music and geography

In the canon of western classical music, one can easily stumble upon pieces where music and geography intersect. That is, music depicting place – a landscape, nature alive with water and animal sounds, an idyllic reminiscence of childhood, vacation spot, or utopia. For me, this music is the type where one can close their eyes while listening to it and paint their own picture of the geography being explored. When I think of this subsection of classical music, four pieces come to mind right away:

• Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, more commonly known as The New World Symphony. A Czech composer, Dvořák came to America in 1892 to become director of the National Conservatory of Music in America. The New World Symphony is inspired, in part, by the prairies he encountered during his summer visit to the areas in and around Spillville, Iowa. He wrote often of the “wide open spaces” of America.
• Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. This is a piece for solo violin and orchestra often described as “the composer’s love song to the British countryside.” The solo violin plays the part of the lark, singing out the bird’s song in the dizzying heights of the lark’s flight into the sky.
• Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations. In a similar vein as the Vaughan Williams piece described above, this theme and 14 variations also depicts the English countryside, specifically the Malvern hills where the composer spent much of his time. The most famous variation – “Nimrod” – is a perennial audience favorite and easily recognizable in pop culture.
• Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England. The three movements in this orchestral suite all portray a specific place in the Northeastern United States: Boston Common, Putnam’s Camp (Redding, Connecticut), and The Housatonic [River] at Stockbridge [Massachusetts].

The two solo piano pieces offered in today’s worship service follow in this tradition. They come from a collection, An American Portrait: The Pacific Northwest, by a composer from that region, Valerie Roth Roubos. In addition to this collection, she has three other books with The American Portrait title – Scenes from the Great Plains, The Oregon Trail, and Views of the West. I hope you will consider closing your eyes while they are played and picture the Lavender Fields of the Olympic Peninsula and the majestic Mt. Rainier – two examples of God’s stunning beauty on the earth entrusted to our care.

virtual choirs

To be sure, our collective cultural vocabulary has been enhanced with pandemic-related words and phrases over the past few months. Words that are now commonplace in our conversations would have sounded so foreign to us in the not-too-distant past. Think about it: Before circa March 15, 2020, how many times had you used the term social distancing? Or personal protective equipment (PPE)? Or aerosols? (I could go on with at least a dozen more...) Can you accurately define and explain the difference between self-isolation, self-quarantine, and shelter-in-place? On a lighter note, Don’t be a ‘covidiot’! and Y’all need to ‘quarantine and chill’! are two social media phrases that make me chuckle.

For musicians – especially singers and choral conductors – another such phrase is virtual choir. Perhaps you have seen such an “ensemble” on YouTube or Facebook or some other online platform. They are carefully produced videos where each member of the ensemble records their own part by themselves in their own space. A (faux) audio/video engineer then compiles and edits each contributor’s video into a collective whole or virtual choir. No doubt, this is a mind-numbing and time-absorbing task!

The term virtual choir is not necessarily a new phrase born out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather, it is the brainchild of composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970), who coined the term about 11 years ago. CBS Sunday Morning recently aired a spot on this phenomenon a few weeks back. Check it out:

Lest you think singers and choral conductors have lost their zeal for forming and expressing bold opinions, suffice it to say that the reception to Whitacre back in 2009 was all over the map. It continues to be wide and varied even now. Purists among us say that at the heart of choral singing is the communal and corporate experience; they would argue that participants in a choir must be physically present in order to achieve true choral beauty in terms of blend, vowel unification, rhythmic precision, etc. On the other hand, experimentalists posit that we ought to allow the technology at our disposal to enhance our art as musicians; if we must forego some of the technicalities of ensemble music-making, we can make up for it in the symbolism of cohesion that a carefully produced virtual choir makes. From those two extremes, many points of view could be plotted along a purist-experimentalist spectrum.

You may recall a virtual choir being part of our worship experience a few weeks back on July 5. A quartet of singers offered the national hymn “This Is My Song,” set to Jean Seibelius’ famous Finlandia. In that instance, each singer received an audio file of the four-parts being played on the organ. While listening to that file with earbuds from one device (a phone or tablet), the singer recorded a video of themselves singing their part onto a second device. I then collected the four videos, lined them up to the exact millisecond so that each part is played at the exact same time, and worked to achieve a quality performance. Thanks (or not!) to modern technology, one could spend days messing with the details of such things. If one singer’s recording is softer than the others, you simply manipulate that track to the volume level you want or need. If one singer is sharp or flat on a chord, no problem! The software can adjust the pitch. If a word ends with a “dental consonant” (such as ‘t’ or ‘d’) but the consonant sounds in the four videos don’t match, not to worry! The engineer just erases the ones they don’t wish to hear. On July 5, my skills were very much in the early-elementary stage. I hadn’t yet figured out how to make the video match the audio. So, the audio was simply accompanied by still photos of the four singers.

This week, you’ll experience another virtual choir in our worship video – complete with three treble voices and piano, audio and video alike. So, where do you fall on the purist-experimentalist spectrum with virtual choirs? (Or virtual music-making in general.) I certainly long for the day where we can safely make music together in community again, but, for now, I am grateful for the resources and increasing ability to assemble fellow musicians in a virtual, safe, and beautiful way. For me, it is just one option in my “bag of tricks” to allow music to speak to our souls and enhance our worship.