Sharon Benzoni Photo
It was the final rehearsal before the New Haven Oratorio Choir‘s holiday performance set for Friday night, entitled “I Have Had Singing.” Daniel Shaw, the choir’s artistic director, was concentrating on the minor tweaks that would move the music from beautiful to transcendent. He focused on crescendos, loudness, balance. The art of the glottal stop.
“What do we do when we dance?” Shaw asked.
“Shout!” answered thirty voices.
“Yes! We dance and shout…. See if you can bring out the pulse and the rhythm of it.”
Shaw (pictured) takes his responsibility for emotionally moving his audience very seriously. Listening itself is an art that requires concentration. It’s easy to get distracted, he said, as we’ve been trained to listen to 30-second commercials and 3‑minute pop songs.
“The more compelling a performance, the more natural it will be to listen correctly,” he said.
The NHOC is a membership-driven choir, and many members live their lives outside the music world. At Wednesday’s practice, one woman was in a running suit. Another wore scrubs. There was a man in jeans and a sweater, another in a button-down shirt and slacks who looked like he’d come straight from the office for the three-hour practice. But when they began “Evening Hymn” by Henry Balfour Gardiner, they sounded like full-time musicians. It’s a sadly beautiful piece with a tension in the middle that’s almost discordant. Then the sopranos break into soaring melody that ushers in its final resolution into three long, soft Amens.
When the choir practiced “Three Humanist Hymns,” the basses came in with the line, “In the breezes of my mind…” The rest of the choir sang pulsing, harmonic hums that drove the song along, creating a sense of urgency, before they joined in.
“This form is very closely wound around the text,” Shaw said, “so being aware of the text will help you.”
Shaw also directs the Composer’s Choir, which works with composers to record and release their work. The “Three Humanist Hymns” emerged from that. Composer Matthew Fields and his collaborator Maira Benjamin’s purpose in writing the hymns was to create non-religious hymnals “that reflect the highest Enlightment ideals.” The three hymns — “Breezes,” “Warmth,” and “Ashes” — are “a portrait of the human condition,” says Shaw, “with different pieces that reflect different parts of people’s minds and lives.”
If humanist hymns sound a bit unusual for a holiday concert, it is part of a coherent whole for the NHOC. “This is a different kind of program, 20th and early 21st century works,” said Gretchen Pritchard, the choir’s membership director. “The way these pieces in the classical tradition are addressed in a more contemporary framework is fascinating.”
Shaw said the songs were all chosen around the theme he sees in the song “I Have Had Singing”:
The singing
There was so much singing then
And this was my pleasure too
We all sang
The boys in the fields
The chapels were full of singing
Always singing
Here I lie
I have had pleasure enough
I have had singing.
“If you use singing as a metaphor and fill in the gap,” Shaw said, “then it becomes a pretty profound statement that many people might have trouble truthfully saying. Many of us fear that we’re gonna grow old and die full of regret. And this is saying that that doesn’t have to happen.”
The songs are “all lyrical and intimate — poetry and poetry-like prose,” Pritchard said. “And are about things popular media are about — relationships. Getting to know another person, experiencing ecstasy with another person, and then losing.”
Pritchard has authored the program notes and solicited input from the other choir members. “My family has had quite a bit of tragedy this year,” she said, and she found the song “Ashes” “speaking cathartically to me.” She got similar responses from other members who found personal connections to the music as they practiced it.
Shaw sees the concert’s songs as “a pitch for gratitude,” he said. “The quickest way to find peace with your life is to acknowledge the good in your life, whether you’re winning, losing, or nothing is happening. And there’s usually more good than the other. And to acknowledge the good in any given moment, regardless of your circumstances, that leads to peace…. It’s not what most people do. The mind tends to grab onto everything that’s wrong … we have very nervous brains. And music is a way to get out of your thoughts.”
“My hope is that at the end of seeing one of our concerts,” Shaw added, “some little part of you is different than it was before. This is what happens to me when I see a movie that I really like. Something in me, something in my imagination is opened up just a little bit…. I have more of an appetite to live a good life. Just a little. But that for me is the most important part: when it feels like an awakening of life.”
The choir also hopes audience members have a literal appetite after the performance: After the hour-long concert, there will be a reception with food and caroling. Last year, it was quite the party.
The New Haven Oratorio performs its holiday concert tonight, Dec. 11, 8 p.m., at the Church of the Redeemer at Whitney Avenue and Cold Spring Street. Reception and carol sing to follow.
