New season and new directions for Carmina Bowena

One of the joys of my life is singing with my a cappella Renaissance choir, Carmena Bowena. For the past six yers we have worked on a repertoire of mostly Renaissance sacred music and madrigals and spreading into slightly later southern European folk music from places like Spain, France, Corsica and Italy. We have sung contemporary arrangements of songs by Sting and Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot and modern settings of old liturgical texts like Ubi Caritas, Ave Maria and O Nata Lux and O Magnum Mysterium.

Last season we added an Irish pub night on St. Patricks Day which will will repeat again this season and our vocal adventure will extend to include a whole show devoted to Broadway, on November 23. Our season will wrap up on June 26 with an electic performance of songs from this whole range of music making.

Monday night was our first rehearsal of the season and we worked on some of the sacred music pieces which we will perform at a contemplative experience on January 30. Specifically we looked at Voctoria’s O magnum mysterium, Robert Parson’s Ave Maria and a Kyrie from Palestrina.

These pieces are interesting to compare side by side. Palestrina’s smooth voice leading almost defines the very genre of Renaissance liturgical music. His harmonies are tight, and mostly consonant, while Victoria, writing in Spain, offers more “crunch” as we say in his work. The opening of the Kyrie is pure imitative polyphony. Altos, then Basses, Sopranos and then Tenors. We just worked the first few bars of this, and danced together with the entrances and lines moving against each other.

In contrast, looking at Victoria’s piece, we focused only on the final few bars, the Alleluia. The piece is very modal and slow but the final section has a jaunty little 3/4 section that returns to the original slow 4/4 time of the rest of the piece. It’s tricky, but shows up some of his more interesting compositional decisions.

Parson’s Ave Maria Parsons’s Ave Maria was chosen partly because of its extraordinary soprano line. Beneath it, four voices weave and braid their lines together; the soprano enters above them in long notes, each successive entrance beginning a step higher than the one before. The bass anchors the other extreme of the texture, and as we sing it I have the sensation of the whole piece opening up between those high and low registers. To me it is evocative of Mary receiving the message of the angel: thoughts moving and rising through her mind while something deeper and steadier holds the whole experience.

After working through short sections of these pieces, we flew into a short survey of Broadway tunes, which most everyone could sight read, so familiar are they. You’ll Never Walk Alone, Welcome to the Rock, I Dreamed a Dream, Edelweiss, and others. We’ve never done show tunes before but I think this show will be a treat. It’s not music I have sung a lot (other than at football matches) but some of it is certainly in the repertoire of the jazz standards I play with my friend Alex Fox.

So another season of music begins. I thought I’d chart this one here a bit this year.