Another Commencement Speech (just what the world needs)

In honor of graduation season, I'm posting my speech from last year's commencement ceremony at the Aaron Copland School of Music. I think I may be well on my way to becoming the next Garrison Keillor. Ahhh, if only...

Crossing the Line

I've grown to love Ocean Grove this summer. It's the beautiful little town right next to Asbury Park, New Jersey. The two face off against each other with the aptly named Wesley Lake to separate them. Ocean Grove has a somewhat earned reputation as a bastion of Methodist piety with a beach front view, Asbury Park a decaying rock and roll town by the sea. Neither is completely true. As is often the case with apparent opposites, the towns share a common past and present, and it seems that each has come to respect the truer nature of its seemingly antithetical neighbor.

The two images above are both of the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove. It's one of those near fantastical creations that can only exist near the ocean. It's a 7,000 seat hall that musters the intimacy to feel only slightly larger than a country church. It is equipped with acoustics designed to allow a revival preacher to speak for hours on end unamplified, a blessing for any musician playing on its stage. The aroma is at the same time both liturgical and carnival, a result of over a hundred years of sun toasted wood. There is a mischievously ambivalent spirit about the hall; I'm not sure whether it inspires meditation or merry making. Or better yet, it obscures the line between the two. One of the main features of the hall is its Hope Jones organ. The organ is one of those instruments that effortlessly inhabits the world of the sacred and the secular, a creation equally at home in a cathedral, a ballpark, an amateur player's living room, or a circus tent.

The organ is a perfect departure point in a discussion of where musica divina ends and musica mundana begins. It's virtually impossible, and frankly impractical, to find a clean division between the two. The ecclesiastical vernacular is inexorably linked with both the theatrical and the political, making it a most worldly language. And that's where history, spirituality and music making make their most profound intersection. Consider the cantata master of the eighteenth century, J.S. Bach. The politically charged devotion of unadorned German protestantism finds its way into each of his 224 cantatas. The compositional genius of Bach would be there regardless of his nationality, but there is a succinct sense of time, place and culture in everything he wrote, especially his sacred music.

Today those works are performed in both sacred and secular spaces, sometimes with the liturgical intent for which they were created, and sometimes merely for the audience to enjoy the Baroque master's works. Some of the cantatas have even been staged theatrically, such as Peter Sellers's June 2005 staging of No. 82 "Ich habe genung" with Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, or Jonathan Miller's re-imagining of the St. Matthew's Passion at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. These productions highlight the innate theatricality that animates Bach's music and break down the division between what belongs to the stage, and what belongs in the church.

I once saw a performance of a Morales mass beautifully sung and executed, but I walked away from it wishing there had been more drama. I've been thinking a lot about what that means in the context of sacred music. This is very theatrical music. To deny that would be to deprive the audience, and the performers, of a more expressive performance. And I will continue to think of the Great Auditorium in Ocean Grove. Not only is it home to the weekly Sunday service, but the Beach Boys played there this summer, too. Talk about blurring the line...

Sense and Sensibility, Baroque Style

I'm listening to the album Il Zazzerino. Il Zazzerino was the nickname of Jacopo Peri, the dapperly dressed fellow in the illustration above. This music drips with sensuousness, full of seductive images born out of lost love, tears and sighs. Peri's deeply expressive articulation touches every word and every note. Delicate chromaticism shades the most agonizing moments, always stylish even in desperation. I often think that there is no music as moving as the monodies of the early seventeenth century. They are properly polished jewels of grace, charm and nuance.

I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Ellen Hargis, the voice behind Il Zazzerino, during the Baroque Opera Workshop at Queens College this past June. It was a joy to watch Ms. Hargis demystify the full artistic potential and drama inherent in the seeming simplicity of these early monodies. Each song is a playful power struggle between strong and weak, accented and unaccented, consonance and dissonance. The one interpretively-charged word that seemed to present itself most frequently in the explication of this repertoire was architecture. There are load bearing notes, and there are decorative ones. There are words which are great support columns, and there are others which merely embellish those columns. Fully realizing those differences is the key to bringing this material emphatically alive.

In a lecture given during the workshop, conductor Gary Thor Wedow said, "Performers need to recognize in the music which notes are structural and which are ornamental." In yet another architectural reference, continuo leader Christa Patton noted that Baroque ornamentation was reliant on the realities of ecclesiastical architecture in the late Renaissance and Baroque church. There was a direct acoustical consideration in the choice of ornament as to how it harmonically dispersed throughout the space.

Carolus Borromeus Church in Antwerp

Looking over my notes from the workshop, the one phrase I wrote down again and again is "strong and weak; invest energy in the strong syllables so the weak syllables fall off." This material asks the singer to acknowledge what the rhetorical and musical gesture is suggesting, synthesizing it with the architecture of syllabic and rhythmic inequality. I'm not really sure what that means, but it sounds doctoral candidate worthy. So enough of the fancy words, the work gets down to this: understanding the organic flow of the words in the musical context of early seventeenth century monody is the task of any would-be interpreter. It's not an easy job, but when the alchemy comes together, it shines most brightly.