Music Group's "Winging Wildly'

Two encores and one American classic

TOM PURDOM

Sean Deibler receives approximately 30 manuscripts a month from composers who would like him to perform their work.

Deibler threw out that figure in his remarks before the Music Group’s latest concert, and it had a familiar ring to the fiction writing side of my literary personality. When my friend Gardner Dozois was editing Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, he estimated that he received 800 to 1,200 manuscripts per month. The magazine only prints about six stories per month, so Gardner averaged about two hundred rejections for every acceptance.

Deibler schedules at least two new works each season these days, so composers face slightly better odds than writers if his numbers are typical. On the other hand, the formal training required probably eliminates the musical equivalents of the would-be writers whose major skill is the ability to type.

The recent Music Group program did not, in fact, include any premieres. Instead, Deibler presented two pieces he has premiered in the past.

As composers and performers will tell you, second hearings are actually rarer than premieres. Most music organizations are happy to schedule a premiere now and then. Repeat performances are less glamorous.

Where Maya Angelou got that phrase

Deibler described Kirke Mechem’s Winging Wildly as a piece the chorus enjoyed singing, even though it’s tricky. Winging Wildly is a setting of three poems about birds, including black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Everyone Sang, which is the almost brutal text that gave Maya Angelou the phrase, “I know why the caged bird sings.”

In all three sections of Winging Wildly, parts of the chorus engage in wordless vocalizations while the rest sing the text. In the opener, Sara Teasdale’s Birds at Dusk, the women sing birdlike phrases while the men sing the first lines. Then the women sing the text, the men contribute the birds, and the combinations become more complex as the poem goes on. For the finale, Siegfried Sassoon’s Everyone Sang, the bird song counterpoint is provided by lalalas, and the whole thing ends with the text declaring, “Everybody was a bird” and the chorus breaking into wordless song.

The Dunbar poem in the middle has its share of choral playfulness, but its most striking feature is the way Mechem wove choral complexity around the text without disrupting its straightforward, four square, late-Victorian meter.

Edgar Allan Poe in the Middle East

This was essentially an a cappella program, but the second repeat on the program added an oboe solo to a piece for chorus and soprano. The text for Robert Convery’s Israfel is an Edgar Allan Poe poem about the angel, mentioned in both the Bible and the Koran, who is supposed to have “the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures.” The oboe contributed a hint of Middle Eastern atmosphere; Janice Fiore’s full, colorful soprano interacted with the chorus; and the piece ended with a complex climax that combined parts for both soloists with multi-line writing for the chorus.

Fiore dropped into an impressively low part of her range during one section of Israfel, but I was still surprised when I was reminded that the evening’s pièce de résistance— Aaron Copland’s In the Beginning— was composed for a cappella chorus and mezzo-soprano. Fiore handled the lower range with no problems, as she had the last time I heard the Music Group perform Copland’s choral masterwork.

Copland’s authentic American classic

In the Beginning sets the opening verses of Genesis to music. There are many ways in which it can be performed. This time Fiore’s part had a cosmic, voice-across-the-deeps quality, and Deibler emphasized the “eeriness” he mentioned in his opening remarks.

In the Beginning is, in my opinion, an authentic American classic. Copland’s setting is understated, but he provides enough musical variety to keep it continuously interesting, up to the moment when it erupts in a sudden blast on the final words, “And man became a living soul.”

You may believe that some god breathed divinity into the first humans. You may be content, as I am, with the idea that the blind forces of chemistry bound atoms into the first protolife, and the ferocious process of evolution through natural selection eventually combined giant molecules into a structure that was so complex it acquired consciousness and became aware that it exists. It doesn’t matter. Whatever your opinion on the literal truth of the Book of Genesis, that final outburst is one of the great moments in modern music.