June, 2001
Volume 16, No. 3

The MELODIOUS ACCORD Fellowship program

Eight MELODIOUS ACCORD Fellows in Hawley

MELODIOUS ACCORD Fellowship 2001

Alice's Axioms (a Baker's dozen)

A Board's Eye View

The View from Here

Alice-izing in a Nutshell

...From the Mailbox

Thought for the Day

Kate's Ditty

Home Page
The News Stand

The MELODIOUS ACCORD Fellowship program is the embodiment of Alice Parker's music and teaching philosophies. From the first Fellow, Eleanor Epstein, recently acclaimed for her work with the Zemer Chai Chorus of Washington, D. C., to the millennial Fellows of 2001, they testify to the transforming experience of their participation in this program. We are featuring stories of the 2001 Fellows in this issue of the Newsletter to bring you a taste of the Fellowship experience and to share the insights they gained from "Spring in the Berkshires."

MP

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The hills were alive with music as the Fellows gathered for ten days of intensive music study. I'll introduce them first, and then let them each speak in his/her own voice, to tell you about it. Katherine Ramos Baker is from Idaho, and on her way to teach in the choral and education fields at Cal State at Northridge. Peggy Johnson drove down from Wonalancet, NH, where she conducts church choirs. Jim Clemens hails from Illinois, where he composes and leads a church choir. Lee Dengler does much the same at Goshen College in Indiana. Alan Gasser came from Toronto with his wife and baby daughter, who captivated us all. (Her version of my name was 'Alice's Parker'.) Susan Nace sings and teaches in Longmont, Colorado. Kate Sullivan composes, sings cabaret and records in Brookline, Mass., and Bill Gottshall is a sound technician, jazz pianist and composer in Souderton, PA.

AP

Alan: Restorative Transformation .... Urgent, restful melody for all ...

You probably already knew that the benefits of a Fellowship from MELODIOUS ACCORD in the surroundings of Singing Brook Farm are a bit difficult to quantify exactly. And that the imparting of a life's wisdom involves a non-measurable application of something ineffable.

But the things I want to celebrate are tiny and nearly invisible, especially after the sun goes down on a full, rich day of experience. The blessing I'm thankful for is something like one of those tiny purple lawn flowers underfoot. (We call them 'blue-eyed Marys'. AP) Even after I cannot see it anymore, I feel the benefit of its still, small voice. Reason and passion, yes, and grand symphony, perhaps, a single voice, for sure, echoing forever.

AG

Lee: This week has been an oasis for me. I have gained a much deeper understanding and insight into what it means to be a musician, composer, teacher and person of integrity. Alice modeled all these for us throughout the week. I especially liked the practical approach in how she taught us - there was no theory. I feel I came away with tools that I can use. Another aspect of the week that surprised a me was the friendships I made. It was wonderful to be placed in this situation with other people of like mind. Making meals together and staying up late talking and laughing was a real bonding experience.

LD

Kate: Excerpt from Journal

Alice asks us to write a chant one day, a metered melody the next. We discuss music notation, pentatonic and modal melodies and text counterpoint. She demonstrates triple and duple meter with an imaginary tennis ball. We imitate her with our own invisible tennis balls. Listen, watch, think and then of course, sing. Our voices make the notes leap off the page and into the air where they belong. Glorious singing.

What is the magic here at Singing Brook Farm? Is it the serenity, the sound of the rain, the mist hanging low in the hills, the white noise of water rushing over rocks, the sun-soaked deck just outside the kitchen.

Yes, it is all these things, but more than this, it is Alice herself. She teaches by showing. We learn by doing. Every afternoon, Alice sends us home with an assignment. After supper and laughter and stories, we settle into different corners of the house to write our chant, to set a text to music, to attempt a bit of counterpoint. In the beginning, we work tentatively and privately, snatches of melody coming from behind closed bedroom doors. As one day melts into the next, we melt into each other, singing each other's songs, asking for help. We are living out Alice's passionate view that music lives and breathes and is meant to be sung and heard, not read, read about or discussed. We move through the assignments and the days, growing with every encounter, letting go of boundaries, losing track of time.

KS

Susan: This is an incredible experience! It was a big risk for me, but the return far exceeds the risk and cost... For the past 28 years, I've been an extrovert, having to put myself 'out there', giving, constantly giving, never takng any time off. In the past ten days, I've had the luxury to be an introvert, not performing, being slow and deliberate, taking long walks, eating '3 squares' a day, and for the first time in decades, sleeping 8 hours straight-through.

What have I encountered? Myself, as a human being instead of an incredibly driven machine. A home - inside myself. Affirmation - of truths for which I had no words.

My time here has shown me those areas in my life which must change, and the next steps to take on my journey. WOW! In just ten days!

SN

Peggy: Every morning you gather around a table in the studio to discuss and practice the art of hearing, and the craft of writing choral music. You work the basics rigorously. You sing. You cook. You eat. You talk. You walk the hills up and down. You live closely with the other Fellows. The afternoons and evenings are usually spent at work, too. You take this time to give place in your lives to music, in a way you may not have been able to do. It is intense, and it ends too soon.

PJ

Jim: Here are some of the things a typical day included: A walk before breakfast, watching for birds, listening to birdsong. Last-minute changes and additions to our assigned composition projects. Walk to Alice's house (on sunny days). Warm up our voices, ear, and minds by centering on one sung note. Going over our new compositions, talking about text counterpoint and the inevitability of each melody - what worked, what didn't work. Listening to stories, anecdotes, wisdom and insights from Alice. Break for lunch, always cooked by one or two of us (ALWAYS delicious!) After lunch, Alice often read poetry to re-focus us. Presentations from one or two Fellows - choral works that have special meaning. Study of pieces written by Alice, often concluding with us singing. Break for supper (ALWAYS delicious - we must put together a cookbook!) Sometimes we met in the evening (less structured) to converse and listen to some of Alice's compositions. Evenings at Red Top: work on the next day's assignment, sitting around the Fireplace talking and laughing, singing together.

Living in this beautiful spot has truly been food for my soul and body.

JC

Bill: the secret is melody...

The balanced approach that Alice has designed for this intensive course of study is masterful. In 10 days we traveled the length and breadth of Western European music history, from Gregorian chant to late 20th century choral composition. We even had time for a few side trips to the Caribbean, South American, and Africa!

To describe this as a music history course, however, would give the wrong impression. The central focus was always on writing music, and doing so in that most natural of ways, through singing. Those of us who have grown dependent upon the venerable pianoforte to help us compose our melodies were forced into a new method of composing. What the crafty master (or mistress, I suppose I should say) helped us discover on our own was that this new way of composing music is really the oldest way of all: using our ears and our voices to find the melodies that exist within us. Once discovered, these melodies sound, to use Alice's words, "As if they have been around forever."

For one who wraps the "starving artist working alone in his tiny, freezing garret" image around him like a blanket, the thought of spending so much time in very close community created more than a little apprehension within this writer. My fears proved to be groundless, though, as it was an experience that helped forge seven friendships, each unique in its focus and intensity. For a self-proclaimed lone wolf, that is quite an admission!

BG

Katherine: What do we do here? Listen, write, compose, eat very well, compose some more, eat very well again, compose some more. What do we really do here? Come with open ears and hearts and minds to learn to trust our musical intuition and develop our rational skills to create beautiful music.

KRB

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a dialogue by Alan Gasser

Each year, at the conclusion of the Fellowship Program, I ask the participants to try to describe to someone who wasn't there what has taken place. Alan Gasser, a composer, conductor and singer living in Toronto, shared these insights, and I believe has touched on some difficult-to-define truths that are a basic part of the study. Can some of these truths enter into music education at other levels?

AP

Q. What did you do exactly?

A. We read widely in the history of good, old melodies. And deeply too; we began with an ancient, unmeasured Kyrie chant, singing it all together, and probing its character, trying to figure out how the words were accented and highlighted and given new life by their melody, how the form of the song worked to pile up the memory-clicks of recognition in each complete singing. We must have done this with hundreds of melodies in those 8 or 9 or 1 0 days. We were being taught how to listen to the most basic unit of human musical utterance, the single-voiced song. We sang melodies, composed short tunes, listened to songs in many ways and tried to learn how to utter the simplest, most direct response to each phrase or each moment of sound. How did a certain melodic event find its echo? And what response did it evoke? These were our questions, and the answers were as various as the musicians who came together at the workshop.

Q. So ... who were the people? Were they all composers, sharpening their professional skills?

A. Well, we all DID work at small, simple composition exercises every day, but it was only a small minority of us who really considered ourselves composers in our professional lives. Even for them, the exercises were deliberately simple, just discovering the first principles of song, not producing finished choral arrangements or symphonies according to some convention which prevails at the beginning of the 21st century. The MELODIOUS ACCORD Fellowship is most certainly NOT a specialist's training session, but rather a retreat meant to sharpen a person's keen hunger for her musical vocation. It wasn't so much an exercise in religion, though we actually used and looked at a great number of standard Christian texts (mostly because they're all familiar to us and/or have been set to music already), as it was a spiritual exercise in listening, really listening to melody. No, not some New Age hokum about Melody, with a capital M, but attentive heed paid to very simple, homespun, and individual tunes sometimes. Just like listening to the simplest most basic urges of the human condition.

Q. It sounds a little creaky and old-fashioned.

A. Actually it wasn't so much old-fashioned, as it was deliberately OUT of fashion. We're surrounded all day, every day of our normal lives by noise and music in various combinations, and from every possible corner of the music business, besides our exposure to a broad array of historical and world-musical styles. And yet ... in the middle of all this noise, very few of us ever get the chance any more to sing a simple old song with our friends or families or our classmates, if we're in school. It's as if we have all collectively ceded our right to musical expression to other people who make recordings of music, and that we have collectively forgotten how to sing. Even the birds have not forgotten that, if we can still hear them in our busy lives, filled with faxes, computers and city-industrial repeated noise.

Q. Speaking of birds and city noises, where did you say this workshop happened?

A. It was up in the forested Berkshire foothills, at Alice Parker's old house, (formerly the town hall of Hawley, MA, current population about 200 in an area the size of Singapore). The Fellows (and in some cases, members of their families) stayed at nearby old farmhouses, all part of the Singing Brook Farm community. Morning and afternoon sessions happened around a boardroom-sized table in Alice's studio. There was plenty of singing, and a modicum of listening to recordings, and discussions about Alice's works of the past 50 and more years. Meals were communally prepared, and there was plenty of time for walks in the woods and by the brooks. Not all of a person's free time was supposed to be filled up with the short music composition homework assignments. (Better to do a small amount of work simply and cleanly, than leave a lot of fragments undone.) There was usually some time for unscheduled inspiration and meditation of the natural beauties of Singing Brook Farm. In addition to all this, we Fellows went to church in the village of Charlemont both on Friday night for a SING and Sunday morning (of a day off) when Alice gave a Pentecost preview sermon-in-song by leading some hymns about spirit in wind, water and fire, and we provided two anthems.

Alan Gasser

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1. Listen.
2. Accept the gift of melody that is given to you.
3. Listen again and again.
4. Respond to what you hear.
5. Keep listening.
6. Echo the rhythm of the text and the character of the melody.
7. Have a musical conversation.
8. Let the intuitive impulse go where it wants:
   trust your intuition
   ask it where it wants to go.
9. Inevitability of melody:
   follow the path of least resistance, like water flowing downstream.
10. Economy of idea.
11. Silence. Lots of silence.
12. Expectation and accumulation.
13. Your intuition gives the gift; your rational mind,the craft.

KRB

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The MELODIOUS ACCORD Trustees enjoyed the hospitality of Saint Hilda's House in New York City for our meeting on May 6. Plans are under way for a January 19 return to the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine for our 2002 Spirituals concert. We're searching the rich musical resources of the city area for a youth choir to share the stage with Alice and the Musicians of MELODIOUS ACCORD.

Lively discussions about, pardon the expression, marketing, focused on how to use our website more effectively for fundraising and for sales, and how to spread the word better about the exciting programs Alice leads. Linkages to other websites and advertising in choral journals are in the works, but we'd welcome suggestions from you. If not through this newsletter, how might you have learned about such information? Let us know at mpryor@melodiousaccord.org.

Wondering about the Alice Parker Recording Project? You should have been with me in James Chapel at Union Seminary to hear some of the rehearsals of works based on women poets. Such exquisite close harmony in Angels and Challengers from May Sarton's poems, and the "Parker touch" in the Millay Madrigals and Songstream, the Dickinson Three Seas and Wylie Incantations are just what we've come to expect and admire in Alice's works. The Musicians of MELODIOUS ACCORD never sounded better. The recording is finished and the long process of selecting and editing has just begun, but it will be well worth the wait. We're looking forward to recording the next in the series this fall or early next year. Remember it's your support that makes this project possible - the Board thanks you for that. Give yourselves a pat on the back, but don't become complacent because there is much more incredibly beautiful Alice Parker music still to be captured in recorded form, and we're counting on you!

Marilyn Pryor, Secretary

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Well, it changes quickly. I just got photos back from being developed, and there was the snow - more than five feet of it, over all the land and the fenceposts, covering all the familiar landmarks. And that was just a month ago - at the end of April we still had white patches. I came home from church on the Sunday after Easter, and chipped away at the ice that was still thick over the bed where my early bulbs should be coming up, Bless their hearts, they did - and three days later were blooming. Late and quick, that's the password for our spring!

Then we had a long patch of beautiful weather, while I went to New York for recording sessions, and came home to a lively and musical group of Fellows - their ten days here started in sun and ended in rain, but was always beautiful. Jim Clemens was a great bird-watcher-and-listener, and left me a list of forty-two species he had identified! The only one he missed was the turkey that most of the rest of us saw, and that visited me for several hours on the day after he left.

Now the hills are all green, many shades from yellow to almost-black. Daffodils and tulips have come and gone, but pansies are bright, and the lupine is high - that tends to be lovely the second week of June, when the next group of Fellows comes. The longer days invite us outside, and then the black flies drive us back in - but they haven't been too bad, yet. The brook has been roaring with all the rain, and the roads are fairly well pock-marked after the hard winter. We drive carefully!

We still need sweaters in the evenings, but the warm weather approaches, and we are ready for it! Grandchildren come in two weeks, so there will be picnics and hikes and general outdoor festivity. What a fine time of year!

Alice Parker

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• "Drown yourself in music."
• "Allow to flow what is really in you."
• "Choose the best poets."
• "Ten or fifteen minutes a day, dip into your creative self. Wash your mind of everything else."
• "Listen to a melody, listen to people sing it, watch people dance it until it's deep inside you. Look through the melody into its profound simplicitiy. What is it made up of? Draw your precepts from the music, not from a set of rules."
• So much of what we do is custom. See if you can cut through the noise. We get into unthinking habits of accepting what is generally accepted. Think about how you learn. How do others learn? The mind wants to learn. It is hungry to learn. All learning begins with the senses."

KS

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A wonderful story from Jane Penfield illustrates how Alice Parker's music has the capacity to cross boundaries of faith and ethnicity, and how it reaches into the depths of our memory to remind us of favorite hymns and folk songs from our childhood.

Jane had chosen Alice's arrangement of the Ladino (Sephardic) lullaby "Durme, Durme" to be sung in the chapel service at a conference.

"...A Jewish member of the conference was planning a ... Shabbat service, so I asked him if that might be a good opportunity for the choir to sing this piece, and he not only enthusiastically agreed, but introduced me to another man who is a Sephardic Jew. This man was astounded that such a piece even existed, and told me that he had grown up in Athens, speaking Ladino. He said that since the war, (in which he lost his own father), the Ladino speaking community was practically all gone. When he heard your piece in rehearsal he was overcome with tears. At the service, he introduced the piece, explained the meaning of the text, and told his story to the congregation.

This was truly one of the most moving experiences I have ever witnessed, musical or otherwise...! Thank you for being the source of it all."

[Ed. Note: Durme, Durme is one of three songs from Zimrei Chayim - Songs of Life. Here's the English translation of the text:

Sleep, sleep, mother's little one,

free from worry and grief.

Listen, my joy to your mother's words,

the words of Shema Yisrael.

Sleep, sleep, mother's little one,

with the beauty of Shema Yisrael.

©1995 Transcontinental Music Publ.]

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"Using quantum physics, I've figured out why older folks get more confused: since time slows down with physical acceleration, and the older we get the more we slow down, time therefore literally accelerates. We slow down, time speeds up-that's enough to confuse anyone..."

Sister Catherine Grace

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Miss Parker learned from Robert Shaw

To write a song without a flaw -

No extra notes to cause "ba-dumps",

No homeless tones in silly clumps.

Alice says "Now here's the thing.

Just write what's beautiful to sing,

Play it straight, no curlicues.

Choose simple when you have to choose."

So simple, straight, my song will rise

If I can keep it Alice-ized. -

Kate Sullivan

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