To Sit and Read to Sit and Dream
From the Manager'south Desk:
Make Our Globe Anew: Black Voices Affair
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 caput-on and forge a new ambitious path. This 2d concert in our remote season includes new virtual choir videos (compilations of singers' individual videos woven together past 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 existent time online, embracing the latency, or lag time, that comes with making music on Zoom. While nosotros still desperately miss singing together in the aforementioned space, we're grateful for the opportunity to come together on Monday nights as we ever have to talk, connect, and sing.
In addition to the electric current health pandemic acquired past the Coronavirus, this past twelvemonth has fabricated it all too clear that we are in the throes of another pandemic that has raged in our land for over 4 hundred years – that of slavery and its ugly offspring, racism in both institutional and personal forms. As a choral ensemble in ane of the most diverse regions in the world, Sacred and Profane could non remain silent. In June, I signed the Black Voices Thing pledge that calls on choral musicians to programme music past Black and Dark-brown composers throughout our seasons. In our December concert, nosotros brought y'all Frè O, a cry for healing from Haiti, and Stacey Gibbs' profound system of There is a Balm in Gilead. In this concert – Make Our World Anew: Black Voices Matter – nosotros amplify the voices of composers who are addressing problems 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 admit that we have failed to fully realize our mission to exist dedicated to diversity by not because the diversity of our own community in our option of music, our choice of musical collaborations, and our intendance for those around us. Nosotros are committed to doing better going forward, commencement with this concert.
Delight visit our ADEI page to read our new statement and plan of activeness for ongoing access, diversity, equity, and inclusion. Read the full Black Voices Thing Pledge at blackvoicesmatterpledge.org.
Go along reading to learn about each work in our Black Voices Affair concert. Yous 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 Verse form Title: "To You"
To sit and dream, to sit and read
To sit down and acquire nearly the world
Outside our globe of here and at present –
Our trouble world –
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered complimentary – assist me!
All you who are dreamers, too,
Help me to brand our globe anew.
I accomplish out my dreams to you.
When I was researching music for this concert final summer, I asked my friend and colleague, La Nell Martin, Artistic Director of the Oakland Youth Choir, for suggestions for Blackness and Brownish composers. She sent me several names, including that of Rosephanye Dunn Powell. I logged into Dr. Powell'south website and discovered a gifted composer, scholar, and vocalist 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, meliorate world wherein people of colour enjoy the same access to happiness, success, and security that White people take for granted. Unlike his meliorate known poem and call to action I Dream a World, which was the inspiration for Dr. King's famous voice communication, To You considers the interior intellectual life of a man who is safe and comfortable in his own abode, surrounded by his books and the written reports in the news nigh current events and ceremonious unrest .
When Dr. Powell joined our rehearsal to hash out her piece, nosotros were inspired by her delivery 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 as well 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 cheers to our Jeremy Davidson for leading a detailed discussion of Hughes' life and work.
Rosephanye Powell joins an S&P rehearsal online to omnibus "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 give-and-take 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 verse form Til Ungdommen (To Youth) calls for a earth that banishes war and instead embraces care and love for our swain humans and the world that we inhabit. Written when the threat of fascism was very real in Europe and set in 1951 to music by Otto Mortensen, the verse form evokes the motivation for the Scandinavian socialist-democratic political arrangement that was adopted soon thereafter, a system to which many people in the The states are now turning for a more positive case of what government can be.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik, a thirty-two-year-sometime Norwegian correct-wing terrorist, led a violent cause confronting people he considered supportive of Islam and a feminist European lodge. He set off a auto bomb exterior government buildings in Oslo, killing 8 of his beau countrymen. Dressed as a policeman, he then managed to evade police force, traveled twenty-five miles by auto, crossed a river by ferry, and arrived on the modest island of Utøya where the Norwegian Workers' Youth League was holding a summer army camp. There he shot and killed threescore-nine more people, some of them at bespeak bare range. His victims included fifty-five teenagers, one of whom was xiv. 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 similar Breivik.
Every time I think near the day the news of this assault spread across the world, tears overcome me. Every bit a Swede, I have always been proud that my female parent's land, forth with other Scandinavian and European countries, has chosen a more positive, humanity-affirming path than seen in many other parts of the globe, including our ain country. To see right-fly extremist ideals reemerge in Scandinavia (because we cannot turn a bullheaded eye to that region's own amour with fascism in the past) has been enormously upsetting to me. Sacred and Profane is bringing you lot Til Ungdommen in this concert non just to commemorate the 10th-anniversary of the massacre, but to proclaim our commitment to anti-racism and our rejection of violence every bit a means to assert potency over others.
Many thanks to our resident Swede Tomas Hallin for leading our word 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 twelvemonth, many conductors accept 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 listing 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? Non merely had he been engaged in his main'due south and Ph.D. studies in composition at UC Berkeley around the same time I was a music educatee 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'due south is the kind of choral music that I relish – deeply moving and emotional and at the aforementioned time unabashedly intellectual and unafraid to have risks and explore the edges of what choral music can be. I encourage you lot all to view our Composer Connections series installment on Dr. Weston and his music, which y'all tin 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 run into if he would consider a commission from S&P for a work that could be apposite 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. Footling did he know that S&P performed C4's Karen Siegel'due south 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 final leap. Happily, C4 agreed to a co-committee, and Trevor proceeded to compose two versions of Martyrs that consider each ensemble'southward technical requirements. Learning this powerful piece has been an exciting challenge that has stretched us and that nosotros've been longing for since nosotros went remote. I am grateful to Trevor for speaking with me at length nearly 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 University of Arts and Messages Announced Trevor as a 2021 recipient of its Awards in Music) to coach Martyrs and help u.s.a. make it at a more authentic performance of this trailblazing piece of work.
Trevor writes about Martyrs:
Years ago, I gave a lecture on early Renaissance music and played 'O Sainte Sebastian' past Guillaume Dufay. The words summoned the saint to spare the population from the bubonic plague. What struck me about the piece, across its beauty, was the utilize of the most formal and complex form of choral composition at the time, an isorhythmic motet, to annotate on an important contemporary business organisation. In essence, Dufay used his strongest compositional tools to address an of import societal trouble.
In the by, I have looked to the Psalms of David when I wanted text to communicate private homo despair. The summer of 2020 combined the COVID plague with numerous examples of African Americans dying equally a result of excessive constabulary actions. The fearfulness associated with both issues seemed similar to me; fear that, in the form of going almost your day, you could be "defenseless" past a life-ending intrusion. The inability to breathe is a symptom of both afflictions. The words used too oftentimes by those suffering from excessive constabulary force, "I tin't breathe" was also the common complaint of those suffering from COVID-19. I inserted this phrase in the extract from Psalm 39 that I used for Martyrs.
The deaths of almost people affected by both plagues during the summer of 2020 could take been avoided. A similar response to both situations was disbelief of the severity of the problem or a atheism 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. equally unnecessary and hands avoided. Martyrs have ever been a alarm to the living to deed before and not later on the loss of life. I equanimous Martyrs to honor their lives and hopefully encourage the rest of us to terminate future senseless deaths.
Ane advantage of rehearsing remotely is that singers are able to join u.s. from slap-up distances, and nosotros've been able to connect with musicians from Canada to the Southwest, where alto Kim Fowler—1 of our newest members—resides. Our weekly online rehearsals create a space for members to limited thoughts and feelings, engage in critical discussions of our repertoire's texts and histories, and digest our tumultuous earth together in a format that celebrates each members unique talents. Kim, an accomplished author, shared a functioning of her powerful poem Emergence in Four Parts she wrote while processing the national trauma following George Floyd'south death this summertime. Her beautifully crafted words touched u.s.a. deeply, and her clarification of the artistic process as an act of healing resonated with our ethos for this season'due south programming: that music and fine art are expressions of our shared humanity that connect, empower, inspire, and heal usa.
Kim writes:
I am pulled to write about the dazzler in the country and in the spirit of humans struggling, jubilant their movement through this life. In my writing and my coaching I want to go to know what breathes beneath the surface that is waiting to be heard, that offers the states riddles to be deciphered through dreams and visions. In that location is power in transparency.
Emergence in Four Parts was published in the Wintertime 2021 outcome of Reinventing Home, a digital mag exploring the concept of home through a broad variety of cultural and artistic lenses, from psychology to storytelling. We're proud to share this impactful piece of work in our plan, and dilate her vocalism and experiences. Many thanks to Kim Fowler for sharing this moving operation.
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 Bedroom Singers
For each child that'due south built-in
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 jiff of our ancestors.
We are the spirit of God.
We are
Mothers of backbone
Fathers of time
Daughters of dust
Sons of dandy vision.
We are
Sisters of mercy
Brothers of honey
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 built-in
a morning star rises
and sings to the universe
who we are.
We ARE ONE.
In normal times, I often arrive at Start Unitarian Church of Oakland around 6:xxx on Mon evenings to prepare the space and my caput for that dark's Sacred and Profane rehearsal. If I'yard lucky, I go far early enough to hear the end of La Nell Martin'south rehearsal with her Oakland Youth Chorus Bedchamber Singers. I'm always impressed by her spirited and supportive leadership that inspires her singers to produce a audio bigger and more powerful than I would await from a group of young singers. La Nell has recently informed me that she then oft stays late working in the OYC offices upstairs and takes in Southward&P's rehearsal after on those same evenings. We have gotten to know each other in the space betwixt 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 by few years and sought her out for multiple presentations at California Choral Directors Associations conferences and events.
La Nell and I accept 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 Nosotros 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 offset to perform information technology 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 Sweetness Honey in the Rock, which was active from 1979 to 2013. I vividly remember discovering Sweetness Honey when I was an undergraduate at UCSC and couldn't terminate playing their records. Dr. Barnwell is too a prolific composer – in addition to writing many of the Sweet Dearest's songs, she has also been deputed to create music for dance, flick, and stage productions, as well equally many popular choral works. Dr. Barnwell conducts music workshops, including a workshop she created chosen "Building a Vocal Community: Singing in the African American Tradition." Her piece Nosotros Are was written for the Oakland-based Redwood Cultural Work, a nonprofit organization that supported the LGBTQ+ community, as well as for the Male child'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 meliorate earth. Our alto Kim Fowler, who nosotros are fortunate to take join our remote rehearsals from her dwelling in Santa Fe, shared with u.s.a. 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 proficient friend and our longtime alto Dyana Vukovich, and La Nell virtually the significance of the text and music deepened our connection to the work and to our ain pasts – the photographs yous come across in our video are of our ancestors. I loved meeting the OYC singers in their Zoom rehearsal a few weeks agone. 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 hitting was when one singer shared that she feels "tired" – tired of spending her schoolhouse days on Zoom and tired of being placed in the impossible position of representing the Black experience to her mostly white and oft insensitive classmates. This is an middle-opening lesson to all of u.s. every bit we delve into this disquisitional work to right the wrongs of the past four hundred years.
Nearly Oakland Youth Chorus Chamber Singers:
Founded in 1974, the Oakland Youth Chorus (OYC) is the longest running youth chorus in the E Bay. Serving nigh 3000 singers and music students in E Bay programs each yr, we focus on creating and sustaining programs of loftier educational and creative 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 earth through music education and community functioning. OYC Chamber Singers are made of young musicians grades 6–12, directed by La Nell Martin.
Acquire more than about Oakland Youth Chorus online at oaklandyouthchorus.org
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Brand Our World Afresh: Black Voices Matter
MARCH 20 2021 | 6PM
this broadcast is gratuitous and open to the public, no tickets necessary
Source: https://www.sacredprofane.org/news/2021/3/17/make-our-world-anew-black-voices-matter
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