An effervescent ode to coffee. Meditations on the divine and the earthly. And a call to move into the future with greater understanding and empathy. All of it was carried on the combined voices of the New Haven Oratorio Choir, in its first virtual concert, and first since the pandemic began. It also featured all works from living composers, who, making a virtue of the virtual, were all on hand from as far away as Australia to discuss their work.
The concert, called “Soul-Stirring Music for Difficult Times,” featured four pieces by Andrew Batterham, Max Vladimiroff, Daniel Shaw, and Ryan Homsey, and was broadcast (and archived) over YouTube on Saturday. Up first was Andrew Batterham’s “Coffee Song,” an energetic composition sung with great gusto by the choir’s members and featuring an extremely charming first-person point-of-view video of a person struggling to make coffee without first having had coffee. For coffee enthusiasts, it’s all too easy to hear the methods by which coffee is made in the music itself — the gurgle of a percolator or a stovetop espresso maker, the steam from a cappuccino machine.
Next was “Wondrous Grace” by Max Vladimiroff, using a poem by George Cuff that, in a dark time, promised good things ahead. “You will receive all that you need / to share with others each day. / You trust in faith and plant the seed / with joy and not with dismay,” the text reads, and the music followed, confident without being cloying, optimistic without being naive. The music of the piece spoke of strength and hope, a character reflected in the sunniness of the choir’s voices.
After Vladimirof’s piece, “February Twilight,” by Daniel Shaw, the New Haven Oratorio Choir’s own artistic director, offered a kind of counterpoint. Taking a short poem by Sarah Teasdale — “I stood beside a hill / Smooth with new-laid snow, / A single star looked out / From the cold evening glow. / There was no other creature / That saw what I could see— / I stood and watched the evening star / As long as it watched me.” — Shaw created a meditation as spiritually minded as Vladimiroff’s piece, but more eerie and contemplative, using long held notes to both make musical space and create a gentle sense of tension and release as the melodies and harmonies floated through them.
The concert concluded with “Believe Me,” by Ryan Homsey, working off a text by Susan Kouguell. Its call for empathy made use of a series of overlapping voices and musical ideas that gradually drew together toward a powerful conclusion.
After the concert, Shaw facilitated a discussion with all the composers present. He began with Batterham — streaming from Australia — who explained that “Melbourne is a large and diverse city” with a “music scene that covers everything under the sun.” While not a choral musician himself, “I always found it really interesting and challenging to write for voices.” His “Coffee Song” was written for a youth chorale “to reflect on Melbourne’s coffee culture, which warms us up in the winter months” and “in the summer months, it’s our constant companion.”
This prompted Shaw to ask a question of Batterham: whether the words or the music came first. “It was mixture of both, which is how I compose,” Batterham said. The repetition of the title word at the beginning, for example, “just seemed right for the subject matter, the intense feeling of needing coffee,” he said with a smile. His favorite way of drinking coffee tended toward European espresso, though he professed to being mostly an enthusiast. “It doesn’t really matter for me as long as it’s small and strong.”
For Vladimiroff, the experience of writing his piece was in feeling “the joy and expectation of voices coming together to sing the text,” which “was the inspiration in the first place.” Vladimiroff described a very deliberate way of composing music. “I plan my work ahead of writing the notes on the paper,” he said. Of his piece, he said, “once I had a concept in mind, the rest was to work out details.” The overall concept was to use musical ideas that would “sound good when sung by four independent vocal sections” but also “create an uninterrupted flow of energy.” He also used suspensions — that is, notes outside of the chords that comprised the harmonic structure of the piece at any point — “so the resolution is slightly delayed.”
Shaw professed his love for suspensions and the way Vladimiroff used them “to intensify the impact of the moment.” In a moment of self-deprecation, he admitted to Vladimiroff that when he used suspensions in “February Twlight,” “I’m copying you — I’m stealing your idea.”
The conversation turned to how the composers each composed. Vladimiroff said that he composed at the piano, even as “I’ve been trying to get away from the piano for many years — to push it as far away as I can,” he said. But “it’s my heart, and my training.” He couldn’t escape the feeling that it was perhaps a crutch. “Music needs to form itself inside, not at the fingertips, at least in my experience. It sounds better, more organic, when it’s being organized inside,” he said.
Shaw had similar concerns. “I worry that my hands are writing the piece, and not my heart — that my hands are writing for me.”
Though Batterham quickly defended the piano as an extreme useful tool for being able to hear whether a musical idea was working. “Piano might help back it up and lock it in,” he said. Homsey agreed, saying he used the piano and a variety of playback options in composing software when working on his compositions. “I think I integrate the piano with what I imagine I’m hearing,” he said. “It’s a blend of the old and the new.”
Returning to the connection between words and music, Homsey and Kouguell talked about the collaboration that led to their piece.
“My background is as a violist — that’s how the collaboration started,” Kouguell said. Both are faculty at SUNY Purchase. “As a poet, language is so important to me, an obsession,” she added. She has collaborated with two other composers in the past, and “when Ryan and I met, we started this conversation.” During it, she remembered thinking “‘this is heaven,’ because we shared the same sensibility.”
The words began as “probably this 10-page poem,” Kouguell said, that they then “whittled down to less than a page” — even, Homsey said, down to “two-word fragments.”
“It doesn’t look like poetry on the page,” he said. It’s “very sparse.” But “the way I see a lot of Susan’s work, you can see the words transforming and evolving,” with their meanings and the way they’re read shifting and changing. “We wanted voices to be individual, coming in and out of the foreground,” he said.
Shaw then used his own composition to ask a question. “‘February Twilight’ was a very enjoyable piece to write because there was no thinking at all,” he said. It felt “inevitable,” like “It was just kind of there and I found it.”
The other composers agreed that they’d had similar experiences of writing music. from choral pieces to string quartets. As Shaw put it, “you feel like you’re unveiling something that’s already there. It doesn’t belong to you. It’s something you discover rather than something you create.”
Visit the New Haven Oratorio Choir’s website to learn more about its activities, or visit its Great Give page to donate.
