Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Two Worlds Harmony
By Josie Diaz

"Dear P.M.E.,
thank you for singing at Emerson school. I like singing too and talking. I am going to sing when I grow up.
Love, DeAzhane"

"Dear P.M.E.,
Thank you for coming to Emerson! We liked your music! We hoppe we can hear your music! My favorite one was Lord Remember Me !!!!!!! I like Freedom Train! Yor music made me criy becas my granfathr past away.
Love, Morgan"

"Dear Pacific Mozart,
thank you for singing to us. It made me feel like I am a good yung man.
Love, Dewayne"

In the past, PME performances have been lauded by noted music reviewers and well-known contemporary composers. But never have we received such love-filled and enthusiastic "reviews" like the ones above, which are just a sampling - with typical phonetic spellings and grammatical substitutions - of the letters written by the six- and seven-year old first graders at Emerson School in Berkeley after our recent performance there.

Last year, as the resident Reading Specialist at Emerson, I invited PME to sing there for students, teachers, and parents. We did this last April, performing a selection of classical (Mozart's "Ave Verum" and "Gloria" from the Mass in C) and popular ("Stand By Me" and "Seasons of Love") pieces. Dick engaged the children with his introductions to the numbers, and Doug wowed the audience and made them laugh with "Stand By Me". In the days after the performance, I got so many enthusiastic responses from parents and teachers as well as children - the most typical one was "I loved it, you've got to come back again!" - that I knew I had to bring PME back to Emerson this year. And after our moving Spirituals concerts in December, I knew that this was the time.

Despite their everyday responsibilities of work and family, 16 PME'ers were able to play hooky from their regular lives to come to Emerson on the morning of Tuesday, February 13. Lynne made a special trip down from Sonoma State to lead the singing. Around 10:00 they all crowded into my little room decorated with children's writing, vowel pattern charts, and vocabulary lists. At first I had the same unreal feeling I had felt last year, that my two worlds of Emerson and PME had somehow unnaturally, but beautifully, collided. Jim and Lynne went over the numbers with us and then, at 10:30, we went on stage. The entire school of about 275 students, Kindergarten through Fifth Grade, was sitting on the "cafetorium" floor, while teachers, assistants, office staff, volunteers, and a number of parents sat on benches around the room. There was an air of expectation as my great principal, Susan Hodge, quieted the children. Shawna Suzuki, a first grade teacher who has attended our concerts, gave us a short introduction, I said a few words about how happy we were to be back at Emerson, then Lynne began speaking about the historical context of the spirituals. Fortunately, the Emerson teachers are such excellent educators that all the children - even the five-year old Kindergarteners - were, to various extents, familiar with the historical and cultural contexts of slavery in America and the slaves' struggle for freedom. The children listened quietly as Lynne explained how thier struggle was expressed through this truly spiritual music and how many of the lyrics had hidden messages of escape routes and times on the Underground Railroad. When we rehearsed in my room, we reminded one another to "engage" the children, but once we began singing our first number, "Amazing Grace", we found the children's rapt attention and enthusiasm so rewarding that "engaging" them came naturally! I had been a little afraid that the children's attention would wane during our slow numbers, like "Steal Away" and "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen", but it never once wandered and the kids seemed to focus even more intently during the slow, lamenting songs. Before every piece Lynne told them a little more about the background of the song and their heads nodded in recognition of her topic. Rob in "Nobody Knows", Jeff in "Ain't That Good News", and Lynne in "Steal Away" all provided beautiful, emotional solos. We ended with "The Battle of Jericho" to thunderous applause. As I approached the microphone again to thank the PME'ers for being at Emerson, I found myself starting to become teary-eyed, and I stated that having my two favorite communities, PME and Emerson, come together again made this the perfect moment for me. Then I told the PME'rs, "And now Emerson has a surprise for you." One of the teachers stood up to lead the students in the famous "Emerson Claps", a succession of hand-motion cheers including the clam cheer, the fireworks cheer, the watermelon cheer, the snowball cheer, several others, and ending with a big "W - O - W - WOW!" Since it's impossible to truly describe these cheers in writing, I leave it to your imagination to picture them - or ask a PME'er who was there!

PME's appearance at Emerson was one of several performances at Bay Area schools as we expand our educational outreach program. Last fall Lisa hosted us at the Waldorf elementary and high schools in San Francisco, and we hope to sing this spring at the Ecole Bilingue in Berkeley. Another project I would like to launch would be a collaboration with Berkeley High's music department, perhaps sponsoring some music students to come to our rehearsals and concerts as well as singing at Berkeley High. It's evident how much students of all ages can understand and appreciate our music. And singing to kids is so much fun! Here's how another Emerson first-grader, with typical first-grade mid-year spelling, expressed it:

"Dear P.M.E.,
Thank you for coming to Emerson. I love the music. It soed [sounded] beautiful you gis [guys] work very hard. Evin Ms. Diaz. [!] Ms. Diaz grop [group] soed great to me. I love Ms. Diaz grop. It's good that Ms. Diaz has that good grop because they soud rilly REALLY REALLY great.
Love, Shirley"

Josie Diaz

Technorati : Berkeley, Berkeley High, Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley, Emerson School, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Waldorf Elementary

by Nette Worthey
(with special thanks to Catherine for the pics)

Well, now wouldn't that just be a fantastic story? My experience wasn't quite that dramatic, but it was very rewarding.

My parents moved to Santa Rosa when I was 10 years old. My mother and her hubby still live in that same house; even though I wasn't born there, I suppose I consider Santa Rosa my hometown. I am a graduate of Piner High School ('88 is GREAT!), and I attended Santa Rosa Junior College for my AA degree.

I joined PME almost 10 years ago, and I've been fortunate enough to sing with these wonderful folks in a wide variety of settings, from the flight deck of the USS Hornet to the Berlin Philharmonic and back (I did miss the Carnegie Hall trip ), but yesterday's concert at the Glaser Center in Santa Rosa was the first time we hit my home turf. I felt like I was stepping back in time, except everything was different. Oh, the mall where I worked my first job is still there, but the Santa Rosa Grill, local spot where we used to get burgers, fries and vanilla Cokes between Music Theory and Chamber Singers is now a Chinese food buffet, and there's a Barnes & Noble in the great Art Deco building that used to be the White House department store.

We arrived early, parked the car, and started wandering the red brick downtown area that used to be so familiar to me, and suddenly, there's Eric Freeman from PME driving by in his convertible. And wait, is that Betsy Johnsmiller over there? I could have expected to bump into high school chums and college friends, but instead there were Peemers everywhere I looked. What a clash of worlds!

Now to the concert: we realized about two weeks ago that the scope of the works we planned to perform was massive, larger probably than the number of rehearsals set aside to prepare them all. It is not the first time this has happened, and PME has proven time and again that we have the capacity to really pull a concert together in short order. Is this a recipe for concert success in the long run? Not really; however, I have seen us, as individuals and as an organization, working on improving rehearsal preparedness and procedures, and it has been an exciting process. But what to do when you have the first run-through 6 days before the concert and it becomes obvious that we're just not there yet? BOOTSTRAPS, PEOPLE!

So we worked. And many of us showed up to Lynne's mom's house on Friday and sang for 3 hours straight, and boy oh boy we really hammered some stuff out! But was it enough to make a difference for our first concert?

The audience was small but enthusiastic, and close enough that I could actually read their expressions. They were right there with us from the start. And we were glorious: rich, expressive, right with Lynne! Was it because we were in the heart of Sonoma County on a beautiful spring afternoon and we finally, viscerally, felt what Wachet auf really meant? I like to think so...

Sonoma Countian Nette Worthey, signing off

PS: all the hard work? That helped too. :)

Technorati : Glaser Center, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Santa Rosa, Strauss, Wachet auf

by Elisabeth Eliassen

I woke up from this lovely dream, one morning last week: I was standing at the top of one of those fantastic mountains you often see depicted in Chinese landscape paintings. I was intoning a monotone chant, and the sound of my intonation was billowing forward, like the movement of a cloud. When the intonation was finished, I stood breathing in crisp, fresh air and enjoying the feeling of sunshine on my upturned face. Unexpectedly, echoes of the intonation returned, as a song. But the song was now in multiple parts.

When one wakes from a dream like this, one feels compelled to write. Or, that is, this one does, namely Me (with a cup of coffee near by and fingers poised on the keyboard, as the children get ready for school).

One day, very nearly two years ago now, I received a mysterious package from a friend. Inside was a spiral bound music score, entitled "Songs of a Soul Journey." Handwritten on the cover was this "SURPRISE!!! XOXOXO, Ken." I was stunned! My friend had taken eight of my poems (seven from the published collection and one unpublished poem that I had sent around to friends one Thanksgiving…) and set them as a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano. WOW!

Ken Malucelli, what can I say about him? An accomplished musician, entrepreneur, impresario, composer, a man of wit and warmth and joie de vivre. Our birthdays, in October, are a few days apart. When you are with Ken, things are lively and fun. Those eyes always have a sparkle in them.

It is an odd experience seeing one's words move off the page of the manuscript to take on a new life as sound, as music. But I must confess, there is something very zen about it: as if there is no need for ownership, but that something created out of love must take on new life in the hands of loving others. That we all influence one another to creativity is natural, and one of the most fabulous aspects to the chain of being.

I can honestly say that I do not know how this particular commission came about, but what I can tell you is that "Fellow Traveler" was one of the songs in Ken's song cycle, and that a few members of our group came to the concert where I sat in the audience and heard the songs sung for the first time. One of those members must have thought, gee, that song would be neat as a choral number. And so then somebody got in touch with Ken, and asked him to set it for the group to sing. And so, here we were, this past weekend, having a World Premiere!

All of this I find quite amazing. I write mainly, though not exclusively, in blank verse and many of the poems I write I would think are anything but lyrical. However, in the hands of a loving other (in this case, my friend Ken), the lyrical line can be perceived embedded in the clumpy, spiky clot of words, and gently carved out into a bird that can take flight. And, in the hands of many loving others (PME), it did, and my poem, and Ken's song, came back to me as a choral landscape with sonorous harmonies.

Thank you, Fellow Travelers. You know who you are…

Elisabeth Eliassen

[Elisabeth's poetry is collected in "Songs of a Soul Journey" ( ISBN 1-4010-2585-4, Xlibris Corp. 2002)]

Technorati : Ken Malucelli, Prince/SF Production, Songs of a Sould Journey