Bowdoin Chamber Choir Hits a High Note, With Help From Friends

The Chamber Choir rehearses.
The Bowdoin Chamber Choir rehearses.

Story posted November 29, 2004

It only takes an event like the December 3-4 concert by the Bowdoin Chamber Choir to reveal the cultural richness that is a regular part of campus life at Bowdoin. Concertgoers at the annual December event will be treated to a program that highlights multicultural exploration, inventive student collaborations, longstanding faculty relationships, and inclusiveness with outside performers.

At both concerts - to be held in the Bowdoin Chapel - the Choir will perform music from the Renaissance, American folk music, and contemporary choral pieces - including a haunting and humorous new work by Bowdoin Music Professor Emeritus Elliott Schwartz.

Other musical selections - as well as guest performers - will be featured at the two concerts.

At the 7 p.m. Friday, December 3rd concert, the Chamber Choir will be accompanied by two other student-based groups - The World Music Ensemble and the Bowdoin Unity Step Team, performing works with shared African roots. The World Music Ensemble will play percussive music of Ghana as the Bowdoin Unity Step Team performs a dynamically rhythmic step-dance created by Kareem Canada '05, and performed by Canada and Christina Souther '05.

These works will be replaced at the Saturday, December 4th concert with a performance by the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, who join the Bowdoin Chamber Choir for their 3 p.m. performance.

"Our programs can go from the Middle Ages to the present day and include cultures from all over the world."

"With the addition of African music and dance, the first program is going to be very ethnic," said Chamber Choir Director Robert Greenlee. "Our programs can go from the Middle Ages to the present day and include cultures from all over the world."

Because of the group's prowess with Renaissance music, Greenlee included four songs from the Renaissance by composers Clement Janequin, Pierre Passereau, Orlande de Lassus, and Luzzascho Luzzaschi. Friday's concert also will include Franz Schubert's Der Hirt Auf Dem Felsen with soloists Sarah Hippert '05, soprano; Elizabeth Nells '05, piano; and Tobias Crawford '07, clarinet.

Both concerts will feature the world premiere of Schwartz's new work, "Two Watterson Poems."

"I've been trying to get Elliott [Schwartz] to write a piece for the choir for years, and this year it came to fruition," noted Greenlee. Undoubtedly the most challenging work on the program, Schwartz based the two-movement choral piece on two poems by Bowdoin English Professor William Watterson, "Cat Fall" and "Seminar."

"What interested me was that both poems have musical or theatrical images, and they both have a dichotomy between two levels of experience," noted Schwartz. "In the first, there is a cat outside the window and one inside. In the other, "Seminar," you have a college professor looking at students while they look back blankly at him. It leant itself to the idea of splitting the chamber into two groups."

rehearsal2.jpgLongtime director Robert Greenlee, right, rehearses the Bowdoin Chamber Choir.

Greenlee came up with the idea to use half the choir for percussion, playing instruments varying from blocks and drums to spoken whispers and "shushes." They create a range of evocative sound effects: rain; wind; cat paws on a piano; the bored murmur of unruly students. The remaining singers carry a melodic score that swells from syncopated, overlapping phrases to warm, harmonic fullness.

"It's not a style that the students engage in very often, so it's not in their ears," noted Greenlee during a recent rehearsal. "The pitches are much more difficult, and there's so much going on in the piece - the percussion, the ensemble of speakers and whooshers, the singers. It's very challenging."

For his part, Schwartz seemed pleased. "I think the kids are getting the music wonderfully well," he said, following along at rehearsal with a hand-penned score. "I think the hardest part of my music is shifting gears rapidly from very non-tonal, angular modern sounds to very traditional and beautiful sonorities. I've discovered this with orchestral music as well; shifting gears on a dime is awfully hard. They do that really well."

Other Bowdoin soloists featured at the concerts include singers Sonia Alam '07, Caitlin McHugh '07, Mary Hartley Platt '07, Jared Hunt '08, James Light '07, Luke Wilson '06, Andrea Printy '08, and Tommy Long '06; and pantomimist Michael Peiser '07.

Both concerts are free and open to the public. For more information, call 725-3747.

For more on the Bowdoin College music department and ensembles click here.

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