A JANUARY TO REMEMBER

What an exciting series of events marked the celebration of Melodious Accord's first 20 years.

The week began with our third "January in New York: Score Study" that brought musicians from far and wide (Texas, Minnesota, Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, ) to approach score analysis a lá Alice Parker. She gives us a taste of what that means in her editorial and one of the participants put it this way, ". . .study a piece . . . to unlock its nuances and more quickly arrive at a complete mental sound-image. . . to trust and feed my musical intuition, and . . . to nurture the musical intuition of my students. They must 'speak' the musical language before they can learn to read it. We can only perform a piece accurately and expressively if my choir and I have a clear mental image of it, but the notes on the page are often a poor means to arrive at that image." Clearly the participants themselves left having been 'fed and nurtured' in just this way.

Saturday night found us at our gala celebration with Melodious Accord friends, singers, fellows, and board members, including Founding Directors Bruce Fifer, Bruce Wilson, Jody Kerssenbrock, Tina Mansfield, and Alice Parker. Fellows from across the country and from the early days (1991) of the Melodious Accord Fellow-ship program renewed acquaintances and shared memories. It was an evening of remembering, appreciation, and good fellowship. Special recognition was given to: Tina Mansfield for her 20 years of continuous service on the Board of Trustees, Pamela-Warrick Smith for her contributions to the annual Martin Luther King Spirituals Concert, and the Sisters of the Community of the Holy Spirit for providing space for our workshops, rehearsals, and meetings. Many long-time friends of Melodious Accord were unable to be present but made their continued commitment known through contributions. These and other generous gifts listed in our annual "appreciation" will propel us into future programs and projects. For your loyalty and faith -- we thank you.

Our concert and spirituals SING was an exciting culmination to the week. It was wonderful to have The Musicians of Melodious Accord on the program with so many of our long-time regular singers among the group: Juliana Anderson, James Bassi, Gail Blache-Gill, Rodne Brown, Margery Daley, Brian Dougherty, Rod Gomez, Joseph Neal, Lewis White, and Jacquie Pierce, who has also served us so well as board member and choral contractor . These familiar names and voices have appeared in our concerts and on our recordings for many years and we are grateful for their part in the history of Melodious Accord. They were joined by Gwendolyn Simmons and Phenisher Harris who gave powerful solo performances in two new Parker spiritual arrangements, My Feets is Tired ( an a capella setting of a movement from Sermon from the Mountain, dedicated to Rosa Parks) and That Bright, Shining World.

Alice Parker

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WORD-SMITHING
Editorial

Each January for the past five years I have led a small group of conductors and musicians in two or three days of score reading: of looking at compositions of different periods to discover what they communicate, and how they are constructed. This is not at all from a theoretical or musicological perspective, but rather from a humanist, common sense point of view: what was the composer's relationship with this work, and how can I, the reader, make it mine?

This year we had an added bonus of one morning's discussion with poet Susan Palo Cherwien. She came from Minneapolis to join us in talking about her poem Winter Solstice 2001, and my setting of it. I just received a note from her, which began like this: "What a pleasure it was to see you and spend a bit of winter with you in New York City. I was so honored to sit and converse with you about poetry and text, and the group gathered there seemed genuinely happy to hear about the process of word-smithing."

'The process of word-smithing.' We don't often think about this in relationship to the texts of our choral works. We take for granted that they've always been there, created whole, without the intervention of choice, of other possibilities, and move quickly on to study the notes. But poems evolve just as music does, with innumerable choices and often hard-wrought decisions. And we were honored to have Susan lead us through some of the challenges of this post-9/11 meditation.

The poem begins "too soft and schön/the Christmas songs -/ all wrapped in plush,/ all rapt in hush", recalling us to those days when we couldn't sing Silent Night without feeling its incongruity in the midst of the destruction in our city. She continues "these latter days/ call forth/ the forest drums/ and bones."

What an invitation for a composer! Although the poem is about violence, one must begin with those "soft and schön" sounds, the background familiar carol, so that when the "latter day" enters it can stand in stark contrast. When I began to intuit the music of the poem, all her opposites stood in relief. The Anglo-Saxon brevity of "sharp the frost,/ hard the birth--" contrasts with the "silvery songs" of the angels, "agonizingly beautiful". Both elements were present then, in Bethlehem, and are present now, in New York. We appreciate more fully what happened then when we truly experience the difficult 'now'. "So all our days . . ." are "dark and hard,/ yet shot through/ with starwing/ and silver."

Susan spoke of the endless assault of images, of the beginning pages with lists of similar nouns, adjectives or verbs in the search for just the right one. (She said that sometimes editors suggest that she might use a more familiar word, and she can wryly answer "I've tried that one.") She also referred to the difficulty of closure - of saying in essence "All right, that's as good as I can get it." That's familiar to me, too - that reluctance to end the task. For me, the deadline prompts the double bar at the end, but the possibilities seem to remain endless. The piece can always be better - that hunt for the ideal continues, impossible of human attainment.

So, if someone wants to score-read my composition, the act of studying the notes without a prior understanding of the poem can only lead to a misunderstanding of the whole. For my music does not exist in a vacuum - it's my response to all the occurrences in my life, just as Susan's poem reflects her sensibilities and craft. So the reader must not only try to recreate Susan's poem, but also my understanding of it, before progressing to the notes on the page. Only then do they begin to make sense.

I can only assume that my experience is similar to other song composers before me. A sensitive word-setting never occurs by accident. Settings by Bach and Schubert and Brahms and Gershwin always betray an intuitive knowledge of the way the text flows off the human tongue, as well as what it 'means'. And I have a theory that lyric poets have a truly musical understanding of the rhythms and colors on which speech rides. The work of the poet and the singer must emerge from the same intuitive part of the brain.

We all enjoyed the discussions in this class (thanks again, Susan), and emerged with the resolution to look more closely at all the texts that we sing - hymns, love songs, drinking songs, elegies - all of them. The music begins there.

Note: Winter Solstice, 2001 is available from the Alice Parker Music Company. If you wish to look at it, e-mail: kay@aliceparker.com.

The poem is copyright 2001 by Susan Palo Cherwien.

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THE VIEW FROM HERE

Well, on the last day of February it's just plain frigid! Well below zero at night, and in the daytime, bright sun with the temperature under twenty degrees Fahrenheit. It creates icicles where I've never seen them before: the snow melting off the roof drips down, but freezes before it's far from the gutter. So the spokes of the porch railing are interwoven with stalactites, and the floor a solid sheen of black ice. Not good weather for hiking!

The wind shakes the house from time to time, pushing great fluffy cumulus clouds straight down from the north. The ground is white, thanks to three consecutive days of snow flurries - but there's no real accumulated bed. The ground hasn't frozen until very recently, and most of January and February my lawn was channeled with the run-off from the hill. Such a strange winter: never the month you'd think it ought to be. Is it global warming? Man-made? Or just Mother Nature exerting her power to surprise us, with below-freezing nights in Florida (I was there too,) and above 60 days in Manhattan (I was there, just after the southern trip.)

Our hills are full of rocks, great angled masses left by the glaciers. Right now they are a map of the water hidden in them. Bright white icy streams fall from every fissure - some cuts on the highway are craggy designs of down-flow: thick and slender, high and low. All are caught in mid-descent, frozen until the season relents and releases them. So the roads are treacherous, too, with mirrored patches where the sun doesn't reach, and full of hazards at night-fall. One approaches the curves very cautiously - and never sets foot on the slanting driveways.

Florida was a wonderful contrast in color and lushness - flowers blooming in spite of the frost, and my hosts picking oranges and grapefruit from their own trees. One could get very attracted to that profusion - except that for us native New Englanders, the suspicion arises that it's probably not very good for us. A poem by Elinor Wylie, Puritan Sonnet, comes to mind:

"Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones/ There's something in this richness that I hate./ I love the look, austere, immaculate,/ Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. . ." We probably deserve our climate, whatever it brings us!

Alice Parker

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ALICE PARKER HONORED BY EASTERN DIVISION ACDA

Alice Parker was both honored and surprised at the convention of the Eastern Division of the American Choral Directors Association in New York City in February to find that the entire four- day convention was dedicated to her. Over 1100 of the more than 3400 members from 11 states and the District of Columbia were in attendance. In recognition of her creativity, and her years of work, commitment and devotion to choral music President Wayne Abercrombie read this citation:

"Her life flows on in endless song,
She hears the music ringing;
She sounds an echo in our souls,
How can we keep from singing?"

To which the audience added a resounding ovation.

In her inimitable style, Alice led the convention SING and, in other sessions, the gathered convention attendees sang her arrangement of Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal, and closed convention activities with Amazing Grace, a favorite Alice Parker-Robert Shaw arrangement.

One attendee noted, "I can't remember having one person's creative achievements honored in this way since I began going to ACDA conventions in 1992. She really means something to the choral field."

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© 2006 MELODIOUS ACCORD, INC.
All rights reserved. To obtain permission to reprint any part of this newsletter, send requests in writing to 96 Middle Rd, Hawley, MA 01339.

The Melodious Accord Newsletter is published three times a year, reaching 4000 musicians in the United States and Canada.

Send address changes, deletions, name changes, etc. to Kay Holt, 34 Ashfield Lane, South Hadley, MA 01075; (413) 536-1753 phone and fax; e-mail:newsletter@melodiousaccord.org.

Contents:

A January To Remember

Word-Smithing

The View From Here

Alice Parker Honored By Eastern Division ACDA

Home Page
The News Stand