Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Last night The Pacific Mozart Ensemble (PME) began it's last season of the year. And what a year it's been. First we went to NY to sing with Meredith Monk. Upon returning we find out The Bernstein Mass was nominated for a Grammy (is was an honor to be nominated). We had an amazing Fund Raiser that showcased a host of new talent. Then we had a 25th Anniversary concert featuring new works from David Lang, Dave Brubeck and a 'reinterpretation' of an old Monk chestnut. This all left us in a bit of a daze heading into our traditional year end show, the A Cappella Jazz & Pops.

The show is a departure from our usual format. As with most choruses, the material is chosen by the Artistic and Music Directors, Dick Grant and Lynne Morrow. The J&P show is something else entirely. Folks in the chorus find or write out their own arrangements, put together groups on their own time, and then audition for a committee. The show isn't, therefore, programmed in the traditional sense. The committee puts together a show from the material provided. As a result the show is never the same twice. Different folks will emerge and fade as stars of the show. Different styles pop in and out as the mood strikes the chorus. It really is a neat phenomena. It's typically our most popular show. We usually sell out 3 shows (as opposed to struggling to fill halls for 2 in other seasons).

My major dog in the hunt this year is an arrangement of Sufjan Stevens' 'Come On! Feel the Illinoise!' from the recent album of the same name. I've been on a bit of a Brian Wilson kick over the last few years. When I heard Stevens' latest I immediately thought of PME taking it on. It's been tough for us to get the hang of it. It starts in an compound meter (1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2 1-2) and then shifts to 2 in the middle. For the non-music geeks in the audience, that's code for hard. Plus, in the spirit of the great Maestro Wilson, there are a million little bips and boops and 'pet sounds,' if you will, all over the place. The stereo affect of all those little parts happening in different spots is pretty cool. Of course, that stuff is way easier to make happen in the studio. Pulling it together live is a totally different animal. I think last night it totally came together. I walked out during sound check and really heard it happening. At one point I lost my concentration cause it was sounding so coooool.

Ok, enough about that. You really want the pics, right? Well here they are. I tried to get every group to showcase the variety of different sounds we produce in the concert. I couldn't get everyone, mostly 'cause it was so damn hot in there that I had to take some breaks!

Enjoy,
-E

Technorati : A Cappella, PME, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Sufjan Stevens

The a cappella Jazz and Pop concert set is unique in many ways. It is the only program PME does every year, the first two weekends in June. Although the music is different each year, the format has not changed in over two decades.

By format I don't just mean the concert itself, which usually consists of about 25 tunes performed by groups of 2 to 50 singers. I also mean the entire process of finding music, arranging it, organizing small groups to rehearse, and auditioning each tune before a committee of nine of our peers. I have not heard of any other organization that prepares a concert this way. It can be very time-consuming and frustrating for our members, especially for the tunes that do not make the cut during auditions. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, it is the worst way to do it, except for all the others ways we have tried. We continue do this because the J&P concerts are almost always our most popular events and consistently draw the biggest and most enthusiastic audiences.

A few ambitious or far-sighted PMErs start thinking about the J&P concert early in the season, but the main push begins about the time the spring concert is finishing up. Since I am one of the arrangers, I get requests from many folks to arrange tunes they want to do. Often they give me a CD with several songs and ask me which one(s) I think I could make into an a cappella chart. I create 10-15 charts each year and I also sing in about that number of small groups during the two months leading up to audition night. Meanwhile we need to find and arrange tunes for the entire ensemble - one for all the women, one for all the men, and 2 or more for the mixed chorus.

Getting 4 or 8 or 15 busy people together for 3 or 4 rehearsals outside the regular Monday night PME rehearsals is a challenge. Coordinating multiple groups so that they don't conflict or so that groups with some of the same people can rehearse the same night at the same location adds to the complexity. Then we have to schedule the audtions. This year it will take about 4 hours to hear all the tunes being preared - there are 44. We start at 6:15 and finish at 10:00. Some working folk, especially those from distant cities, cannot be get to Berkeley by 6:15, so their tunes must audition later in the evening.

The auditions will be done (we hope) by 10:00, although the collapse of the MacArthur Maze may impact this timing. Then the audition committee stays up for another 2-3 hours making the difficult choice of what tunes get into the show. The following morning the committee members call the designated contact for each group letting them know the results. We find email to be too impersonal for this, since there will be both good and bad news for people.

Next weekend, the tunes that pass auditions will go through stage 2 - the retreat. The entire chorus goes to a lovely vacation spot and spends at least one whole day being coached by two highly-esteemed directors. Each small group tune gets 15 minutes with each coach. Scheduling these sessions is much more of a challenge than the auditions, since we want to have the two coaches working simultaneously, which requires finding multiple pairs of small groups with no members in common. By the end of the retreat day we are ready to party and hang out on the beach.

I will do some more blogging after the auditions with some specific examples of how tunes progressed through the process and how they fared in the end. The retreat is sure to be blog-worthy, too.

Jim Hale

One of PME's most active small group organizers, Josie Diaz, came to me with an arrangement of "Truck Drivin' Man" by Craig Knudson of the Edlos. Josie knows Craig through her work in the Berkeley public schools. The Edlos are past champions of the Harmony Sweeps, where many members of PME have performed over the years. In fact, this Saturday, May 5, our good friends in Solstice will be competing in the Harmony Sweeps finals. In fact, my quintet Clockwork has been in the finals twice. In fact, ex-PMEr Avi Jacobson is the bass in the Edlos. In fact, ... but I digress.

In the early days of PME, we would take an arrangement like Craig's and simply learn it. These days, I often find it more interesting to create a new arrangement. So I reworked the song for a mixed quintet (the Edlos are four guys) and made it a little more jazzy. Craig's version is a manic ride that leaves you breathless, ending with a Doppler effect that I would love to have used in my chart but he had already stolen my idea (many years before I had it, dang). My version starts out very slowly and works up to a frantic pace at the end.

First rehearsals are almost always rough. We mainly learn the notes and struggle with key changes, trying to stay in tune. Normally a chart like this one, that modulates up a half step three times, will end up flat. Because experienced a cappella singers know this, they tend to over-compensate. Sure enough, this fine veteran quintet finished a half step sharp every time we sang it. Other than an extra bridge that I composed in four-part close harmony, the arrangement is not too challenging musically. We just need to pace ourselves through all the tempo accelerations so we get up to the right speed.

[N. B. - this photo is not the "Truck Drivin' Man" group, but it is in the same place that group and many others have rehearsed, namely my dining room.]

As we got more comfortable with it, in subsequent rehearsals we added some visual gimmicks to accentuate the comedy. I won't give them away in case you, my esteemed reader, decide to attend one of this year's shows on June 2, 8, or 10. You see, we made it through the audition successfully and will be singing "Truck Drivin' Man" for the public next month.

Another tune I arranged for this year's show is a setting of Michel Legrand's "I Will Wait for You" in 7/4 time. You may recognize many members of Clockwork in this picture of our rehearsal. (Once we know a song well enough, we graduate from the dining room table to the living room.) We have premiered many Clockwork tunes in the PME Jazz and Pop concerts, and I hope to have this one in Clockwork's repertoire soon.

That brings up an interesting aspect of the Jazz and Pop show. Almost all the arrangements are done by members of PME and almost all of them are new. We very rarely perform a song we have done in previous years unless the treatment is significantly different from the last time we did it.

Now that auditions are over and the show is set, it's on to the retreat, where we all go away for a weekend of intense work.

Jim Hale

It's been a crazy couple of weeks. We auditioned pieces for Jazz n Pops and had our annual retreat. At the same time our pals Solstice sang in the Harmony Sweeps takes in Marin (taking 3rd place, way to go!). And finally one of our own Monica put together her Masters Recital in SF. Things just keep coming. Next week our director, Dr Lynne Morrow, opens Porgy & Bess in with the Oakland Symphony (featuring some Peemers too). Then it's time for to start dress rehearsals for the big show. I'll leave it to others to write about it. For now I just wanted to share some pictures.

Photo Album #1: Prepping for auditions through the auditions themselves
Photo Album #2: Retreat weekend plus

Here's a teaser of the pics in both albums:

Rehearsing "Still Loving You"

J&P Auditions

Tridecatet

Retreat Rehearsal

Solstice at the Sweeps

Brushing up outside

Nature walk docent

Monica's Recital

Technorati : Harmony Sweepstakes, Oakland Symphony, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Solstice

This year we had 44 small-group tunes audition for the show, and only 22 could make it into the 90-minute program. Cutting 22 tunes is a daunting task, and the committee took over 4 hours of deliberations to do it. Imagine getting down to the last 2 slots and having 10-12 very good songs to choose from. It was almost 2:30AM by the time the job was finally done.

The next step in preparing for Jazz and Pop is the retreat. Usually we take an entire weekend at a beach on Monterey Bay. One full day is dedicated to rehearsing and the rest of the time is for relaxing and partying. In order to describe a full day of rehearsing, we'll have to do some math (sorry).

We have two coaches who work with each group, so for 22 groups that means 44 sessions, each 15 minutes long. That is a total of 11 hours. We also take at least 2 hours for the whole group tunes. If we start at 8:00AM, we would go to 9:00PM with no lunch break and certainly not a lot of energy left to party. (The party is an essential element here.)

Sound impossible? It isn't. The solution is to figure out how to have 2 different small groups working with one of the two coaches at the same time. Potentially we can cut 11 hours down to 5 1/2 hours. The odds of being able to find 11 pairs of small groups with no overlapping personnel are very low, but each year we manage to shave a few hours off the day. It is still a marathon for the coaches, and the singers are often dashing from one room to another between tunes, grabbing lunch when they can.

Speaking of lunch, a huge part of planning the retreat is organizing the meals. We are rather particular about this subject, and having many outstanding cooks in the group keeps the bar high. PME has come to expect fine dining along with their music (the young son of a former member dubbed us the singer-eaters). With many active professionals in an ensemble this size, you cannot count on them all to be able to attend the enitre retreat, so figuring out who can prepare or clean up after a given meal and how many will be there to eat can be as complicated as figuring out how to find 11 pairs of small groups (see above).

Since many of us wanted to see our good friends Solstice (which includes three PMErs) perform in the finals of the Harmony Sweeps, we moved the retreat to Marin County so we could get from the retreat to the Sweeps more quickly. You can see some of the benefits of this move in the previous blog's photo gallery. The Point Reyes peninsula is one of the most beautiful places on earth, and the weather cooperated nicely.

That's right - 28 world premieres. Because we create new arrangements every year for the Jazz and Pop concert set, the entire first performance is music no one has ever heard in public. Some of it may sound familiar if you know the original material, but even in that case you probably haven't heard it a cappella or with a Latin beat or in 7/4 time. Therefore, it is always a mystery to us how that first audience will react, and how good the show really is.

To add to the novelty, we gave the first performance this year in the Finnish Brotherhood Hall in Berkeley, where we have never sung before. The smooth barrel-shaped ceiling of this concert hall produces some unusual acoustics. It takes some time for singers to acclimate themselves to the standing waves and extensive reverb. Our dress rehearsal was further complicated by the fact that a martial arts class was booked the same night, so the first two hours of our rehearsal took place in a smaller room, also very resonant, which gave one the feeling of singing in a shower with 50 close friends.

One thing we discovered was how the hall projects male voices. Usually the men (except for certain tenors) have to work harder than the women in order to be heard, but that is not the case in Finn Hall. This made it somewhat easier to balance the group sound, and provided an ideal venue for a bass to channel Jennifer Beals.

Since much of this concert is prepared by small groups in various living rooms (see previous articles on making J&P happen), none of us hear or perform the whole program in order until the first dress rehearsal. Occasionally someone realizes that singing two particular songs in succession is vocally taxing and we have to make last-minute changes. We never print our programs until after the dress.

Along with a small, dedicated corps of volunteers, we singers set up for every concert ourselves - risers, lights, chairs, programs, a wine bar, recording equipment, box office, ushers, Jennifer Beals - it takes two to three hours to get ready for the first downbeat. By the time the show starts, some of us are downright sleepy and need some coffee.

The audience response Saturday night let us know that this was an especially good concert. Every tune got a warm ovation, and the more comic or dramatic songs had the crowd jumping. The presence of 200 people softened the acoustics a bit, and the attendees, most of whom have come to many J&P shows, remarked on the strength and clarity of the sound.

Between performances we listen to the recording to evaluate our singing so we can make it even better the next weekend. On Friday night we will be in the Green Room of the Veteran's Building in San Francisco, and on Sunday it's the Berkeley City Club (get tickets). That will be the conclusion of a very eventful and satisfying seaon for PME (well, not quite - we are performing in the Green Music Festival on July 12 - a reprise of our spirituals concert from last December).

For the full photo spread go to J&P week 1.

Technorati : A Cappella, Pacific Mozart Ensemble

No, we are not Rolling Stones. In fact, I don't think we have ever done a Stones tune in a J&P show. However, we share with that group the metaphoric feature of gathering no moss. As good as the Finn Hall show was, we did not relax. After the tape listening (see previous blog entry) we had a second dress rehearsal, constantly striving to improve our performance.

We were delighted to see that the Berkeley City Club had set up a banquet for our Wednesday rehearsal. Most of us do not have time after work to get dinner, so this was a welcome surprise. It was an extremely healthy meal, as well, low on carbs and fat (and protein, ... and fiber, ... and plates).

The elegance and lush acoustics of the Green Room (in the Veterans' Building across from City Hall in San Francisco) make for a special Friday night event. We sounded at times like a big cathedral choir, and we looked pretty spiffy, too. The momentum of the previous week propelled us through another fabulous evening, with the help of the best San Francisco crowd we have had in years.

We try to put together a show that combines inspiration, humor, and high drama, so each number takes the audience in a new direction. Having one concert under our belts prepares us for how the audience responds to these different aspects of the presentation.

The final performance, as is our custom, was in the lovely (and jam-packed) Berkeley City Club. The setting is more relaxed than the Green Room, we dress down a bit, and our confidence is at its peak. Many of our regular attendees told us this was the best J&P show ever, with impressive variety, entertainment value, and a consistently high level of singing. We featured some new soloists along with our veterans, and the team of arrangers within the group is growing.

It was a great way to end this first season with Lynne Morrow as our Music Director. Dick Grant finally got a break after 27 years (he took most of these photos).

Technorati : A Cappella, Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Well at long last I uploaded a new slide show culled from the hundreds of pics taken (mostly by Dick) at our Green Room and CIty Club Concerts. If you're just reading this for the first time, this might seem a bit confusing. Fortunately Jim has been walking us through the entire process that is PME Jazz and Pops. You can retrace the entire process starting with his first entry back in Arpil: Making Jazz and Pops Happen.

The Slide Show can be accessed here: PME JnP 07 pt4

Here's a little taste of the the Green Room concert. Enjoy.

Still Loving You:

Barber of Seville:

Technorati : A Cappella, Barber of Seville, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, Still Loving You

One of the most unique things about The Pacific Mozart Ensemble is the annual A Cappella Jazz & Pop concerts we produce every year. Unusual for a number of reasons:

• Here's a choral group that actually performs classical, modern and popular music, and pretty darn well at that.
• For the past 20-something years, each Jazz & Pop show has almost completely new repertoire. We're talking 25 to 30 new arrangements every year.
• No other group, to my knowledge, does what PME does.

I think that this show in particular attracts singers, not unlike myself, to PME who love to sing in the pop and jazz style but then get the opportunity to sing and perform classical, traditional choral, innovative and unusual material the rest of the year. It's a challenge, and switching gears for the various styles can be tricky. BUT ... this group can do it.

The process for putting this show together is pretty amazing, and not for the light-hearted. Individuals get their own song ideas and charts together, form up small/medium sized groups and rehearse outside our regular Monday night rehearsals in order to audition for the program. A committee is selected and on one Monday night, early in May, all those rehearsed small groups audition and the final program is chosen that night. Whew. It seems that even the busiest of our singers find time to put songs together and rehearse. It's fun to hear what unfolds in the auditions, although selecting the final list is not always the easiest process since there is an abundance of great stuff. The end product is an a cappella show like you've probably never heard. Humor, beauty, rock 'n roll, a few farm animal noises ...

The performances are always fun for the audience and (usually) for the performers, but between the audition night and the concert dates, we all pack up and head down to Pajaro Dunes in Watsonville (although we have had retreats in other places at times) for a weekend retreat to workshop the show. Now, we're not dubbed the Singer-Eaters for nothin'. We do work hard all day that Saturday, singing our songs for the coaches and all, but we have lots of food and drink ... and it's one of those rare times when we're together and can just hang out with each other. More singing ensues after the long day of workshops, believe it or not.

This year, our long-time friend and coach Nile Norton was not able to come to the retreat but we had the opportunity to bring in another fabulous educator, Kerry Marsh. Kerry directs the vocal jazz program at Sacramento State University and San Joaquin Delta College, and is a prolific and wonderful arranger and composer. Check out his stuff when you have a chance: www.kerrymarsh.net One of his beautiful arrangements will be in this years' show, in fact; a completely new take on "Scarborough Fair".

Jazz & Pop closes our concert season with a bang, and although we're exhausted and ready for a break by mid-June, we keep coming back every year with renewed energy and lot of creative ideas.

-Angie Doctor

(All the pics from our J&P 2008 Retreat at the PME Group Pool)

Technorati : A Cappella, Kerry Marsh, Sacramento State University, San Joaquin Delta College

We had our final concert of the season last night, and it was one for the ages. Amazing considering the time crunch we had putting together. Seems like time gets tighter every year, but we somehow get it together and, if I do say so myself, nailed it. It was one of the most enjoyable shows in recent memory. Each night as we came up to sing the final number, I found myself wishing the show could just keep going. That's a nice feeling to have.

Here's a smattering of scenes from the last 2 weeks.

Here we see the women of Summer Bounty engaging in the time honored tradition of squeezing in just one more run-through before the show. Each hall is different, so there's always a mad scramble to sing in the space during that precious time before the doors open. If you've ever been stuck out side waiting for us to get the show on the road, well now you know what we are up to!

The Green Room is a great place to do this show. The acoustics are fabulous. There were a number of tunes that sounded there best here on Sat. And as if that wasn't enough, it's beautiful! Here's a shot of Old MacDonald revving up the audience for the show.

Somehow we ended up with a lot of props this year; Armageddon cloaks, wigs, bling, feather boas, and a pick-axe! You know, I'm not so sure the foreman is gonna let those ladies go down in the mine dressed like that...

This year there were a lot of languages. One of the hardest to memorize was Tour de France. There were German and French lines to memorize over a very repetitive melody. Someone had the bright idea that the Tenors should be lucky enough to get that assignment. We were cramming right up to the last (and maybe could have crammed harder, if you know what I mean...) At the City Club, Bryan came up with a solution that amused some, but was met with stern disapproval from others...:

After the last show everyone congregates to unwind and relive the highlights of the show. This year we found ourselves once again at TCs house (Thanks TC!). The party was a blast and we sang through a couple tunes from the show. The high point of the night was a rather robust rendition of With a Little Help From My Friends, complete with revival clappin' 'n' stompin'. In TCs house the thing sounded amazing... and loud! I don't think Gretchen's relatives from NY knew what hit them!

As usual, the singers were ravenous after the show, so when some smart guy brought a Zach's pizza, the feeding frenzy began. Gone in 30s!

It was a great show and a great time. Thanks everyone who helped make it happen and thanks to those of you that came to watch the show.

You can view the entire slide show here:
PME Jazz & Pops 2008 Pictures

See you next year!
-Eric

Technorati : A Cappella, Beatles, Berkeley City Club, Green Room, Old MacDonald, Workin in a Coal Mine