Category Archives: the chorus

the chorus

we heard the cows breathing

Getting to use chorus techniques as part of a callback session on Sunday (for someone else’s callbacks) was great. There were 16 people there, with this text memorized from Gao Xingjiang’s THE OTHER SHORE:

“We set off before dawn. The morning dew was thick and in the dark we heard the cows breathing while they were chewing grass on a small hill nearby. In the distance, the river bend was enveloped in a shade of deep blue light brighter than the sky. ”

This is how we proceeded:

90 minutes: broke into groups of 3-4 people and focused on vocals only, developing both a good unison and a good non-unison variation version for a previously memorized 8-line piece of text. They each got 15 minutes. We had a musician there but he didn’t play for this part.

30-40 minutes: enlarged groups to 5-7 people and added movement and music, building towards a larger chorus. Specific intention. Repeating text once or twice, still in linear narrative form.

last 30 minutes: megachorus with entire group, both text and movement. With music. At very end, abandoning linearity of text and permitting other pieces of text, too.

These things happened that had never happened before:
– The director encouraging me to ask for feedback at the halfway point, which is a great rehearsal technique. I should use it more, instead of just saying “Questions?” People told me how helpful it was to have circumstances, which I should remember. I wrote down these words from the responses:
deconstruct (how difficult it is to work like this)
situation (need one)
different groups (how quickly the personality of one chorus vs. another forms)
present/responsive (you have to be)
and subconscious (it taps into that.)

– An actress was at the callbacks who had done my chorus work before, but not with me — she’d actually learned it from someone else. This was awesome.

– One particular setup. A four-person chorus going through the text in linear unison with a two-person chorus next to them overlapping/doubling/echoing. You’d think I’d have thought of this before, but I haven’t. (And I didn’t think of it this time–the actors did.) I’ve always jumped to “Anyone can overlap, anyone can be in linear unison.” But incorporating the restriction by group helps.

It was good work. I was exhausted at the end of it, and I’m sure the actors were, too. Reminded me of how rewarding and draining the MOH&H rehearsals were.

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Baltimore, the chorus

chorus weekend

Yesterday, I led a small Parallel Octave / chorus workshop with the text of an Allen Ginsberg poem being read to a new instrument one of our members has created, a laser harp.

Today, this afternoon, I’m going to collaborate on some audition / callbacks and use choral techniques as an audition requirement. This will be the first time I’ve done this for auditions that are not for my own production. We have a large group and an improvising guitarist. I’m very excited about it.

It’s wonderful to have a theatrical activity on both days of the weekend.

I’ve been spending some time this weekend helping an incoming writer in the program look at potential locations for rent, which has meant exploring parts of Baltimore I hadn’t seen before. I thought I was pretty familiar with all the areas around the campus, but you turn a corner and it’s a different planet, around here. Even from one block to the next, the width of a street may double. There may be absolutely no trees, and then a tree in front of every house.

Today is also the seventh day of getting up and walking before working, and although the temptation is great to skip it (it’s later, it’s hot out) I’m going to do it.

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the chorus

this weekend

I’ve been doing a lot of work on the blog for ||8ve (The Parallel Octave) which is the project name for the recordings-of-poems chorus group I’ve been running here for the past 2 months. I am going to try to finish it tomorrow, and it’ll be great to share it. I’m very curious to hear what people think of these sound files.

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the chorus

Chorus meeting, tomorrow: THE APPARITION

Dear Baltimorean actor/singer/musician collaborators, come lend your voice and musical instruments to a improvised choral rendition of John Donne’s THE APPARITION, tomorrow, 2-3:30 pm, 3032 St. Paul.

The Apparition

When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead,
And that thou thinkst thee free
From all solicitation from mee,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, fain’d vestall, in worse armes shall see;
Then thy sicke taper will begin to winke,
And he,whose thou art then, being tyr’d before,
Will, if thou stirre, or pinch to wake him, thinke
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleepe will from thee shrinke,
And then poore Aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver swear wilt lye
A veryer ghost than I;
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I’had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

– John Donne

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Baltimore, the chorus

back from NYC

enjoying the Baltimore weather, playing soccer (for the first time ever!) Commencement is tomorrow. I’m working in the library by day, reading–plowing through the enormous Raymond Carver biography–by night, making more recordings on the weekends. Yes, still thinking about choruses. I played some sound files from the recent chorus projects for friends in NYC, and although I liked doing it, I think I need to be more stringent with sound quality in the recordings we make. It’s one thing to document and another to distribute. I want to start making recordings that are so good they need no explanation. This is going to mean learning more or finding someone who knows more.

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the chorus, Uncategorized

ps.

I recreated the “The Dead Echo / Death’s Echo” speaking experiment yesterday with another poet. We didn’t record it: we just read it, together, aloud, in the format with multiple voices on the verse and a single voice on the refrain. It was great to see chorus-type things poking their heads outside of rehearsal and into life that isn’t staged, or recorded. It made me remember that there was a time when it was not possible to record anything, and that some part of the virtue of experimenting with choruses is just that working on them gets you speaking with other people.

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the chorus, Uncategorized

Into the woods, it’s time to go,

it may be all in vain, you know–
Into the woods, but not forgetting
Why we’re on the journey…

Yes, please try to remember why you’re on the journey. You know it is time for the semester to be over when you have discovered how to use Amazon’s Video On Demand. Recap:

Wednesday: very successful chorus recording session for Auden’s “The Dead Echo” (originally titled “Death’s Echo”) When poets write choral texts, they don’t give stage/staging directions. I had thought, for years, that the italicized portions of that poem ought to be spoken by many voices, and the non-italix by a single voice. The reverse is true. Auden’s “chorus” in the poem, in the sense of a refrain, is better actualized by a single voice, and the “verse” by a group of choral speakers. He is so smart, and so difficult. The texts resists being performed. Reminds me of the way I felt trying to memorize Dickinson. I’ve pasted it below if anyone cares to see what a trip it is. Note the tripping-up-of-rhythm. Recap will continue after the poem.

The Dead Echo (Death’s Echo) – W. H. Auden

“O who can ever gaze his fill,”
Farmer and fisherman say,
“On native shore and local hill,
Grudge aching limb or callus on the hand?
Father, grandfather stood upon this land,
And here the pilgrims from our loins will stand.”
So farmer and fisherman say
In their fortunate hey-day:
But Death’s low answer drifts across
Empty catch or harvest loss
Or an unlucky May.
The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The end of toil is a bailiff’s order,
Throw down the mattock and dance while you can.

“O life’s too short for friends who share,”
Travellers think in their hearts,
“The city’s common bed, the air,
The mountain bivouac and the bathing beach,
Where incidents draw every day from each
Memorable gesture and witty speech.”
So travellers think in their hearts,
Till malice or circumstance parts
Them from their constant humour:
And slyly Death’s coercive rumour
In that moment starts.
A friend is the old old tale of Narcissus,
Not to be born is the best for man;
An active partner in something disgraceful,
Change your partner, dance while you can.

“O stretch your hands across the sea,”
The impassioned lover cries,
“Stretch them towards your harm and me.
Our grass is green, and sensual our brief bed,
The stream sings at its foot, and at its head
The mild and vegetarian beasts are fed.”
So the impassioned lover cries
Till the storm of pleasure dies:
From the bedpost and the rocks
Death’s enticing echo mocks,
And his voice replies.
The greater the love, the more false to its object,
Not to be born is the best for man;
After the kiss comes the impulse to throttle,
Break the embraces, dance while you can.

“I see the guilty world forgiven,”
Dreamer and drunkard sing,
“The ladders let down out of heaven,
The laurel springing from the martyr’s blood,
The children skipping where the weeper stood,
The lovers natural and the beasts all good.”
So dreamer and drunkard sing
Till day their sobriety bring:
Parrotwise with Death’s reply
From whelping fear and nesting lie,
Woods and their echoes ring.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man;
The second-best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

(1936)

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the chorus, theater, Uncategorized

also

I should blog about this. The chorus meeting on Saturday was really special. One of the collaborators brought in some different musical themes related to the content of “Emperor of Ice-Cream,” like ice-cream truck jingles combined with a moving left-hand bass, to layer together, so that the music with the words had the same sense of multiple voices. With just three of us, over time, we built up lots of layers: a humming voice, two speakers, two people on piano and trombone. I have discovered that I don’t mind using technology to achieve multiple layers as long as the vocal track has simultaneity that is genuinely recorded in one take, or track. (Many takes, fine, but multiple voices on the same track. You know what I mean.)

At any rate, it was wonderful. Lots of dense musical layers, two male tenor spoken voices with a really similar timbre, just blending together. Intense use of volume. It was good, good, and we’re meeting again Wednesday. I don’t know how, exactly, I have time for this. I don’t. I just don’t have time to not be doing it. Chorus jams, chorus impromptus…something. A place where voices, people with instruments, actors can be combined for the sake of the sounds. I hope, if it’s not hoping too much to hope this, that I never have to stop doing this kind of work.

Never is a lot. I wish that when I had gotten the chance to know the man who was the composer for the show I worked on in Denver that I had talked to him about some of this. I have thought about him a bit since starting this, and the way that his own music had so much simultaneity to it. I mean, all music has some, I suppose, but his really featured it. (He died months after the show was up.) He worked very closely with the text. For weeks while he couldn’t be in Denver, I wrote a sort of private rehearsal journal for him, telling him what we worked on in terms of character. He said it helped him write the music.

It doesn’t do any good to sit around thinking about what may or may not happen. It only does good to keep working.

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poetry, the chorus

hello, out there

I was recently reminded of the fact that I possess a blog by one of my students. It has been a long time since I’ve written in it.

So.2. Since I last wrote here, the chorus group has met two more times, to work on some Shakespeare and some Yeats. I have been really consumed with this, to the extent that I’ve forgotten about almost everything else.*

All three meetings, so far, have tested me and the methods I have in ways that I really need. I hadn’t realized to what extent my chorus techniques were becoming didactic from primarily teaching in student contexts. Working with adult actors and musicians feels like such a luxury. I have missed it. I have missed it in the way that you miss things in French, where the missed thing is the subject and you are the object.

With this group of people, there is nothing to teach, nothing to be communicated — there is only the chance to explore a largely unexplored region of performance, and I am learning from their work. It’s amazing.

We are doing things that I haven’t tried in years, if ever, including doubling voices on top of other voices with digital recorders, and using simultaneous pieces of different texts. I am back in an environment where my word on a subject is not the final word. That’s a good thing. I have even done something which I haven’t done since Clytemnestra/Cassandra (if there is anyone reading this besides Z who remembers that, I will give you a prize): participated in the vocal realizations of the choruses myself. That is to say, sung.

I have dreamed of being able to work on choruses once a week for a long time. (This is a revised dream from the original dream, which would have been working on them every day, all day and all night.) It is startling to me how long I’ve waited to make this happen, and how I probably wouldn’t have made it happen, at all, if not for the particular environment of Hopkins and Baltimore, for the Single Carrot actors I know, for the friends from poetry classes.

I have lots of interesting sound files that I would like to put up, but that probably won’t happen until after finals are completed. I do, however, hope to create some kind of Internet presence for them that will allow me to post them more regularly. Maybe a subpage of this site, or another site. Or a Myspace.

At any rate, I’m very grateful to the collaborators who have made this possible.

* Oh, and — the “half-thesis” or first-year portfolio for the MFA is due to the faculty tomorrow. Needless to say, that’s about all there is to talk about right now.

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music, poetry, the chorus

so,

Good meeting on Saturday. Choruses (poems) spoken, music played. I have notes from it. I was going to put them up here as a rehearsal report of sorts. Good intentions. But we’re going to meet again next week. I am looking forward to this project generating sound files, to having something that can be played to explain itself.

Apart from that, a lot of discussion about whether a flawed interpretation of a great text matters — whether the text’s greatness transcends the interpretation. It does, I suppose. It must.

Also heard M. Doty read at the BMA. He mentioned a sense of discomfort whenever he hears his poems set to music. I can see why. Of what he read, I didn’t hear any with a choral component. But there are many poems with that sort of public and dramatic structure — many, many poems — that are suitable.

Also, would he not be as uncomfortable if the poem was not “set” to music? Not pinned, as it were, to the notes? If the principle of improvisation were present? I am preaching to my own choir. Obviously, I think that would be different.

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