The Boston Secession has been rattling around in my head since Spring. The group was kind enough to send me their latest CD (Surprised By Beauty: Minimalism in Choral Music) which features a program of modern choral pieces. I knew only two of the composers on the disk: Gavin Bryars and Arvo Part. Ruth Lomon and William Duckworth were alluring discoveries.This is always the case with me and classical music. As soon as I think I understand the genre, something comes along to completely change my view. William Duckworth and Ruth Lomon did that for me.Secession founder and artistic director Jane Ring Frank.
Boston Secession was founded in 1996 by conductor and artistic director Jane Ring Frank. The ensemble is a modest group of twenty-five singers that have distinguished themselves in the four concerts they perform each year. Unlike a lot of choral ensembles their size, their repertoire is broad and ranges from chant to contemporary choral music.
They don’t just stick to what’s already been composed though. Next year, the group premieres Ruth Lomon’s Testimony of Witness. Lomon’s piece is a full-length concert oratorio based on the poems of Holocaust victims and survivors. She wrote the piece while serving as the composer in residence with the group.
A sample of the oratorio appears on Surprised By Beauty. According to the liner notes with the CD, the six and a half minute Transport depicts the frenzied, confusing and ultimately deadly experience of being deported to Nazi concentration camps. The text is harrowing, claustrophobic and of course tragic. I know how the story ends, but I still felt icy shivers crawl up my back when the familiar Nazi-era siren wailed through my speakers.
Yet, the piece didn’t affect me in the same way Steve Reich’s Different Trains did. Reich connects his memories of riding in a train as a kid to the completely different experience of being deported, by train to concentration camps in Europe. Different Trains was new to my ears and interesting for how Reich matched the rhythm of the taped voices to the string quartet, or in my recording, string orchestra. It hums, moves and ends optimistically.
Transport is nothing like Different Trains. Transport created percolating images of sound that lingered for a little bit, before they gave way to some other, new sensations. Sections of Transport buckle and push against one another. Lomon’s piece didn’t remind me of the minimalists I know. Lomon’s text anchors the music in the caustic, nihilistic soup of the Nazi-era Germany. The retrospective stunned me the first time and each subsequent time I heard the piece.
I frequently come in contact with Holocaust survivors and people who have endured the unimaginable. Hearing the unimaginable, often said in a whispered voice, I am immediately paralyzed with awe, fear and empathy in my day job. It is an experience you don’t entirely get used to. The same is true when I hear music connected in any way to the Holocaust.
Rather than looking only at popular minimalism, Surprised By Beauty takes a more extensive view of the style. It shouldn’t be shocking. For a choral group like Boston Secession it’s a but a tiny hop between monophonic early music and William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony.
In Southern Harmony, Duckworth used “shape notation” for inspiration. Basically, shape notation utilizes different shapes for each note of the musical scale. The technique is used in the South to enhance communal singing and by extension religious practice. Theoretically, the system allows almost anyone to sing hymns. Here again, the effects were beguiling and unexpected. Each selection from Southern Harmony is built on simple, taut, rhythmic patterns that are glossololic. In my wonderment, I keep asking myself how something so simple, so pedestrian as shape notes can yield music so complex?
Boston Secession takes their name from the Vienna Secession: a co-operative that displayed art at eye level. In their way, Secession brings choral music to eye level. With Surprised By Beauty, the Secession, explores the entire range of minimalistic choral music. By peeling back the layers and styles of different composers the group presents contemporary music at “eye level.” For me, the best part was hearing, for the first time, music by Duckworth and Lomon. As the title of the disk suggests, I was surprised.
Thousands of miles from Seattle, I have no doubt Boston Secession will continue to thrive and grow artistically. Choral ensembles are plentiful but few have the willingness, grace and skill to handle such a wide repertoire. Until they make their way to Seattle, I’ll have to make do with their eye-opening Surprised By Beauty.
