Founded in 1974, the Oakland Youth Chorus (OYC) is the longest running youth chorus in the East Bay. Serving nearly 3000 singers and music students in East Bay programs each year, we focus on creating and sustaining programs of high educational and artistic merit that are accessible to and supportive of children and youth from all backgrounds. OYC welcomes all children and youth, celebrates their cultures and unique strengths, and connects them to each other, amplifying voices for changes needed to bring harmony to our world through music education and community performance. OYC Chamber Singers are made of young musicians grades 6–12, directed by La Nell Martin.

 Learn more about Oakland Youth Chorus online at oaklandyouthchorus.org

♫ ♫ ♫

Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter

MARCH 20 2021 | 6PM

this broadcast is free and open to the public, no tickets necessary

Health and Harmony - Program Notes

From the Director’s Desk:

I Hope You’re Doing Well: Health & Harmony

Dear Friends of Sacred and Profane,

When our world turned upside down last March, Sacred and Profane was confronted with the need to make a decision -- take a hiatus until we could safely sing together again, become an online social club of sorts whose musical activity would consist of  singing pieces together while on mute, or forge into this new reality of singing together online. We took the latter option and have chosen to take musical risks, innovate, make mistakes, learn and grow. We have committed to making music together, to nurturing our musical connections with one another, and to share that music with our audiences.

We’ve put together a season of all kinds of musical experiences. We are creating virtual choir videos of compilations of singers’ individual videos and singing remote pieces where we sing together in real time online, embracing the latency, or lag time, that comes with making music on Zoom. We’ve sampled various internet platforms for making music together and learned how to work with new modes of technology, acquired USB microphones and learned how to set mic levels specifically for each piece. We’ve debated whether to attempt to sing rhythmically in sync or whether to accentuate the lag time. We’ve sung on mute while one person sings live. We’ve sung along with guides and recordings. We’ve been frustrated with the limitations of singing through technology and missed the wonderful energy of singing together in the same space, but at the same time we’ve relished the opportunity to come together on Monday nights as we always have, talk and connect, and sing beautiful, moving music.

And now we are excited to share that music with you! When I began ruminating on this season, it was clear that we would still be in the throes of the Coronavirus through the end of 2020 and possibly beyond. What I didn’t know was that cases would be surging in the United States as we broadcast our concert. Our first concert of our 43rd season – I Hope You’re Doing Well: Songs of Health and Harmony – feels particularly needed in this unusual holiday season, when we all need a good dose of “health and harmony.”

Keep reading for notes on our December concert repertoire. Full program notes with texts and translations can be found here.

Composer, arranger, and conductor Stacey Gibbs

In the past few years, I’ve often turned to Stacey Gibbs’ remarkable arrangements of traditional African American spirituals. Sacred and Profane sang his Follow the Drinking Gourd in December of 2017 and his Soon I Will Be Done in March of 2019. There is a Balm in Gilead speaks clearly to this moment and our longing for healing. The text refers to the Hebrew bible book of Jeremiah, in which Jeremiah appeals for a healing balm or a physician to heal the people of Israel. The balm itself has been interpreted to refer to a spiritual medicine. After the last few years of division in our country and the last several months of the pandemic, spiritual and physical healing feel equally needed.

African American spirituals have a rich history. Because enslaved people were often forbidden to read anything but the Bible, spirituals are made up of direct and adapted scripture. As Karen Cook Bell writes, enslaved people saw in scripture "a God who took the sides of the victims of history, rather than one who simply established the existing social order. [So] African American spirituals not only appropriated the tools of the enslaver’s language to resist slavery, but also relied upon African American folk culture to critique the southern slave system." As W.E.B. Du Bois writes, "through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is a faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometimes, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.”

Many thanks to Rachael Rouché for her assistance researching and writing these notes.

•••

My original plan for our 2020-2021 season included a concert of music from the Jewish tradition. I programmed Karen Siegel’s Ana El Na (Please G-d heal us) as a procession. Karen is a member of the C4 Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, an ensemble based in New York that instantly became a leader in remote singing when the pandemic hit. Last spring, Karen began writing music to be sung remotely, including a re-arrangement of her Ana El Na, a plea for healing that has been sung in her synagogue in New Jersey for years. Who could have predicted that a work I had already intended for this season would suddenly become so fitting in this moment, and written by the composer who has more than any other made singing together online during the pandemic a mission? I’m pleased to offer this piece that not only asks healing for those who are ill, but also remembers the members of the medical community who are our heroes of the moment in its plea to “strengthen the hands of those who are taking care of them.” This piece has special resonance for me as a Jewish woman and it was a pleasure to coach the Hebrew pronunciation with my Israeli stepmother, Avital Agam. It’s also been particularly wonderful to hear our own Adam Lange give all his heart to the moving text in the solo recitation.

•••

Haitian percussionist Jeff Pierre is featured in this December’s performance of Frè O

Sacred and Profane has embraced the music of Sweden for years, but this moment calls us to augment the voices of Black and Brown communities and composers. Sten Källman’s work with Haitian music presented a perfect opportunity to embrace both of these missions at once, and his Frè O is particularly fitting for our concert. A Swedish multi-instrumentalist, arranger, and conductor, Källman has lived in Haiti on and off since the late 1960s, working with the people and developing a deep connection to Vodou culture and music. Källman’s Gothenburg-based choir, Amanda, has championed his arrangements of Haitian music and he has toured extensively with his all-Swedish Vodou band, Simbi. Our own Swedish tenor Tomas Hallin sang with Amanda a number of years ago. Sten’s notes in his score present this work perfectly:

The Republic of Haiti was created in 1804 by slaves who revolted against France, believing that the message of the French Revolution that all men are free and equal brothers was as true for the black man as it was for the white man. Modern Haitians are descended from generations of intermarriage between a variety of West African nations, with some influence from the French and the Taino Indians. Similarly, Haitian cultural life is a rich mix of these influences, and the Vodou religion has become an effective synthesis of Christianity and West African beliefs. In my experience, Vodou has been vastly misunderstood by most Western nations.

Vodou is practiced mainly by poorer, rural Haitians as a way of creating a collective community between the extended family and the nature spirits that they believe respond to singing and dancing. These Haitians are also Christians who believe in one God – the Vodou spirits appear and are pictured in similar ways to Catholic Saints and are used as symbols representing the various aspects and emotions of man. Vodou spirits are worshiped only through singing, dancing, and drumming. I have watched as the music at these gatherings creates a sense of warmth and security in a community that helps people become completely free to express themselves, revealing the true dignity of the human spirit. It is this sense of freedom and community that we all seek through group singing, and this music confirms for me that people express the same basic emotions with their music wherever and whenever they live.

I heard a village in Haiti sing Frè O and was overcome with the power of this expression of grief. As a man lies dying from illness, his relatives appeal to the Vodou spirits Dambala, the serpent, and Ayida, the rainbow. These married spirits are very old images brought from West Africa to Haiti and symbolize our connection to the past, the present, and the future, which we feel more strongly in the face of an impending death. I hope the beauty and the simplicity of the music speaks for itself.

I am grateful for the support of the individuals who helped make our performance of Frè O more genuine and meaningful. Haitian percussionist Daniel Brevil recorded the text for us so we would have a native speaker to emulate. Daniel also connected me with members of the local Haitian music community, including Yagbe Onilu, a percussionist, scholar, and spiritual guide who spoke with us about Vodou culture, and Jeff Pierre, the remarkable Haitian percussionist who you see in our virtual choir video. Many thanks also to Wade Peterson, a college friend and percussionist who helped me connect with musicians, and to our own Rachael Rouché, who led additional discussions about the rich tradition of Vodou and provides the moving solo you’ll hear in our video.

•••

Los Angeles based composer Dale Trumbore has taken the choral world by storm in recent years and this young composer’s works are now championed by the country’s finest vocal ensembles. I will never forget hearing the remarkable Aeolians of Oakwood University sing her In the Middle, with Dale on the piano, at the American Choral Directors Association conference in March 2019. Sacred and Profane was planning to present that piece as part of a concert with piano this coming March and we hope to bring that to you soon. Thankfully, Dale has written a number of pieces that can be sung remotely, including her of the moment I Hope You’re Doing Well. This piece calls for the conductor to sing with the choir, and it’s been a delight for me to have the opportunity to join in the music making as a singing member of the choir.

•••

Sacred and Profane has regularly turned to Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s music for comfort and healing, most recently in our 40th anniversary concert in May 2018 with his Da pacem Domine, which served as a balm to follow his countryman and friend Veljo Tormis’ powerful cry against the ravages of war, Curse Upon Iron. For this concert, I chose his Beatitudes. Composed for Theater of Voices in 1990, Beatitudes is one of Pärt’s first English language settings. The text from text, from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, offers comfort to those who are persecuted or who suffer, promising relief and celebration in the afterlife. I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect poem for this year in which we’ve witnessed and condemned police violence against African Americans and seen Black and Brown people disproportionately affected by the coronavirus. C4 Ensemble performed a remote version of Beatitudes in their May online concert, in which they embraced asynchronous singing, inspiring me to bring the piece to S&P. We’ve tried different approaches to singing this work, alternating between augmenting the asynchronous reality of singing together online and trying to align rhythmically as much as possible. Of all of our works in this concert set, this one has challenged us most, but we’ve learned how to hear each other in new ways and we’ve leaned into the beauty and substance of the text.

Arvo Pärt’s distinct compositional idiom is tintinnabuli (from the Latin tintinnabulum, "a bell"). This simple style was influenced by the composer's mystical experiences with chant music and gives his compositions a meditative and spiritual quality.

•••

I first came to know James Agee’s masterful poem Sure on This Shining Night through Samuel Barber’s remarkable setting for voice and piano. I’ve always enjoyed the alliteration Agee employs in the words “sure, shining, shadows,” then in “healed, health, high, holds, hearts, whole” and again in “weep, wonder, wandering.” I find it delightful to massage those consonants into expressive meaning when singing that piece. Morten Lauridsen’s much-loved setting of that text for piano and voice was an obvious choice for our concert, and several S&P singers have remarked how good it feels to sing this nurturing and warm work. We hope it leaves you feeling equally cradled and comforted this holiday season.

Rebecca P. N. Seeman, Artistic Director

Warmly,

Rebecca

Watch the December concert broadcast I Hope You’re Doing Well: Health & Harmony

Saturday, December 19 at 6pm on our YouTube Channel

International Women's Day: Champions of Music

March 8 is International Women’s Day, a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women and marks a call to action for accelerating women's equality. International Women's Day (IWD) has occurred for well over a century, with the first IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over a million people. Today, IWD belongs to all groups collectively everywhere. IWD is not country, group or organization specific.

Sacred and Profane is always proud to champion women’s important contributions to music in our programming, and strive to feature the exceptional composing, performing, conducting, and educating done by women in all our concerts. This International Women’s Day, we’re turning the spotlight on Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist, as we prepare for the US premiere of her new work Day is here! at our upcoming concerts, Luminous Resonance: Music for Chorus and Strings. If you’ve been to an S&P performance in the past, chances are you’re familiar with Rehnqvist’s incredible music.

Sacred & Profane’s Artistic Director, Rebecca P.N. Seeman writes about programming Day is here! for our upcoming concerts:

I first began dreaming of a concert for choir and strings when Karin Rehnqvist, the fantastic Swedish composer whose music we frequently perform in our concerts, told me that she was working on a work for string orchestra and eight solo voices, for which she was choosing texts from the same collections of poetry by indigenous poets from various regions that had been the source of Songs From the North, the remarkable four-movement work she composed for us for our fortieth-anniversary concert in May 2018 (watch the video of our performance here). I was struck by the opportunity to perform a work that was something of a partner to Songs of the North, and asked her if she thought it could be re-conceived for soloists and choir. She liked the idea, and we agreed to discuss it more when the work was complete.
 
We needed an excellent string orchestra to work with to make this concert a reality. The first group that came to mind was the wonderful local Circadian String Quartet, whose violinist David Ryther is an old friend of mine from our undergraduate days at UC Santa Cruz. David’s remarkable skill, expressive musicality, and commitment to new music is something that is shared by the entire quartet, so I was thrilled when they agreed to partner with us, and recruit a top-rate ensemble of colleagues to complete the fourteen-piece orchestra.

When Karin completed Day is here! and it had received its premiere in Stockholm, she sent me the score. We worked together to determine which parts could work well for the full ensemble, and which would be best in solo voices. Making this a reality with Sacred and Profane, our eight remarkable soloists, and the string orchestra in our rehearsals over the past couple of months has been thrilling and hugely rewarding for me. It is a demanding and moving work about the birth of the planet and our current situation confronting climate change, using Native American and other indigenous texts, as well as a beautiful Swedish hymn, to celebrate our abiding relationship with the natural world. Knowing Karin as I do, a person who spends weeks at a time on backpacking trips with her husband Hasse, and whose home outside of Stockholm sits perched on a wooded hill above a large and beautiful lake, I know that the environmental health of our planet concerns her greatly, as it does all of us.

Day is here! is about the natural world—its beauty, its solace, and our need for its sustenance. It holds all our emotions about the earth: our joy, our connection, and our deep fears about its demise. The work begins exuberantly, as we are surrounded by birds, insects, and other sounds of nature presented by both instruments and voices, while the text announces the waking of the earth with the rising of the sun in movements one and two.

"Day is here!" features extended techniques for strings to create a texture evocative of nature, such as harmonics, glissandi, jeté/ricochet bouncing bow strokes, and bow placement effects like flautando (near fingerboard) sul ponticello (on the bridge), and behind the bridge. Can you hear those woodland scenes?

More about Karin Rehnqvist:

The first woman to enroll in the composition program at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, Karin Rehnqvist (b. 1957), is currently among the most frequently commissioned composers in Sweden. She has composed for such ensembles as the BBC Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio, Swedish Opera, Kronos Quartet, and many others. In 2009, Rehnqvist was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, the first woman to hold a chair in composition in Sweden. Her style is notable for blending Swedish folk music and art music. She has been a prolific composer of choral music throughout her career, and continues to champion music for choral ensembles of all levels and all types.

Rehnqvist’s music for mixed choral ensemble is characterized by contrast. She often writes in a warm manner for men’s voices and in a strong manner for women’s. She also frequently juxtaposes light and dark, both in her choice of text and in her use of timbre. Nearly all of her music is rooted in Swedish folk music. Her vocal music is notable for the use of kulning — a form of herding call, or lockrop, that was traditionally sung by female cowherds in Sweden. In Rehnqvist’s early music, kulning lines were given solely to women’s voices and primarily to solo singers, but as her style has matured, she has expanded the use of the form to be sung by all members of the ensemble, men and women alike.

Rehearsing with Circadian String Quartet

We hope you’ll join us in celebrating this fantastic composer’s work, and the work of all women in music, not just on International Women’s Day, but every day! Hear this exuberant piece alongside local composer David Conte, contemporary choral favorite Eric Whitacre, and classical icon Ludwig van Beethoven for a concert of chorus and strings that will take you through a musical journey through the human experience, with poignancy and joy, depth and levity!

LUMINOUS RESONANCE: music for chorus and strings

Friday, March 13 at 8 PM
St. John's Presbyterian Church
2727 College Ave, Berkeley

Saturday, March 14 at 8 PM
St. Mark’s Lutheran Church
1111 O'Farrell Street, San Francisco

Settling to Rest in the Dark Winter Nights

From the Director’s Desk:

Winterlude: Songs of Sleep and Repose

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,
 

Now that the days are getting shorter and the nights longer, it’s easy to feel like we want more time to rest, slow down, light candles, and curl up on the couch with a book—you know, hibernate. It was with that seasonal mood shift in mind that I developed our upcoming concert—Winterlude: Songs of Rest and Repose. While it's easy to fill a concert like this with only sweet lullabies and Christmas cradle songs—those pieces are definitely included in the program (and they are beautiful!)—I wanted to make sure there was something to keep our interest piqued as well. We don’t want you all actually falling asleep in the concert!
 

Composer Abbie Betinis

Our concert begins with the beautiful medieval English carol On Yoolis Night, edited and arranged by the women’s early music quartet, Anonymous 4, whose fabulous work exploring women’s medieval-era vocal repertoire has been an inspiration to me for years. I attended a vocal workshop with them a few years ago, and was happy to learn that these phenomenal singers and scholars are equally gifted as educators and promoters of this relatively obscure area of early women’s music. It’s delightful to bring this meaty carol to S&P’s singers and our audiences. In keeping with Christmas lullabies, we will sing Dormi, Jesu by Minnesota-based composer, Abbie Betinis. After hearing Abbie’s music become increasingly present in choral programming for several years, I finally met this fabulous young composer at the Chorus America Conference in the summer of 2018. In addition to her active composing career, Abbie has been the main creative and organizational force behind Justice Choir, a chapter-based movement, complete with songbooks, that arms singers to hit the streets during protests with easy protest-appropriate songs about social justice, environmental issues, and more. I’m hoping to collaborate with other local conductors to create a Bay-Area chapter of Justice Choir in the not-too-distant future. 

Composer Tina Andersson. We performed her work in May 2019, and are thrilled to be singing her music again—this time for a world premiere!

I discovered Tina Andersson’s Sleep, Baby, Sleep last year when we were preparing the Swedish composer’s The Angel for our concert in May. When I contacted Tina to let her know we’d be singing Sleep, Baby, Sleep, I was excited to learn that our performance will be its world premiere! 

Sacred and Profane audiences have come to anticipate hearing the wonderful music coming out of Scandinavia at many of our concerts, and this concert won’t disappoint. In addition to Tina’s piece, we will be singing the Swedish composer Gunnar Eriksson’s arrangement, Norwegian Lullaby. Like S&P tenorTomas Hallin, Eriksson comes from Göteborg, a city on the Western coast. After a recent rehearsal, Tomas commented that Norwegian Lullaby is classic Eriksson, complete with a sense of humor in the addition of a bit of Cuban rhythm to this traditional Norwegian folk song. Lest you think that all Scandinavian music is light-hearted, we will also sing the young American composer Jocelyn Hagen’s arrangement of Sofðu unga ástin mín, a dark Icelandic lullaby that was originally composed for a play about 18th century outlaws who do unspeakable things when on the lamb from the law. The piece is simultaneously sweet and creepy, as one would expect. 
 

Composer Lera Auerbach conducting in Vienna, Austria recently (via Wien Modern)

The Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach’s setting of the Blake poem A Cradle Song also has a rather unsettling quality to it. I was first introduced to the work of this exciting young composer by our bass and board president, Niek Veldhuis, who heard a demanding multi-movement work of hers performed by the phenomenal Netherlands Chamber Choir. I immediately set out to find a work by Auerbach for S&P, and I love how this piece, possibly better-suited to a Halloween concert than a December holiday concert, gave our concert some chilling contrast.
 

American composer Eric Whitacre

Our concert will also feature two works by different American composers, both from multi-movement pieces called Paradise, and both written for San Francisco's Chanticleer. Shawn Crouch’s setting of Brian Turner’s poem about a father in Iraq who tries to soothe his four-year-old son to bed during a military offensive, telling the child that the bombs are “just the drums, a new music,” brings tears to my eyes every time I read the poem, let alone hear S&P sing the beautiful music that Shawn has composed. When I met him at the Chorus America conference last June, Shawn told me that this piece has become the most-performed of his choral works, and for very good reason. Followers of American choral music are now very familiar with the layered chords of Grammy Award-winner Eric Whitacre, probably the most celebrity-like composer of our choral universe. I sometimes resist Whitacre’s popularity, but he never fails to win me over with his moving and rich music, especially in more demanding works like his Sleep My Child, an ethereal work originally composed for three women portraying angels in his theater work, Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. 

Scattered throughout the program are works by the great composers of history, the 17th century English madrigalist John Wilbye (probably my favorite English madrigal, the contemplative Draw on sweet night), the great Edwardian English composer Herbert Howells, whose Sing Lullaby deserves its place as one of the classics of the English Christmas repertoire, and a folk music-inspired lullaby by the Polish spiritual minimalist composer Henryk Górecki. This is sure to be a wonderful holiday concert, with lots of variety to both lift you up and to settle you into rest. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

Rebecca Petra Naomi Seeman, Artistic Director

Warmly,

Rebecca

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Join us!

Saturday, December 7 at 8pm

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Berkeley

Sunday, December 8 at 4pm

St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, San Francisco

Tipping the Balance and Quilt Songs

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,
 
I’ve have wanted to present a concert of music by women composers for years, and during last year’s #MeToo movement, it became clear that now is the time. Some music organizations, including the Women’s Philharmonic and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, have begun to track the percentage of works by women that are programmed by major symphonies. In the 2016-2017 season, of the top twenty-one orchestras in the United States, fourteen did not program a single piece by a woman, including our own San Francisco Symphony. Of the remaining seven, several programmed only one work by a woman. The choral world is only slightly better. Recent American Choral Directors’ Association (ACDA) conferences have showcased a sorry selection of works by women in their concerts, and even then often pieces for girls choruses. I remember a particular conference session on music by American and Canadian women with a colleague who said to me, “I don’t consider the gender of the composers I program, I just program music that is high quality.” This inability to consider the biases that we hold unawares simply isn’t good enough, and it’s time that we act to equalize the field.

We’ll be performing composer Caroline Mallonee’s O Lux

Some organizations are taking note of the disparity. The New York Philharmonic is launching its multi-season Project 19, which celebrates the centennial of the 19th amendment (which gave women the right to vote) with world premieres by nineteen women composers, including Caroline Mallonée, one of the composers featured in our upcoming concerts. My friend Eric Banks, conductor of the Seattle-based choral ensemble The Esoterics, has programmed this season to tip the ratio – of 33 composers the ensemble will feature this year, 20 are women and non-binary gender, and 12 are people of color. (Check out this interesting article by Women's Philharmonic Advocacy about women programmed for 19-20 season)

With S&P, I’ve also worked to program more works by women and people of color this season. While history has given us a plethora of phenomenal choral works by women, I felt it was important to showcase the talents of women working now for our upcoming concert. As an homage to the original woman in music, we will begin our concert with a work by the first composer to whom we can attribute a musical work, Hildegard von Bingen. Following her O virtus Sapientiae, every work is written by a composer living and actively working today.

A few years ago, while roaming the aisles of exhibits at yet another ACDA conference, I spotted a free CD by the Minneapolis-based choral ensemble VocalEssence, conducted by the great Philip Brunelle. Each of the five works on the recording was by a woman who composed a piece inspired by a different quilt. The resulting Quilt Songs cycle features works by the splendid Alice Parker (who’s Wondrous Love we sang in March), Libby Larsen (one of the great American symphonists of our time), Berkeley’s own phenomenal Gabriela Lena Frank, whose music is informed by her Chinese-Peruvian-Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry, Ysäye Barnwell of the internationally acclaimed African American women’s choral ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Carol Barnett, who is well-known for her genre-bending works like Bluegrass Mass. When programming this concert I jumped at the opportunity to program these great pieces. I can’t wait to share them with you at the concerts—definitely a selection of works you’ll want to hear!

The amazing quilts that inspired the composers for the Quilt Songs cycle. You won’t want to miss their musical interpretations!

See program notes and texts for Quilt Songs here

In my next letter, I’ll write about the other composers featured in our concert and the exciting works they’ve composed.



Warmly,

Rebecca

Deutschland Drama

Dear Friend of Sacred & Profane,
 
In my last letter, I wrote about the works in the first half of Sacred and Profane’s upcoming program of sacred music by German and Austrian master composers – Bach’s motet Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, BWV 231 and Brahms’ motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Müseligen, Op. 74, No. 1. In this installment, I’ll let you into how I came to choose the other works that we’ll perform.
 

Hugo Distler

I keep a running list of pieces that Sacred and Profane’s singers suggest for us to perform down the line. Several years ago, our baritone (and at one point, alto!) Gabe Fuson asked if we could sing  Hugo Distler’spassion play Totentanz for choir and speakers. This dramatic work alternates aphorisms, sung by mixed choir, with dialogues between Death (spoken in our concert by ACT actor Paul Finocchiaro), and his many victims, who beg for mercy as they go to their fates. This beautiful piece (with wonderfully interesting music for the choir!) is entertaining, but also deeply dark.

 
When I was a teenager, I worked at art house movie theaters in Palo Alto – maybe some of you remember the New Varsity Theater, the famed theater/restaurant/café and launching place of many of Windham Hill’s jazz and new age recording artists? I worked there! In 1988, we showed the Belgian film The Music Teacher. Although I’d grown up in a house with instrumental chamber music and some vocal music, I’d never really heard anything like this, and I bought and devoured the CD of the music in the film. The piece that moved me the most, and that I credit for igniting my passion for music, was Mahler’s orchestral lied Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen, masterfully sung by the Belgian baritone José van Dam. I listened to that CD, mostly that piece, until it was a skipping mess. I’ve never been the same. A few years ago, I heard a German chamber choir perform Clytus Gottwald’s arrangement of Ich bin der Welt for 16-part a cappella choir, and was awe-struck. I couldn’t believe that this rich, complex, and deeply moving piece could be reworked so perfectly for singers. As S&P has become more eager to tackle challenging works of the professional choral repertoire, I knew this piece had to be part of this concert, and part of this exciting season. I hope you are as moved by it as I am, and I hope to be able toconduct it through my sure-to-be tearing-up eyes!

Rebecca Petra Naomi Seeman; Artistic Director, Conductor

I hope you’ll have the opportunity to enjoy this remarkable music with us! I’m looking forward to seeing you at one of our concerts!
 

Warmly,
Rebecca

Hear Director Seeman's recent interview with Jeffrey Freeman about these fabulous pieces on KDFC's State of the Arts!

Music of the Soul: Motets

Dear Friend of Sacred & Profane,
 
Sacred and Profane is hard at work preparing the second concert of our season celebrating 40 years of bringing beautiful choral music to Bay Area audiences. I wanted this season to focus on our title and our mission – celebrating the sacred and the profane. So while our December concert featured secular music of the winter night sky, our upcoming concert delves into sacred works by the German and Austrian masters Bach, Brahms, and Distler, plus an a cappella arrangement of a semi-sacred work for solo voice and orchestra by Mahler.
 

Choral conferences are treasure troves of repertoire discovery for me, but it’s pretty rare that a conference will reveal a new work by J.S. Bach! However, a small California conductors’ gathering at a retreat outside of Yosemite in the summer of 2016 did just that. I was introduced to Bach’s motet Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren, BWV 231, which had been sandwiched inside a larger work by Telemann for hundreds of years, and therefore assumed to also be by Telemann. When it was determined to be by Bach himself in the early 1980s, the world was given a new, beautiful motet for mixed choir. I can’t wait to bring you this exciting work that may be as unfamiliar to some of you as it was to me, with cellist Gretchen Claassen playing the continuo.
 

Brahms was a great lover of the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque, particularly the music of J.S. Bach. As a young man, he was known to spend many hours in the extensive music library of his mentors and friends Robert and Clara Schumann, poring over the complete works of Bach. Later, he kept a treasure trove of music by earlier masters in his own library in Vienna.. The influence of Bach’s music can be heard no place more clearly than in Brahms’ motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Müseligen, Op. 74, No. 1. It is structured just like many Bach cantatas and motets, containing four sections, polyphonic passages, and changes in texture and style, and closing with a homophonic harmonization of a hymn by Luther. I first heard this masterpiece in my graduate studies at the University of Iowa, and fell head-over-heels in love with the work. I brought it into a Sacred and Profane concert in 2012, and I’m excited to share it with you again.
 
In my next letter to you, I’ll tell you about my relationship to Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen and Hugo Distler’s Totentanz. I hope to see you at our concerts!

Rebecca Petra Naomi Seeman; Artistic Director, Conductor

Warmly,
Rebecca

Songs of Stars & Northern Lights

Dear Friend of Sacred & Profane,
 
What a wonderful experience to sing our secular wintertime concert of music about the evening, darkness, the night sky, and the northern lights last Saturday in Alameda! We can’t wait to present the concert this weekend – Saturday night in Berkeley and Sunday afternoon in San Francisco.

In my last letter, I talked about the first half of our program, and the focus on evening and solitude. The second half of our concert delves into the starry night and the Northern Lights: the magical Aurora Borealis.

Composer Eriks Ešenvalds

I’ve never had the opportunity to see this phenomenon, but it’s always been a dream of mine. Stars have always been an inspiration for composers, as can be heard in our performance of Monteverdi’s brilliant madrigal, Sfogava con le Stelle. Lately, a number of composers have been inspired by the night sky and the Northern Lights. I actually had to eliminate several lovely settings of Sara Teasdale’s poems – their frequent reference to being alone in nature at night, gazing at the stars, and finding solace in solitude has spurred many recent beautiful choral works. I settled on two for these performances – Winter Stars by the recently departed Steven Stucky, an important composer of mostly instrumental music from Ithica, New York; and Stars by the Young Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds. I first heard Stars at the American Choral Director’s Association 2015 convention in Salt Lake City. I loved the piece for it’s emotional immediacy and it’s beautiful use of water-tuned wineglasses (many of you know that I play a wineglass instrument that I made). Since then, Ešenvalds’ music has become a mainstay of concert programming across the United States. I chose two other works by Ešenvalds’ for our concert – Northern Lights and Rivers of Light, two pieces that both incorporate folksong references to the aurora borealis as well as historic accounts written by early arctic explorers. I’ve been excited by a new trend to set non-poetic texts such as historical documents and speeches in vocal music and this is among the first times that Sacred and Profane has delved into this expressive form.
 

I hope you’ll have the opportunity to enjoy this remarkable music with us!

Warmly,
Rebecca