lies like truth

Blue Heron is a high-endy early music-oriented vocal ensemble based in Boston whose members have sung with the likes of Sequentia and Chanticleer and whose work has been written up by Alex Ross in The New Yorker.

But, even though Blue Heron employs some beautiful singers (notably the iridescent tenor Jason McToots and the beveled-edged baritone-bass Paul Guttry) the group’s makeup confuses me.

It’s mixed gender, but only three of its 12 members are women. I listened hard at a concert of works from 15th century France, Burgundy and Cyprus last night at a billowy church in Cambridge, MA to see if the gender imbalance created something special for the sound.

But I drew a blank on that front.

Though the ensemble worked hard to achieve a good balance and blend, and succeeded on the whole, countertenor Gerrod Pagenkopf’s timbre, though lovely, stuck out of the mix. I’m guessing that this happened because the other three high voices in the ensemble are supplied by female vocalists — Daniela Tosic, Pamela Dellal an Jennifer Ashe.

Still, the concert, which felt rather long, had some great moments. The most extraordinary was a quartet of men performing the French-born composer Johannes Ciconia’s “Gloria Spiritus at alme,” a piece which modulates in such bizarre ways and whose “Amen” coda is so tonally unsettling, that it caused some audience members to titter. I loved it.

Last weekend in Davis, CA, I had the pleasure of interviewing Aaron Humble and Adam Reinwald of the Cantus men’s chorus based in the Twin Cities.

One of the things the singers said which struck with me was about how they consider it part of their mission to inspire boys to sing.

It’s not the first time that I’ve heard this mission from organizations that are centered on the singing male. Every boy choir in the land talks about the importance of getting boys into choruses and keeping them singing even through the challenging vocal change time during puberty.

But it was only yesterday while attending a concert in Boston by the Youth Pro Musica children’s chorus that the importance of encouraging boys to sing hit home.

Youth Pro Musica is like so many youth choruses around the country, which is as much as to say that it is peopled by ten times as many girls as boys. Despite Glee and The Voice, singing still seems to be an occupation that is considered to be feminine in nature.

In the more senior groups that comprise Youth Pro Musica, I spotted only two boys. I think there were around the same number in the younger group. Poor things, the more senior boys were dressed like waiters (see the photo above) and, I guess because their voices had already changed, they were forced to sit out of pieces that were only for treble chorus. Plus the group’s concert mood and etiquette was rather rigid and stolid — especially considering that it was supposed to be a festive holiday concert. The kids didn’t exactly look like they were enjoying themselves as they sung their way through Vivaldi’s Gloria, a few other Baroquey bits and the odd Christmas carol or two.

If I were a teenage boy, I certainly wouldn’t want to have anything to do with this lot. Show me to the nearest Wii.

And yet finding ways to engage boys in vocal music activities — and keeping them engaged through the vocal change — is one of the most important things you can do as a parent, teacher, vocal coach or other responsible adult. Countless studies have been done that show how much children benefit from singing, particularly in a group.

I am beginning to think seriously about what other means can be used to bring more boys to vocal music — I’m not just talking about choral music. Any kind of singing will do.

More singing boys = fewer wars.

When most people think of El Sistema, the amazing Venezuelan-born music education program that’s transforming the way in which many countries are approaching the musical development of children, images of little kids playing violins and French horns come most readily to mind.

Few people, particularly outside of Venezuela, consider the fact that El Sistema also has an incredible vocal music education program involving thousands of children.

Documentaries about El Sistema focus strongly on the instrumental training, as do news stories. Most of the photographic documentation related to the program that’s disseminated around the world captures kids blowing, plucking and hitting various orchestral instruments. Very rarely do we see images of El Sistema kids singing. And it’s the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, the top tier instrumental group of the El Sistema program, that most of us here in the US have been lucky enough to experience live on stage. The ensemble has been touring this country for a number of years now. The Simon Bolivar Choir, by contrast, only made its US debut this fall, and has only undertaken one previous international tour.

At a conference about El Sistema hosted by Cal Performances last week, the singing side of El Sistema was once again invisible. At least it was until I asked a question of keynote speaker Eric Booth about why so little emphasis is placed on the choral activities of El Sistema in the marketing of — and international conversation surrounding — the program.

Booth replied that although the singing program is very extensive and impressive, it doesn’t have the same marketing cache as the orchestral program. What it boils down to is this: Seeing a picture of a little kid holding a violin, as above, left, is somehow much more impressive and compelling to people than looking at a picture of a bunch of children, as above, right, with their mouths wide open singing a song.

This wasn’t a very satisfactory answer to my question. I don’t think Booth felt very comfortable talking about singing.

Funnily enough, people who attended the conference picked up on the singing issue several times for the rest of the day, so it clearly touched a nerve. Gillian Moore, of London’s South Bank Center, said during one panel discussion that the El Sistema choral program, “is going to be the next big story coming out of Venezuela.”

I certainly hope that this will prove to be true.

It’s time for marketers and media types to pay attention to singing as a core component of music education. The voice is the most primal and widespread instrument. It’s arguably the most powerful too, in terms of its ability to touch vast numbers of people both at the individual and community level. The brilliant vocalists who come out of the El Sistema choral program can help to demonstrate just how important singing is to the world.

But their efforts would be much more visible if they didn’t have to stand in the shadow of the El Sistema orchestral juggernaut all the time.

Cultural industry workers who happened to attend Clas/sick Hip Hop at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend, would very likely have been impressed and probably envious of the audience that the performance event combining hip-hop dance with live/DJ’d music led by the violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain attracted.

The crowd was predominantly young (20s and 30s) and very ethnically diverse, but there was also a smattering of people in their 50s and 60s as well as kids as young as 10.

There was something about the fluidity and porosity of the event that strikes me as being very powerful. The first thing that happened was that the big open floor of the YBCA Forum (one of the venue’s two performance arenas) was not treated as a traditional theater, but as a space for dancing. So most people started by moving about to DJ’d electronic music, or first getting a drink from the mobile bar that was set up in front of the DJ podium in one corner of the room, and then dancing, drink in hand.

Then, when the performance actually started, there was no call to attention. A young, female hip-hop dancer simply started doing her thing in one part of the room and automatically, the crowd cleared a space around her. Eventually she finished her dance, and the audience gathered to dance en mass again.

The same thing happened a few more times with more solo dance performances by virtuoso and emerging hip-hop dance artists including hip hop pioneer Rennie Harris, trail-blazing b-girl Ana “Rokafella” Garcia, Montreal’s b-boy Arthur “Lil Crabe” Cadre, and Bay Area new comers Ladia Yates and I Dummy, 

I didn’t take to all the dance. Some of the performers were more varied and arresting than others. But what I responded to immediately was the spontaneity of the way the room reacted to the performers and the interactions between the soloists and the group at large. In short, we all felt included in the experience.

Later on in the evening, Daniel Bernard Roumain, a fellow violinist, the DJs and the dancers took to the floor for a more formal performance predominated by duets of varied emotional and movement qualities between pairs of dancers. Somehow the audience instinctively knew that it was time to take to the stadium seating that had been set up on all four sides of the auditorium. Even though at this point the experience was more of a traditional performance set up with the audience watching the musicians and dancers do their thing “on stage,” the atmosphere remained charged.

The only let-down was that as soon as this part of the performance was over, the lights went on and everyone was abruptly ushered out into the night. It would have made much more sense for the proceedings to have been allowed to continue with more dancing, drinking and other ad hoc performance interventions for a while longer.

Still, the effect was overall strongly galvanizing. I don’t know if the elements of fluidity and porosity were responsible for attracting audiences in such large numbers in any conscious way. But perhaps there’s a subconscious understanding among the community of what an event like Clas/sick Hip Hop might entail. And this is what draws people in.

More arts organizations should take these qualities on board and find ways to make their experiences more fluid and porous.

Cal Performances is hosting a two-day conference about music education centering on El Sistema, the lauded Venezuelan approach. The conference is part of a bunch of offerings organized around Gustavo Dudamel’s present tour with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela.

It seems that symposia on music education are springing up in many places that Dudamel and the SBOV are landing during their journey across the United States. And if the first half of the one organized by Cal Performances yesterday is anything to go by, music educators across the country, even those who profess to knowing quite a bit about El Sistema, are going to be getting a transformative experience.

It’s tempting to provide a blow-by-blow account of the day’s activities. But that would use up too much typewriter ribbon. So I’m going to jot down out a few of the ideas that came up during the discussions that made the strongest impression on me…

1. Eric Booth, the erudite and compelling arts education pundit who gave the keynote speech, on why Gustavo Dudamel thinks El Sistema has been so successful: “There are two reasons for this: One, it makes every child feel like he or she is an asset; and two, we never forget to have fun.”

2. According to Booth, the greatest determinant of the success of a music education program is the motivation of the learners.

3. Teachers in the El Sistema system are described as “C.A.T.S.” which stands for the four qualities that they all possess. An El Sistema teacher is at once a Citizen, Artist, Teacher, and Scholar.

4. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned about the El Sistema way of spreading music education to large numbers of children is how the kids grow up being both students and teachers at the same time. There are several orchestral levels and those in the second level and above teach the students in the junior levels. I imagine that this duality must inspire a lot of pride, self-esteem and patience in the El Sistema tribe from a young age.

5. Jose Antonio Abreu, who founded the El Sistema movement in the mid 1970s, impressed me with his long, visionary answers to panel chairman Matias Tarnopolsky’s questions. Of the many amazing things the guy said, the most compelling idea — or at least the one that stands out for me — is to do with how he views El Sistema not as a musical organization but rather as a movement for social change. He also added that the word “Sistema” is misleading because it makes people think of a strict and rigid system when in fact he views it as a network of educators and learners.

I’ve been thinking about how much audiences seem to value the element of spontaneity in their musical experiences — and how much this element is lacking from some types of music, notably western opera and classical concert music, today.

Through music history, “in-the-momentness” has taken on many forms, from the way in which composers like John Cage used chance as a compositional tool, to rock musicians performing stage dives in concert arenas, to jazz musicians improvising solos. Even classical music and opera once embraced its off-the-cuff side through improvised cadenzas in solo concerti and operas during the Baroque and early classical eras.

But over the past couple of hundred years or so, it’s fair to say that classical music and opera have left little room for the extemporaneous act. And sadly, it’s that very quality that often makes art come most alive for audiences.

In recent years, some artists have been making efforts to inject a little spontaneity back into classical music and opera events.

Organizations like Opera on Tap and Classical Revolution have done much to loosen things up by creating experiences that, because they often take place in casual settings like bars, at least allow for more in-the-moment interactions with audiences.

But I’m wondering if it’s time for classical music and opera organizations — including the big ones who typically attract the best talent — to make more of an effort to bring spontaneity back into the fold in terms of injecting it into the art itself, and not just by creating an atmosphere/setting conducive to less formal/practiced behaviors.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: It’s common enough for opera singers to stand in front of a piano at an art gallery or museum and sing some lovely arias by the likes of Schubert and Wolf. But what if the singers involved were to respond in the moment to a work of art (or entire exhibition) in a museum by creating improvised music rather than always singing perfectly polished pre-existing material?

The outcome doesn’t have to have lyrics, an instrumental accompaniment, or even a melody. The singer’s response could simply take the form of a beautiful, powerful voice and body “in conversation” with a painting hanging on a wall. The same experience could be created using instruments other than the voice.

Obviously, it would take a brave coterie of singers and instrumentalists to do this. Classically-trained performers aren’t typically trained to improvise, though I’m finding that musicians coming out of conservatories these days do seem to have acquired a broader musical palette than was the case in previous generations, and have developed considerable chops in areas such as improvising and pop music backtrack playing.

In fact, I bet there are quite a few top-of-the-line artists out there who are closet improvisers. I wonder if they can be coaxed into coming out of the closet and having a go at celebrating the spontaneity in their art?

Sasha Frere-Jones’ recent article in The New Yorker about the

I feel sort of embarrassed to say this as the thing has gotten such euphoric reviews, but Steven Spielberg’s new movie about Abraham Lincoln kinda left me cold. I exited the theatre over the weekend feeling like I didn’t give much of a hoot about any of the characters and the film falls way short of its director’s usual storytelling skills.

The biopic is most interesting for its performances, even though Tony Kushner’s script doesn’t make me care all that much about the characters.

Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones are particularly magnetic in the roles of, respectively, the Sixteenth President of the Unites States and Thaddeus Stevens, a powerful member of the House of Representatives and a radical Republican (back in the days when radical Republicans stood for things that could make a positive impact on the country as a whole, like anti-slavery laws, rather than the sorts of ideas that today’s right wing wonks hold dear.)

This film version of Lincoln also tells a refreshing narrative which focuses not on the president’s untimely death or small-town roots, as so many other biopics about Lincoln do, but rather on the thorny political wranglings surrounding the passing the Thirteenth Amendment — the bill to end slavery. As such, the movie provides a welcome, in-depth insight into some of the main players involved in bringing about the amendment — and opposing it, as well as the causes and effects of the historical event.

But Lincoln doesn’t make for very compelling cinema. The narrative arc of Kushner’s script feels stolid and there isn’t a whole lot to hold on to for people who aren’t well versed in American political history. In other words, it’s quite easy to get confused and even bored with the focus on concepts rather than characters.

Finally, besides the extraordinarily visceral battle scene that opens the film and a few beautifully lit silhouette shots of Day-Lewis, the film isn’t all that interesting to look at. The claustrophobic interiors of old wood and cold light are certainly atmospheric, but there’s little in the way of visual variety.

PS On the subject of Day-Lewis’ performance: I can’t understand why people in the media are making such a fuss about the actor’s accent and gait. I don’t find the voice that Day-Lewis adopts to be particularly high. And the Lincoln in this film is captured during his Autumn years. So it stands to reason that his walk might be ambling and his frame a little stooped. I found Day-Lewis’ personification of Lincoln to be nuanced and warm, but hardly weird.