Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Several months ago I was informed by Clockwork bass, Stephen Saxon, that the baritone of the Swingle Singers (http://swinglesingers.com) was leaving the group and that they were holding auditions for a replacement. Stephen has been exchanging emails with the Swingle's bass Tobi (Tobias Hug) for a couple of years.

I first became aware of the Swingles when they were making hit recordings of Bach fugues in the 1970s. Ward Swingle started putting scat syllables and jazz beats to baroque and classical works with a group called the Double Six of Paris. He moved to London and formed the Swingle Singers to continue this pursuit and was rather surprised when they became extremely popular. The group has survived to this day.

Several years ago I had the pleasure of spending several days with Ward Swingle during the West Coast A Cappella Summit. I was attending his lecture with Michelle Mailhot (now Michelle Mailhot-Valines) of Toxic Audio (www.toxicaudio.com). She was Ward's chaffeur for the event but she suddenly realized she had a sound check for the evening concert, so I volunteered to help her out. Gee - I have Ward Swingle to myself for a whole afternoon, I guess I can manage That afternoon I learned that Ward and I had performed the same part (Second Tenor) in Luciano Berio's Sinfonia. I knew Sinfonia was composed for the Swingle Singers but I did not know until then why the Second Tenor part was so huge. Berio wrote it especially for Ward Swingle.

The week after the Summit, John Neal (www.singers.com) got eight local singers, including Michelle, Angie (Clockwork/PME) Doctor, and me, to be guinea pigs for Mr. Swingle in a teaching video called "Swingle Singing" based on his book of the same name. It was directed by Richard "Bob" Greene, who later produced Tesseract for Clockwork.

I could not resist the temptation to go for the audition. There were two times during the summer when I decided not to do it. If I got into the Swingles I would have to move to London and then try to figure out how to juggle all the other good things in my life, like my wife Jacquie (she has her own business with strong Bay Area ties - www.vibrancecoach.com), my vocal group, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble (PME - www.pacificmozart.org), and, of course, Clockwork (www.clockworksingers.com). Besides, I was almost twice as old as any of the current Swingles.

Finally I sent my resume and recordings to Tom Bullard, tenor and music director, and waited to hear if they wanted me to go to London. I did not get any messages until about a month later when Tom informed me that the packet had not arrived, and that the deadline was that day, August 21. As if this wasn't bad enough, I was at that moment in a remote town 200 miles north of Tokyo (see my Clockwork blog) and could do nothing about it. Fortunately, Tom was understanding, especially when he subsequently discovered that the packet had, in fact, arrived at their office a month earlier and had been forwarded to his home address, only to vanish in the Royal mail service for four weeks.

When I got back from Japan and saw that I was invited to London after all, I leaped into action. I found a flight and a hotel, and, oh yeah, I retired from my job. It wasn't quite that spontaneous - I had already planned to retire that week. The trip was somewhat complicated by the fact that it was in the middle of High Holy Days, and I was singing in the Peninsula Temple Beth El choir for Cantor Stephen Saxon (yes, Clockwork Stephen). Small world - not only was Angie in the choir, so was Avi Jacobson, formerly of PME and now bass for the Edlos (www.mascot2.com/edlos). Smaller world - Avi sang with Swingle alto Kineret Maor in Israel. When I rushed out of the temple after Rosh Hashana services to catch my plane, Avi was the last person I said good-bye to. Two days later I met Kineret.

The audition worked like this - on Monday I had to sing three solos, one classical/baroque, one jazz, and one pop tune. If I made it past day one, I would then sing on mic with the group. Here is the kicker: I (and all the other candidates) had to memorize seven charts in case we made it to round two. Swingle charts are not simple, and some of them were a real bear to memorize, because they have complex harmonies, lots of words, and tend to be through-composed (i. e., very few repeated sections). I spent most of my waking hours for two months learning the baritone parts for:

Fugue in A minor, Ciao Bella Ciao, Country Dances, Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho, My Fair Lady Medley, Straighten Up and Fly Right, Drive My Car

There were also excerpts from Sinfonia and another modern piece that were challenging but did not need to be memorized.

For my solos I chose:

Papageno's aria from Act I of The Magic Flute (Mozart), "When Sunny Gets Blue", and "Save the Last Dance for Me".

The entire group (minus the departing baritone) was there for the day one auditions. There were five other candidates that day plus six more who had already made it past day one. Everyone was very friendly and they were a pleasure to sing for - smiling, taking notes whenever I did something particularly interesting, generally quite supportive.

Although I felt great about my solos, I figured that the fact I had, indeed, memorized all the material, including nuances like dynamics and tempo changes, and had a lot of experience on microphones - especially with Clockwork - would be what would distinguish me. My audtion was from 11:00AM to 11:30AM, and I figured they would be done by about 1:00PM. My only means of contact was email via internet cafes, so after spending a luxurious time in the nearby British Museum I went on-line about 2:00 waiting for a message.

This became sort of like an IM session with Stephen and Jacquie. I would check for an email, find one from Stephen or Jacquie, answer it, then check again. I used the time to write down my experiences and feelings, which I am reviewing now to remind me how it was that day.

At about 3:30PM, I finally got a message from their office that I had not made it past round one. There was immediate disappointment, but it was quickly followed by relief. All the juggling, which I never did figure out, would not have to happen. Jacquie tells me to check my body for feelings, and I noticed a curious, almost complete cancellation between the disappointment and the relief - like they were waves of equal frequency and opposite phase (sorry, I was an engineer for 23 years).

The consolation prize was a totally free day in London on Tuesday - wow! I walked all around town, spent three hours in the Tate Modern, and saw Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe. I also had three great Indian meals in the three nights I was there. Life could be a lot worse.

During this adventure, I got nothing but support and encouragement from everyone close to me, including those who would be most affected by all the juggling I mentioned - members of PME, fellow Clockworkers, family, and above all Jacquie. Jacquie urged me to pursue this and promised to do whatever it would take to make it work. When it was over, the universal message was: the Swingles blew it, sorry I didn't get the gig, great that I am staying in California. Thank you, everyone, for your love.

Et In Arcadia Ego... The Founding of PME
by Larry Rose, still a member!

Dick Grant, Tom Mugglestone, and I (easy to remember- Tom, Dick and Larry) and Lindsay Laton and Gwen Pittman met at Laval's Beer Emporium on North Campus like a cell of revolutionaries at the Relais de St Antoine, or Lenin and his buddies in Paris, or Sam Adams at the Liberty Tree Tavern. We declared that our new chorus shall be better, that is, more fun for the audience and the performers, than anyone else's chorus...it shall be open to theater and dance and small group work, open, open... a feeling of repertory, an ensemble, featuring Mozart, the sublime Master of Pool and Babes and the cycle of fifths and suspended sixths, the master of form and energy within form, with soloists from inside the group, kept small and nimble but large enough, just large enough to do the great works... .. but what about a name??? That will come later. The question now is what were the events that led up to that fateful pitcher or three?

Recent events provide part of the answer. Last weekend (March 24, 2007) I saw Dennis and Marsha Johnson in the audience after the Strauss concert. Seeing their smiles and feeling their warmth of appreciation for the music and our friendship, it came to me that this is exactly and wonderfully what PME is about --- after 27 years of PME and after thirty-three years of knowing Dennis and Marsha --- this is what keeps the music exciting for me. The people made PME what it was and still is today. Marsha and Dennis were there at the beginning, so telling the story of the founding of PME is important to me.

An announcement of a concert of the Mozart "Solemn Vespers" and a Bach cantata at the church down the block on Gough appeared in the pink sheets in the Fall of 1974. Paying my three dollars, I sat in the pews and was glad to hear that music again. New to San Francisco, I asked about joining the chorus of about seventy and was glad to hear that they needed tenors ( hello!!!!) and that they pretty much took anyone into the San Francisco Bach Choir. Eventually becoming tenor section leader, I sat in a quad of four with Dick Grant, Jeannie Young and Linda May Robertson Groobin, the other section leaders. Also in Bach Choir were Gretchen Grant, Gretchen Nicholson, Barbara McKenna Pattie, Josie Diaz (a year earlier) and Janet Corah. Dennis was the accompanist and organist.

Linda May drafted me into the Presidio Protestant Post Chapel Choir as tenor soloist in 1976. She was the soprano soloist and Marsha Haner (later Johnson), was part time conductor. Young followed as mezzo soloist and then, needing a new director, we hired Dick to be the conductor. Then Dick hired Dennis to be our organist (Dennis met Marsha!). We were in the Army now and served the retired and active members of the Presidio's United States Sixth Army and Letterman Hospital with weekly music at the services and with special functions on parade and in the cemetery and at the hospital. We had the services of the Sixth U.S. Army Band, as well as a very nice budget for hiring instrumentalists for special concerts and holiday performances. The Post Chapel itself was an ideal little bandbox in which to sing with perfect acoustics and with a very supportive chaplain staff. We were in Arcadia in one of the most beautiful settings in the world with our small whitewashed Mexican colonial church overlooking the Bay, the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate. We invited many members of the Bach Choir and later PME members to come sing with us there over the nine years of my tenure. Larry Moore, Tom and Linsay (now Mugglestone), Peter Sly, Tony Antolini, Gretchen Grant, Nile Norton, Gretchen Nicholson, Trixie Donaldson, Betsy Bell Taylor, Dalene Drake, Janet Rensel , Barbara Pattie, and many others who would later form the nucleus of PME would be found at the Post Chapel in the Seventies and early Eighties. Bob Hawkins, who grew up on the Presidio since his dad was chief ranger of what would later be the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, was our beautiful Bass/Baritone.

So there we were in semi-music-heaven with four fine soloists, a talented and adventurous conductor, the nucleus of a potentially excellent chorus, a great musician on keyboards, the 6th US Army Band at our disposal, and a nice budget for music and guest artists. And then came Peter with a proposal, an invitation, to join a little elite chorus in Berkeley, the former select chorus of the old Oakland Symphony run by Joe Liebling and calling itself the Berkeley Chorus Pro Musica. I guess they meant that they were in favor of music, that they weren't against it. (Contra Musica?). Peter was one of Dick's Stanford friends along with Tony, Nile, Gretchen G, Chuck Alston and others who were at Stanford at the same time and who were involved in music there. So Peter was trusted. So Dick and I joined. There we found Tom and Lindsay. But the leadership group was a group of really poor musicians --- that is, they did not have musical souls. Maybe they sang and read, but it soon became obvious that music to them was a closed alley, a participant sport that if it were appealing to an audience it would be nice, but not important- and strictly an accident. But that was okay, because their audiences averaged about ten including the director's landlady who said she would come if he drove her. Let me tell you about "Der Staub des Tod!" Mendelssohn was so enamored with Bach that he attempted a few pieces in the style of Bach, one of which was the "Dust of Death" in cantata style. Interesting. An interesting music history note, yes? Well, Berkeley Chorus Pro Musica chose this piece as the central work for its Christmas Concert. ( Here we go a-wassailing amongst the dust of death....la la la") A few weeks later Dick received a knock on his door from "The Committee" telling him that since he joined there was "too much jocularity in the bass section". We all knew it was time to get radical and leave and finally found our own chorus. And so a few of us had a beer at Laval's.

To be continued....

Technorati : Berkeley Chorus Pro Musica, Laval's, Mozart, The Pacific Mozart Ensemble, solemn Vespers

Et In Arcadia Ego... The Founding of PME .... continued....
by Larry Rose

Building the chorus followed soon. We made a list of singers to invite. Then two weeks later we met with those who responded at my place in SF, 9 Nebraska Street off Cortland, in Bernal Heights, our first official meeting. We voiced our thoughts and we agreed on Monday nights for rehearsals, and Dick found us a place, the new Julia Morgan Theater in Berkeley. Too numerous to remember and too forgettable to recount, names for our new choral thing came flying. My mom suggested, in light of our new venue, "The Morgan Tabernacle Choir". Tom, Dick and I looked at each other and just for a brief instant... but, no. Finally the name you have all come to know and love was fleshed out and argued and adopted. "Pacific" gave us a place, "Mozart" showed our love for the tradition of his genius and nimbleness, even playfulness, and "Ensemble " gave voice to our uniqueness and adaptability to all forms of music-based stage work. And through the years, in spite of many attempts to change it, it has remained, and has served us well. One of the ways it served us was to provide an opening line for numerous reviewers, such as "The Pacific Mozart Ensemble didn't do any Mozart last night. Instead it was a program of Adams, Part, Brubeck, Andy and John Williams, M. Monk, Ligeti, Brahms, Russian Liturgies, The Hi-Los, Sufjan Stevens, etc etc." You get it. It was a strange and quirky name that got noticed and under which we have become well-known for our accomplishments.

Sunday, June 28, 1980, 5 P.M.--- Julia Morgan Centre for the Performing Arts, College Avenue, Berkeley, suggested donation $3.50. Bach Cantata #106, "Gottes Zeit ist der allerbeste Zeit"; Songs by John Dowland; Mozart "Vesperae Solennes de Confessore" K.339---

The chorus was dressed in afternoon street clothes, jacket and tie for the men, skirts, blouses for the women. I took my usual position, as I would for the next several years, out front greeting and counting the house, answering questions, helping with programs. "Dick, there's a guy here who wants to know if we're using recorders or flutes. I told him flutes for the Bach and now he wants his money back." Jerk alert!!! We gave him his money back. I got first shot at a solo with "Ach Herr, lehre uns bedenken." The Bach went beautifully with Dick conducting the twenty-four of us. The Dowland was prepared and conducted by Tom Mugglestone and it was excellent madrigali a cappella. The Mozart had Dick conducting again and it was terrific for all of us and became, as always, a touchstone, and a signal piece for PME.

For a first effort, and with flutes not recorders, we all felt very good about our debut. Twenty-six years later, and at least four more concert sets which featured the Mozart Vespers including bringing it with us to Parisat L'Eglise de St. Louis en L'Ile , we still feel very good. PME is a great memory machine, and I hope it continues to make memories for everyone from our newest to oldest members. For those of you who don't know them, I would love to introduce you to Dennis and Marsha Johnson at our next show.

-Larry Rose
April, 2007

Technorati : The Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Last weekend on the cavernous Zellerbach Hall stage we closed our Sweet Honey in the Rock collaboration singing "Joy in the Morning," repeating "Joy to the Lord" dozens of times as the wonderful women of Sweet Honey moved to the music in front of us, urging on and urged on by the enthusiastic crowd. This weekend we will invoke the same word--Freude this time, again and again--as we join the Napa Valley Symphony to sing Beethoven's Ninth up in Yountville. The last week has catalyzed many reflections about the piece, its political baggage, and my uneasy relationship to it. This process is especially poignant to me as I contemplate that the day I began writing this, April 8th, would have been my father's 93rd birthday, and it is his experience that so strongly affected my own.

This will be my third opportunity to sing the 9th Symphony, and the second time I've actually sung it. The first chance was at Pomona College back in 1978, when the great Robert Shaw came and conducted with the Atlanta Symphony, and all the local college choirs joined to provide the chorus; I would miss that one when I was accepted to do a Study Abroad that semester. My old roommate summed up the experience--"Shaw heard us struggling with these lines and said, 'Beethoven didn't write this for mortals, he wrote it for gods! You must become gods!'"--at least that's what I recall from an aerogram he scribbled to me at Oxford. The next opportunity was in 1994, the first year I sang with PME, a true baptism of fire: Jeffrey Thomas asked for people to beef up his American Bach Soloists chorus, having put together an authentic-instruments band for the Ninth as a capper to the Berkeley Early Music Festival [Recently released on CD]. Everyone else had sung the Ninth multiple times before, and though I enjoyed the steep learning curve with no note-bashing, I don't remember having much time to ponder subtleties before we were recording and performing at First Congregational Church with a world-class group and the World's Loudest Timpanist.

The Ninth has always occupied an odd, even disturbing place in my musical world: my father was born in Breslau (then part of Germany) during the first World War, part of a very musical academic family that played string quartets, with impromptu musical soirees a focus of the their social life. My grandfather and my father played violin and viola, his older brother Otto, a fine cellist, studied composition with Hindemith among others, and my grandmother was a talented pianist. But she was technically Jewish: thus, as the Nazis consolidated their power, everyone would either die or emigrate. My grandfather succumbed to an aneurysm in 1935, at about the age I am now, having lost his academic post to a Party functionary, already clearly seeing the inevitable destruction of German culture and the co-opting of the remaining artists and musicians. Because my grandfather had served with distinction in the first war, Otto was still allowed to join the German Army, under a special rule: as my father bitterly put it, "he could become cannon fodder" and be killed in the Ukraine in 1942. The three remaining siblings and my Grossmutter all ended up in California--a scholar, a professor, a social worker and an artist--and I still have a huge stash of musty piano scores and sheet music waiting to be sorted and given away. Even from my mother's side I got a negative attitude about the Ninth--I think from her small-town Indiana perspective it evoked too many newsreels of goose-stepping troops and waving flags, as well as an undefined resentment of how a supposedly civilized culture could fall so far so fast.

Thus my earliest memories of hearing the Ninth are tainted by a strange sense of shame and ambivalence, by the knowledge that this sublime music had been co-opted to set the mood for gigantic and bombastic Nazi party functions. More broadly and tragically, every quality that my father saw as German--diligence, respect for hard work, creativity, discipline, intellect--was turned to serve evil rather than good. He did not just blame the Party, he blamed his old country as well, for becoming what one scholar has termed "Hitler's willing executioners," though after joining the American Army he helped bring some of those leaders to a form of justice as a translator before the Nuremberg tribunals.

Even as the soaring lines and poetry moved some deep part of me, I felt the shadow of this history, and recently I have been researching the specific ways in which the SS and the SA bent the Ode to Joy to their purposes despite Beethoven's distinctly non-Aryan physiognomy and heritage. Of course, the Nazis' perversion of music mirrored their cynical manipulation of language, from KdF, "Kraft durch Freude" (Strength through Joy, the name of the Nazi recreational-cultural movement), through the bitterly ironic "Arbeit macht frei" (work makes you free) that adorned the entrances to the camps of no return, where many relatives died for their Jewishness, or killed themselves to avoid being killed. Anyone who has seen Leni Riefenstahl's films like "Triumph of the Will" or "Olympiade" knows how frighteningly beautiful the Nazis' choreographed multimedia spectacles truly were--and how seductive their combination of music, movement, and message must have been to susceptible participants.

Last Saturday as I watched Sweet Honey moving in front of me I could not help thinking that their dancing was "ecstatic" in the etymological sense of the word (from the Greek "extasis," meaning taken outside of themselves by this music). As I write this I realize that during the very semester I wasn't singing Beethoven with Shaw I was studying Renaissance Neoplatonism, and learning that this "ecstatic" potential was the very reason why Puritan religious leaders frowned on music: it opened a line to the soul that was beyond reason, too direct and therefore too dangerous to be deployed without careful constraints. With the suspension of reason, participants and listeners were susceptible to the infusion of ideas without conscious control--something we find laughable in the context of "Dirty Dancing" but menacing in the context of Nuremberg or Berlin.

Athletes sometimes know this feeling of "extasis" too, the "runner's high," the suffusion of feel-good chemicals produced by the body as it exercises at a sufficiently intense level: you are lifted up, you feel supernaturally strong, you sometimes get the sense that you are simultaneously outside of yourself looking in, and inhabiting your body in a way that doesn't happen in your everyday existence.

Rehearsing the Ninth this spring with Lynne has been an intensely athletic experience: more so than other choruses, we are trying to put across the words and the notes with greater clarity than audiences are used to getting in the customary wall-of-sound presentations. For the first time many of us are actually hearing some of the lines and words that otherwise get lost to poor diction. Even this aspect has brought its odd connections, as being "the German pronunciation guy" makes me self-conscious about my limits: thanks to a year in Germany when I was nine years old, and years of listening to my Dad and his relatives, my German is more by ear than by rule.

The rehearsals are a great workout for both the vocal apparatus and the mind: Start with the difficulty of spitting out lines like "Ihr / stürzt-nie / der-Mil / li-onen" (do you bow down, you millions?) without letting Germanic consonant-clusters tangle you up. Add the sopranos' sustained high A's, toss in the preposterous alto and tenor lines written by a deaf man whose inner soundtrack still resounded with unrealized ideas, and don't forget the bass lines that mix marching-song bravado and gravity-defying series of high E's and F's as we seek God "über'm Sternenzelt" (above the star-canopy). But it is not enough to get to the notes and sustain them: just as demanding are the changes of dynamic force (crescendos, decrescendos, and sforzandos) that Lynne has been pushing us to honor and perfect, not content to do the usual Beethovenian full-volume blast-away. Recognizing this aerobic demand, we've "run the program" straight through far more times than any of us has in previous performances. While some rehearsal sessions addressed only small chunks and technical problems, taking apart particular measures or sections, we've had time to execute the whole piece at different tempo markings, even as fatigue takes its toll, exactly as an athlete has to run repeat-intervals and train under game conditions. I think the results will be stunning.

The connection between the physical and the spiritual has always been strong for me--and again I honor my father the classics professor by recognizing the common root of "respiration" and "inspiration," to breathe, to be suffused with something. In multiple senses, then, we are bringing a "spiritual" dimension to this familiar work, singing it with the rhythmic conviction and technical commitment that we brought to the Negro Spirituals last season. There's a line from the old movie "Chariots of Fire" that captures it best for me: before the Olympics the devout Scottish middle-distance runner says, "God meant for me to run, and when I run fast, I feel His pleasure." Robert Shaw was right: singing the Ninth well can take you, even fleetingly, to a plane beyond the mortal, and can connect us to something or someone long gone, as it has for me.

Working on the Ninth this spring--and placing it in the context of the Joy we experienced with Sweet Honey--has redeemed this piece of music in ways I did not expect, from the resonance of the words themselves, to the unexpected rhythmic and dynamic complexities, to the underlying architecture of the layers of instruments and voices. When everything is clicking, whether in rehearsal or performance, when everyone from seasoned veteran to newest member is giving the music their all, a chorus of voices becomes a conduit for some bigger magic, we feel a Pleasure, a Joy, a transcendent Freude, that takes us beyond ourselves to a world of love without oppression or pretension, a celebration of the uplifting and healing power of music. If we can communicate something of this pleasure to the audience, pass along this schöne Götterfunken (beautiful divine spark), then all our hard work will have truly succeeded.

John Stenzel
April 2008

Technorati : Beethoven's 9th, Napa Valley Symphony, Sweet Honey in the Rock