Recap of the 2013 ACDA National Conference in Dallas

The Friday evening concert at the ACDA 2013 National Conference in Dallas held three choirs- the Union High School Chamber Choir from Vancouver, WA directed by Mikkel Iverson; Chroma, the womens ensemble of Seattle Pro Musica directed by Karen Thomas; and the University of Louisville Cardinal Singers directed by Kent Hatteberg. The Cardinal Singers were happy to be back from Vatican City after electing a new pope.

Union High School presented a program of music all by living Washington state composers. The choir sang with great skill and confidence and as each piece finished the audience grew more and more enthusiastic. A new Ethan Sperry Indian-influenced piece in manuscript titled Albela Sjan was led by a tabla player with great effect- this will no doubt be another hit for Ethan.

Ethan Sperry

The totally engaged audience spurred the choir on and by the time this program ended with two movements of John Muehleisen's Eat your Vegetables (very campy in the best sense of the word) it was obvious that this choir was on a par with many a university choir. Iverson and the choir are high-achievers and it was an absolute delight to hear a fine high school ensemble singing advanced, adventurous (yet still appropriate for their age) music. I would also like to applaud the composers on this program for cultivating their own voice- I heard no blatant Lauridsen or Whitacre imitations, and also generally  heard no blandly simplistic forms of homophonic music. This concert made all the many ACDA members in attendance from Washington state and the Northwest division quite proud.

Mikkel Iverson

The NW flavor continued with one of the few women's ensembles at this years conference, Chroma directed by Karen Thomas. Their program was probably the most adventurous one I heard in the whole conference. Some of the pieces were moderately avant-garde which something really missing from this conference- most of the "new" music on programs were safe plays and, again, mostly homophonic pandiatonicism in one way or another). Thomas led the ensemble with great skill and the ensemble was an apt model of the new sound that has developed in women's choirs in the last 10-15 years- strong, full-bodied women's voices covering large territories of tessitura and dynamic range. To me the highlight of their program was an odd, very subdued and mysterious setting of the Charles Orleans text Quant j'ai ouy le tabourin. The choral tone palette of the choir here was mystical and intimate. Thomas' own Wild Nights, a setting Emily Dickinson's R-rated poem was passionate and - oh yeah, sexy and wild! The group then finished their set with a rollicking Bulgarian folk song sung expertly in the style made famous by the Bulgarian State Radio Female Vocal Choir. Thomas displayed expertise in this, to many, unusual singing style both in this concert as well as in her "Into the Mind" session a day earlier. This was another state of Washington triumph.

Karen Thomas

The evening ended with a performance by one of the premiere choral ensembles in the country, the University of Louisville Cardinal Singers directed by Kent Hatteberg. This was the third time I have heard them- the first time was an epic all-Baltic program at the ACDA 2009 Southern Division conference and their more recent NCCO performance here. For this evening Hatteberg once again showed his great knowledge of current  non-American choral repertoire. The program opened with a piece I am a big fan of- Josep Vila i Casana's Salve, Regina, which I first heard in a performance at the Western division conference of 2010 in Tucson directed by Brady Allred (review here). There is an absolutely magical passage when Casanas music becomes mesmerizingly polytonal. This is no bland,  accidental pandiatonic collision of notes, but true dissonance created by clashing chords. This Salve, Regina is something more conductors need to discover. After some great Monteverdi and Max Reger, an actual four-part fugue broke out (it was kind of like a fugue flashmob, man) in Swedish composer Michael Waldenby's Hominus dies. While the piece seemed a bit too long and not that great, I was pleasantly shocked to hear some- wait for it- REAL COUNTEPOINT! Hurray to Hatteberg for presenting such a musical curiosity. The entire program was excellent and beautifully sung- that's what this choir does! If you have never heard them, try to find a way to get to one of their concerts. Bravo to Hatteberg for being one of standard-setters not only in choral sound but also in presenting high quality repertoire, much  off it off the proverbially beaten path.

Kent Hatteberg

My evening ended with a visit to the NCCO (National Collegiate Choral Organization) reception where I had a chance to chat with cool folks like Josh Bronfman, Steve Grives, Steven Sametz, Giselle Wyers, as well as Mike Murphy from Idaho who I had not yet met. The NCCO reception was great and we all look forward to the NCCO conference in late October in Charleston, South Carolina hosted by Rob Taylor and of course led by current president Lisa Graham.

ADDENDUM to any earlier blog: During the Friday afternoon gold track concert Tim Sharp gave a state of ACDA address. It was pretty positive information about membership, initiatives and so on. Tim has led this group so successfully into the twenty-first century and has expanded the association into global initiatives and collaborations. Bravo, Tim and and to all at the national office in OKC. Tim also announced that the Brock commission composer for 2013 will be Alice Parker and for the 2014 national conference in Salt Lake City the composer will be Jake Heggie- quality folks, although Heggie has written very little choral music.

I had to leave early Saturday morning to get back to Chicago for the premiere of a new commission later on that day. I went from 75 degrees and sunny in Dallas to 25, cloudy, windy, and the streets filled with 20-somethings who had already been drinking way too much cheap beer in "celebration" of  St. Paddy's Day. The shift in weather was a shock, but the drinking wasn't. I'm pretty much used to seeing the ridiculous drinking that goes on here on St Paddy's Day-ugh. So......

COMING UP: The final day of ACDA 2013 in Dallas from guest-blogger Reg Unterseher. Reg has some good stuff for you (including some great insight into listening to The Tallis Scholars), and I think he's a better writer than me- so enjoy this when I post it!

Alice Parker at the 2011 NCCO Conference

Change of Plan- I will blog about Alice Parker's work on Saturday at NCCO- then write a new blog about the rest of Saturday's interest sessions.

Saturday began with Alice Parker recounting how she wrote what are known as the Parker/Shaw arrangements. From her recounting of the process, it was pretty obvious that these arrangements were mostly her work, and that Shaw guided and helped her tweak them. I was not aware of this- the fact that Miss Parker wrote most of the notes and created this music first by herself, with tweaking by Shaw coming after her first inspirations. She has told me, when I questioned her politely on this, that the designation Parker/Shaw was and still is the right name for these works because Shaw guided her so well when she was quite young (she started working when she was 21) and not fully confident of her work. And she has reminded me that later on a number of the arrangements have only her name on them, as she was becoming more confident and far less in need of the guidance/editing of Shaw. In our correspondence on this Miss Parker is quite sweet about how she views their early collaborations- she was ten years his junior, and she says that at that time she truly needed his experience to help her compositional and arranging skills.



We had a whole packet of these pieces and we sang them through with her leading. She was tough on this crowd of choral directors, some of whom (including moi) may have been up too late the previous night! In fact, someone nearby whispered to me- "Hey, I though she would be like a sweet Grandma, I didn't think she would yell at us for sucking at singing!" And yes she was tough on us- at one point telling us that 5% of us had gotten a phrase right and the other 95% were terrible, and berating us for always crescendo rising lines. Personally, I thought it was great fun!

I would also add my opinion that the quality of these arrangements is not totally even- there are many brilliant arrangements which stand the test of time, but also some things which go on too long without fresh ideas warranting the length of them. But there is a great heritage here and so much to like-- and I will always have to say that I love her adamant statement (which she iterates quite often in her appearances) that all the arrangements pick a key and stay there- no knee jerk, "Hey Judy, let's add a half-step up modulation, and another, and another" stuff going on.

Some Parkerisms for y'all:

"Some people were 12 tone composers- I turned into a 5 note composer"

"Phrasing shouldn't be about beats- it should be like waves or a current"

"Never ignore a text comma"

And to counteract the usual performance tendencies of most people conducting "Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal" she said, " It's not ALL joyous. It's more dramatic, and at times tearful- it only gradually grows in its affirmation." What a brilliant soul- would that we all could be so cool and full of energy at age 86!

On Saturday night Alice Parker was named an Honorary Life Member of NCCO- here is what she said as her accepted this honor:

"I am honored more than I can say by this award, and also totally humbled by the fact that I’m standing on the stage before wonderful music is going to be made here. I will be brief in my remarks so we can get to that. I want to thank NCCO for inviting me here, and giving me the chance to be with a delightfully enthusiastic and varied group of people who love what I love, vocal music, and are searching after its many means of expression, with true humor and intelligence and diligence.

We are all here because we have ears. We are taking part in a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the human race, wherever we can find it: people have always listened. People have always learned songs and carried them on. The styles of music vary enormously, as do the languages in which people sing, but the reality is that music is a form of expression that we humans share all over the world. It does something for us that nothing else can do. Words are a basic part of it, but what happens when we combine words and rhythms and tones, is really miraculous. And what it allows for us is a language for our emotions, for sharing in those things which are most human about us and which unite us one to another. All of the different walls of race and color and age and language, political beliefs, everything else falls when we begin to sing together. And I can only wish that all the world would do a lot more singing. That if our Congress always sang a folk song to remind them of our common beliefs, we might be better off. And the same thing at the United Nations. Our rational brains get us into trouble. They are amazing things, but they get us into trouble when they are not balanced by our intuitive brains. And I honestly believe that when I am singing, or making music in this way, I am using all of the faculties at my disposal in a way that nothing else challenges me to do. My mind, my heart, my spirit, my body, my breath, everything I know, all the sounds I’ve ever heard, all come into it. And the incredible thing is that it all happens right now, right here. And the challenge for all of us is to keep learning, to keep hearing better and better, finer and finer distinctions in tone quality or in text accentuation, or the purity of the vowel, or the kind of rhythm which calls forth a certain kind of dance, which indeed calls it into being. So we listen more and more.

When we have the chance to be at a weekend like this, concentrating on both hearing excellent groups sing, and talking about the things that go into making it possible, it is a marvelous opportunity. And it is capped off in a superb way by tonight’s concert, where we are all in communion with Bach, through Helmuth Rilling, and his lifetime of absorbing himself in that language. So we kind of take fire from this. We are part of that tradition. We all are part of what we have been taught by the many visionary teachers who have influenced us. But we are also that next generation that needs to hand it on. So be very aware that we are all, each one of us, a fulcrum between the past and the future, and the only time we have to express that is right now. So don’t hold back: express it, learn tonight, listen tonight, revel in being a human being that is part of the same race that can produce this music that gives to each of us this chance to drink at those springs of inspiration that keep us working and singing together."