Popular male chorus Chanticleer
celebrates the diversity of our songs
By John Mark Rafacz
A cappella choral music has a devoted following of fans, but a concert by a chorus of twelve male singers is not the sort of thing that typically attracts a mass audience. But Chanticleer’s Wondrous Free concert, which features music made in America, is a program with the potential to please people who might ordinarily shy away from choral music.
“This is our heritage, this is our music, and people will find things that they will find familiar, especially on the second half,” says Matthew Oltman, music director of Chanticleer. “And I think that they will be in awe of the broad scope of music that we’ve achieved in the little tiny 300 years of … a written, recorded history of people living here on this great continent of ours.”
Chanticleer commemorates the 250th anniversary of “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free,” a composition by Declaration of Independence signer Francis Hopkinson that is considered the first American song, with a program that demonstrates the diversity of song in North America.
Highlights of the Wondrous Free program—at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 7, in Eisenhower Auditorium—include early American hymns; Mexican Baroque works; The Homecoming, a newly commissioned composition by David Conte that uses as lyrics a poem by John Stirling Walker in memory of Martin Luther King Jr.; Reincarnations by Samuel Barber; folk tunes by Stephen Foster; and satirical fare from the mind of P. D. Q. Bach (Professor Peter Schickele).
“Each piece has its story,” says Oltman, speaking by phone from his home in San Francisco. “Typically we’ll do a concert that will probably involve several languages, and then we have to ask the listener to look at the program notes and read what the translations are and what the piece is about so they have a better understanding. The interesting thing about this program is that we only have three pieces that aren’t in English.”
Night Chant, by contemporary composer Brent Michael Davids, is written in Davids’ ancestral language of Mohican.
“The translation of the Mohican is very simple, and what it’s about is also very simple. It’s pretty much, ‘Hey babe, come on, let’s go.’ … It’s pretty much, ‘You’re pretty, I’m pretty, the moon’s pretty.’ … It’s absolutely wonderful.”
A pair of seventeenth-century Mexican Baroque works, one each by Juan Gutierrez de Padilla and Juan de Liens, have Latin lyrics.
“These two pieces were written by Spanish composers—composers born in Spain—who were imported, as it were, by the Spanish kingdom to the New World to write music for the Catholic Church, which they were establishing here,” Oltman says. “What’s very interesting about it, I think, is that the Spanish did not dumb down their music. By any stretch of the imagination, these two pieces are incredibly sophisticated.”
The works written in what was then called New Spain are rooted in European music of the time, but they display an inventiveness likely spawned by encounters with native peoples and the distance from the motherland.
“Maybe these composers felt a little bit of license to branch out and experiment a little bit,” Oltman says.
“We find the pieces of Spanish music written here in the New World to have an added sense of rhythmic vitality, excitement, expansiveness—probably due to what they found when they got here,” he says.
Chanticleer’s 2008 Warner Classics CD and DVD set, Mission Road, features music that would have been heard in and around the historic mission churches of California around the time the United States became an independent country.
“Various forward-looking early music ensembles have offered releases drawn on the fascinating repertory of the Mexican Baroque, but with this disc by the very popular all-male San Francisco group Chanticleer, the music has reached a new level,” writes an All Music Guide reviewer. “It sounds like an odd idea at first, but the group gave its first concert thirty years ago at Mission San Dolores on San Francisco’s south side, and it treats the project as a homecoming of sorts.”
Chanticleer, inducted a few months ago into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame in Cincinnati, takes its name from the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Tenor Louis Botto founded the chorus in 1978, sang with the group until 1989, and served as artistic director until his death in 1997.
Joseph Jennings joined the ensemble as a countertenor in 1983, but it wasn’t long before he took on the role of music director. A prolific composer and arranger, Jennings has provided the chorus with some of its most popular repertoire—especially spirituals, gospel music, and jazz. In 2008, Jennings become artistic advisor, while Oltman, who has been a tenor in the chorus for a decade, became music director.
“I had been his assistant for about five years, and over the course of that time the load of responsibilities was gradually changing,” Oltman explains. “And we decided that a change in title and what not, to make it clearer for us as to who’s doing what, was sort of appropriate.”
Jennings still plans each season’s repertoire and is responsible for maintaining the continuity of sound for which the chorus is famous.
“My task becomes more and more now the implementation of that vision,” Oltman says. “He and I share leading rehearsals, and I primarily am the person out on the road keeping everything in check while we’re on tour.”
Chanticleer is scheduled to perform more than 100 concerts in twenty-seven states during the 2008–2009 season.
“The group was founded primarily to do Renaissance choral music, but it was within its first season or two that it already started branching out into other types of music popularized by a cappella ensembles, folk music, some barbershop, and vocal jazz types of things,” Oltman says. “… With Joe’s coming on board, that ability to do wonderful jazz and gospel arrangements expanded greatly. And soon, also, we began commissioning composers to write music especially for us. That’s always been a very important aspect of what we do. Part of our mission is to add to the choral repertoire in general.”
The program at Penn State includes three pieces commissioned by Chanticleer. “I think that the new pieces are some of the most exciting things,” he says. “It’s always wonderful to be able to bring new music to life.”
The Homecoming, composed by a professor at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., is one of the commissioned pieces.
“It really isn’t about his life so much as the legacy of his dream,” Oltman points out. “It’s sort of a call, a very emotional call, to wherever the spirit of Martin Luther King is now to continue to inspire us to realize the dreams set forth when he was living. … It’s a wonderful, evocative poem.”
Another major work on the program is Reincarnations by Samuel Barber, a Pennsylvania-born twentieth-century composer. Reincarnations includes three pieces set to reworkings of old Gaelic poetry.
“Samuel Barber’s one of those people who it just seems like anything he wrote was sort of golden, and anything he wrote has its own very distinct sound,” Oltman says. “… It’s interesting as a singer to approach these pieces, because they do make quite the demands on the voice. But once you’re able to learn how to use the breath that you need, and use the line that you need to spin out these lines that he wrote, it’s some of the most exhilarating music to sing.”
“Anthony O’Daly,” the second piece in the trilogy, is an especially emphatic dirge about the death of Irish patriot Anthony O’Daly.
“In everybody’s voice the lines soar ever higher and ever more impassioned, and when it’s going well, it’s like a locomotive. There’s nothing that can stop it till its ultimate climax,” he says. “And it’s followed by ‘The Coolin’,” which has to be one of the most rapturously beautiful choral pieces ever written. It talks about drinking the milk of the white goat, and you almost feel like you’re bathing in warm milk and honey when you’re singing it. So, the contrast between the three is amazing. They’re just beautiful pieces.”
Artistic Viewpoints, an informal moderated discussion featuring one or more Chanticleer members, is offered in Eisenhower Auditorium one hour before the performance and is free for ticket holders. Artistic Viewpoints regularly fills to capacity. Seating is available on a first-arrival basis.
Chanticleer
An Orchestra of Voices
Eisenhower Auditorium
Adult $39
University Park Student $15
18 and Younger $29
sponsor
The Village at Penn State Life Care Retirement Community
