Here I stood, nearly 90 years ago, on the ridge of the Quabbin’s majestic Enfield Overlook, not contemplating the wintry aeries of soaring Bald Eagles, as I would in a later life, but imagining the slow, relentless creep of the waters of the Swift River, the drip of aeons of snowmelt and creekseep, gradually engulfing four abandoned towns in this valley of the Berkshire foothills. As I listened, rapt and dreaming, to Nightingale’s 24 singers in thrall of artistic director / conductor Ben Perry, my entire half-life of choral singing flashed before my mind’s ear, and hurtled me willy-nilly backwards through time where last I was a croaking, aspiring pre-teen tenor a-teeter between secular (Faure’s Requiem) and profane (rock and roll, campfire songs, football anthems.) I sang onstage with :
Brookline Chorale [Scott Jarrett], Cambridge Choral [Jim Johnson], Boston Camerata [Joel Cohen/TimAarset], Kansas U Chamber Chorale [Clayton Krehbiel], Boston College U Chorus [Alexander Peloquin], Classical High Chorus [Louis Picchieri]
Once I’d caught my breath, I belatedly thought of writing the transported, personal impressions of this magical evening: Nightingale heartily fused themes old and new. My BMInt colleague had nailed the group’s Weltanshauung: “This virtuosic professional choir… can be counted on for originality of tight thematic programming” [full review HERE]. In “Blue Sun,” Nightingale had once again accomplished an ingenious adaption of repertoire, reaching across centuries eloquently pairing the music of revered elders and our living composers. Saturday night at Saint Paul’s, Park Street, they filled that august temple with their astonishing blend of the wildly disparate musics of Gregory Brown (1974—), his haunting, evocative suite un/bodying/s and three brief chorales, plus one by Tim Eriksen (1966—), with the sturdy, shape-note hymnody of Bostonian choral pioneer William Billings (1746-1800) and three revolutionary era colleagues, Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838), Justin Morgan (1747-1798), and Jacob French (1754-1817). All hands re-imagined the program in Amherst on the following evening.
The evening’s thematic glue could hardly be tighter. Cheering, stalwart hymns of the patriot era build the foundation. Brown’s suite, its libretto by poet Todd Hearon, follows, similarly employing quasi-Biblical scenarios and inspirations of Nature. Thus: “Winterlong the bodies of lost deer lie littering the ice.” And: “At dawn, the sudden, trumpeting eagle strikes.” Two quatrains by poet Isaac Watts (c. 1700) set by Ingalls hauntingly echo the shape-note predecessors, and presage the moderns recounting “the drowned towns.” Colorful aquatic images raise “cantering salmon” while “bass hosanna.” Geologic time melts glacier and gushes “contour, kettle, esker drift.” Bird-song dawn chorales lift ghosts of the drowned towns (Dana, Prescott…), unremember workers of lathe and loom, celebrate historically displaced indigenous peoples (Nichewaug, Nenameseck), and praise sunken churchyards where “the tombs stick out like knees.” Among the means to purposely disquiet and disorient. Plainsong, melisma, and antiphonal echoed syllables do some work. Tritones cross fifths, shape-note hymnody interrupts, then meshes with consonance, unisons. In the end, all the “dark, infernal aqueducts (like shades to slake the high, titanic thirst of Boston)…”
Brown’s joyous, cathartic Judgment Day paean sets John Leland’s 1793 “Morning Trumpet”:
Shout, O Glory! for I shall mount above the skies,
When I hear the trumpet sound in that morning.
A recording of un/bodying/s by Crossings Choir can be found HERE.