Singing in choir. I really love singing in a good choir. There's something so satisfying about having your whole physical body as your instrument and resonating with others around you. Creating a beautifully blended choral sound is much harder than it seems on the surface. It takes a great deal of control for everyone to match their vowel sounds across the ensemble, to listen and balance a whole herd of differently colored voices, and have them all come together and agree on tempos, rubato sections, and expressive passages. This list could really go on and on. When all these things come together, the sound, and the sensation for the singers is wonderful and very addicting. We're really blessed to have such a wonderful vocal coach in our Musica Sacra Cathedral choir, Pawel's wife, Joanna Lukaszewska. She is so helpful in getting us thinking the right way for our vocal mechanisms to work correctly and together. If the voices are not working together technically, no amount of expression or style or anything else can make up for it. Hard work.
Conducting a choir. I was fortunate to receive my conducting training from a very gifted orchestral conductor, Robert Tueller. I worked on that technique through conducting student and community orchestras while living in Idaho. I later had great training in choral conducting while at CCM from Brett Scott, a fine Canadian conductor. Between the two, orchestral and choral conducting, I'm still more comfortable with orchestral ensembles. I feel a little naked without my baton--it's a whole different set of gestures and movements to invoke good vocal and breathing technique. This seems a little weird to me as I think about it because I've been singing in choirs most of my life, but I've only played in orchestras since I picked up the double bass during my bachelors degree. I spent a great deal of time working as a pianist with string players, and then I married one. A lot of my advanced musical learning happened during the time when I was developing that side of my musicality. Maybe that's part of it. I think the hardest thing about choral conducting, at least for me, is not singing along with the choir. This is a very common bad habit among conductors, and not only choral conductors. This is something that every conducting teacher tries to knock out of their students from the beginning. As the conductor, your first and most important job is to judge, gently correct, and evoke greater performances from your musicians. The truth is, how can you hear what your ensemble is doing, and therefore, how can you adequately judge their performance and know how to help them correct their playing or singing if the main thing you're hearing is your own voice? As one who loves to sing, this is especially hard when conducting a choir. I want to join in the fun of singing. It is even more difficult for me to control this urge when conducting a less polished choir ('polished', as in furniture polish, not 'Polish-ed' like the country or people). It seems so easy to just sing their part for them so they can hear it and then sing it correctly. This might be okay once or twice to help them along, but then having already allowed myself to vocalize, it becomes even harder to hold back. I heard a choral conducting teacher from Eastman say that singing their parts for them as a means of helping them get it right should not be the conductors first 'go-to', to fix the problem. First, let them try it a second time without giving any correction. If they mess up again, have the pianist play their part and then try a third time. Then, if they continue to sing it incorrectly, sing it for or with them. (I'm sure that if anyone from my Mormon church choir is reading this, they're probably thinking to themselves, "you sang all during rehearsal tonight, what's the deal?" Yes, I know, and I'm sorry. Like I said, it's hard for me to control sometimes, especially when our time to prepare is short and what will most likely fix most peoples problems in this case is having a strong singer next to them blasting their part in their ears. I shouldn't try to be both the conductor and the helpful neighbor singer. Bad habit.) But, like singing in a choir, even the most amateur choir, when we get it right and become many voices but one sound, it is very exhilarating to conduct a choir.
Composing for choir. I know I've gone on and on before about my teacher Pawel Lukaszewski, but he really is such a great composer and especially when it comes to writing for choir. My hope in coming to work with him was to get to know more intimately the inner workings of good choral writing. I'm certainly not fluent yet, but he has been such a great help. We had a 2 hour lesson this past week looking at some of my older choral pieces that were written before I had ever worked with a teacher who knew anything about choral techniques. It was so helpful, though humbling, to see where I had made mistakes and to understand how those mistakes effect the sound the choir makes. I realized in that lesson that I had always approached choral writing the way I would approach good string ensemble writing. Like in my conducting, I feel very comfortable in my writing when working with strings. Though I have spent far more time sing in choirs than playing in orchestras, I have spent far more time studying deeply the inner workings of good symphonic string writing than choral writing. It is common knowledge among composers that it is much more difficult to write for our own instrument that we've played for so many years, than for other instruments. We are so close to the instrument and it has become so natural for us, that it can be very difficult to back away and approach it from a compositional point of view rather than a performing point of view. This is true for me to an extent with piano music because I am a pianist, but it is even more the case when it comes to choral music. I have always felt that my most natural performing vehicle is my voice, and more specifically, my choral voice as opposed to my solo voice; that's a whole different thing. I'm learning now that I need to spend much more time analyzing and dissecting great choral works to observe the minutia from the composers point of view, the way I have done with string writing. There's so much to learn. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know and need to learn.
Upcoming Choral Performances. I am very pleased to have a good handful of performances coming up over the next 2 months. I will give a recital of my own compositions at the Chopin University on Sunday, 4 March (see Facebook for details). There will also be 5 additional performances of selections from my new, 6 movement choral piece Missa 'Musica Sacra' by choirs in Poland, Germany, and Cincinnati. Each of these performances will use the piece liturgically (in their church services [both Catholic and Episcopal]), as was my intent when writing the work. The best part of these performances has been the emails that I've received from the conductors as they prepare the works. They are very happy with the piece and find it fitting for their worship services. This really makes me feel glad, especially that they can be useful pieces for worship. I thought that many would not be interested in considering music by a Mormon composer for use in services of other denominations. I'm so glad to be able to share my feelings for God and Scripture through music and have it mean something to people of various faiths and affiliations.
Choral composition competitions. This weekend Pawel has been out of town facilitating the judging for a composition competition that he organizes every year. For this competition the applicants submit a cappella, sacred choral works in an attempt to win one of four prizes. http://www.competition.waw.pl/. There are the typical 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prizes which receive cash and performances by great choirs. The 4th award is labeled, "Special prize of the Archbishop of Cologne for liturgical character of the work". The city and clergy differ from year to year based on where the judging is held. Cash, a performance, and a recording are involved with this prize. I was very happy to receive word yesterday that I had won the award for the "liturgical character of the work" for my piece Agnus Dei for double chorus. It is the final movement of my Missa 'Musica Sacra' that I mentioned above re-arranged from the original SATB and organ to a double SATB a cappella setting. You can see the official announcement at this link. It will be performed and recorded at the Gaude Mater festival in Czestochowa during the first days of May. My teacher and I will travel together to be there for the festival performances and recording. I have won composition prizes before, but this is my first one for a choral piece, though I've tried many times. If I didn't already have proof enough that I was learning a ton from Pawel, I know have this tangible proof; I composed this piece under his tutelage. Thank you Pawel, you're the greatest!! It's really true. Gorecki's dead and Penderecki's getting really old. Who else is there in Poland who can match what you're accomplishing in choral music??!!!
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