NEC Symphonic Choir and Chamber Singers: Voices of NEC - Arise, be enlightened!

The first in a 3-year concert series - "Voices of NEC", featuring works by NEC faculty and alumni, tonight’s performance highlights choral works by former and current NEC faculty composers: George Chadwick, Arthur Shepherd, Daniel Pinkham, Kati Agócs, Michael Gandolfi, Felicia Sandler, and Mehmet Ali Sanlıkol.  Also on the program will be Stand with us by Lingbo Ma '24 DMA.  Erica J. Washburn, NEC's Director of Choral Activities, conducts.

The repertory for the next two concerts will be selected via anonymous submissions.
     "Voices of NEC": Our present (2024-2025) featuring works by NEC alumni
     "Voices of NEC": Our future (2025-2026) featuring works by NEC current students and 2025 graduates

About tonight's program

Tonight’s program, the first in a 3-year concert series for the Choral Department titled Voices of NEC, celebrates contributions to the choral canon from current and former NEC faculty. As March is Women’s History Month, our program is book-ended by three wonderful current composers: Felicia Sandler, Lingbo Ma, and Kati Agócs.

The Symphonic Choir opens with Felicia Sandler’s Laus Trinitati. Featuring a text by Hildegard von Bingen, the work is presented tonight as a centering piece – an opportunity for the performing musicians, and listeners, to gather their thoughts and focus their minds on the beauty and wonder that is the human instrument.

Next on the program is NEC’s Chair of Composition, Michael Gandolfi’s two-movement choral work Winter Light, which includes string quartet. While the strings in movement I, Falling Snow, elicit images of a gentle, swirling snowfall, empty spaces left by footprints in the delicate snow, and temple bells ringing, the choir share’s Amy Lowell’s elegiac lyrical poem, encouraging the listener to reflect on life’s transitory nature and whether we will be remembered after we’re gone. Movement II, Opal, the tangible, seen representation of the love shared by Lowell and her life partner Ada Dwyer Russell, is “characteristic of the ‘Ada poems’ in its invocation of the poet’s correspondent in images of flowers, as well in the ‘sometimes ecstatic, sometimes painful’ duality present in the women’s relationship. It acknowledges and embraces love’s potential for both fulfillment and frustration in its extraordinary apposition of heat and cold, pleasure and pain, in the same moment.” (Dana Bonstrom)

Closing the Symphonic Choir half of the program, the ensemble presents Arthur Shepherd’s rarely heard Psalm 42. Shepherd enrolled at NEC at the age of 12 in 1892 and graduated with a diploma in composition in 1897. He was, in fact, the only student that year to earn a diploma in that concentration. At 29 he was invited to return to NEC (1909) as a faculty member by George Chadwick. Having accepted the post, he was then under the mentorship of Chadwick, and several other faculty, and he remained on at the college until 1920.
        Shepherd’s setting of Psalm 42, penned by a psalmist who bemoaned the trials and tribulations they were required to endure in life, was an apropos choice for Shepherd. Composed just a few years prior to his death, he had experienced his own share of hardships: a year of military service toward the end of World War I (during his faculty tenure at NEC), the collapse of his marriage after his return to civilian life, and the beginning of distancing himself from his Latter-Day Saint faith, while continuing to explore his own personal relationship with God. It is easy to hear in Shepherd’s writing the ways in which the text spoke to him, opening with a deeply personal desire of inward peace, transitioning through intense angst, to ultimately finding not only solace, but joy in his spiritual journey. Originally composed for orchestra and chorus, the orchestral parts have since been lost, and so in true NEC fashion, we have decided to reimagine the accompaniment. Chang Jin Ha and Lingbo Ma, both composition majors with backgrounds in piano performance, have written a 4-hand accompaniment for this evening.

The Chamber Singers open the second half of this program with George Chadwick’s Commemoration Ode. Chadwick set only a handful of the 523-lined James Russell Lowell poem, which was written for the Harvard University Commemoration Day on July 21, 1865; a service to honor the lost lives of Harvard students and alumni during the Civil War. James Russell Lowell, who was a Professor of Literature at Harvard at the time of the poem commission, had lost several of his students during the war, as well as five younger family members, three of whom had been awarded distinction for ability and heroism.
    In Lowell’s own words, this is how the poem came about:Two days before the commemoration, I told my friend (Prof. Child) that it was impossible – that I was as dull as a door-mat. But the next day something gave me a jog, and the whole thing came with a rush. I sat up all night writing it out clear. But enough strength had gone out of me to make me weak for a fortnight afterward,” – “literally making me lean and so nervous I was weeks in getting over it.”

    It is reported that a friend of Mrs. Lowell’s gave her version of the account:
Mrs. Lowell told me that after Mr. Lowell had agreed to deliver the poem, he had tried in vain to write it. The last evening before the date fixed, he said to her, ‘I must write this poem tonight. Go to bed and do not make me feel that I am keeping you up.’ He began it at ten o’clock. At four in the morning he came to her door and said, ‘It is done and I am going to sleep now.’ She opened her eyes to see him standing haggard and actually wasted by the labor and excitement which had carried [him] through a poem of 523 lines in six hours.
(Prof. Newell D. Gilbert, for Parker’s Penny Classics)
        Chadwick captured just a snippet of Lowell’s sentiment in this accompanied part-song, but in its short performance run-time one can hear the drums and march of war, the celebratory fanfare of trumpets, and the deeply felt sentiment of enduring appreciation for all Union (and future) soldiers who gave their life in the pursuit of freedom for all.

Mehmet Sanlıkol’s “Ey gönül neylersin sen bu cihanı”, the first of his two-movement work Devran, is a brilliant composition that has presented traditional western-classical choirs the opportunity to explore Sufi, Mevlevi, the political and social stereotyping of Muslims and the Islamic faith, as well as the beauty that is Türkçe, the Turkish language, which is spoken by 90-100 million peoples.

As one ages one begins to truly understand the saying, “life is all about connections.” In this case, however, connections are not about whom you know and how they can advance your career, but whom you know and how they can influence you, helping to shape you into the human you are meant to become. Next on the program are two works by Daniel Pinkham, one of Sanlıkol’s favorite NEC professors whom he also came to know as a person.
        The majority of Pinkham’s extensive choral oeuvre is sacred in text. This is unsurprising to anyone who knew him; he was, after all, the organist at King’s Chapel in Boston for 42 years. What is surprising is the handful of secular texts for SATB chorus that he did write, with the majority being settings of poetry by Norma Farber. How Farber and Pinkham came to know one another personally, if at all, is unknown, though they both spent the second half of their lives in Boston. It is said in Farber’s obituary that she was a soprano, and so it is entirely possible their paths crossed musically. What can be said of the connection between the two is that Pinkham had a great affinity for her poetry, which runs the gamut from love, nature, childhood, etc. The two selections on this program are from different choral cycles but are linked through the life span of a star; an astrological element which provides light in times of darkness for humankind, from the human perspective of scientific discovery and what that means for the advancement of understanding the larger universe.
        Pinkham’s dense, stacked homophonic passages of After the Storm a Star allude to the calm that exists immediately following the chaos of a violent storm, the time when human beings can first survey the destruction left behind. The gentle light of the star offers “a grace of glow”, consolation to the earth from a celestial neighbor.
        Star and Pulsar Discovered Waltzing is a chromatic tour-de-force. While it’s easier to visually interpret the ‘pulse’ on the printed page of the score, if one listens carefully, the unison, to two-part, to three-part, to four-part divisi can be discerned, creating a musical ‘pulse’ of sound.

Lingbo Ma is currently a DMA candidate at the Conservatory and teaching Composition for Non-Majors. She has been mentored by Felicia Sandler, Michael Gandolfi, Mehmet Sanlıkol and Kati Agócs, and has also served the institution as a staff pianist within the Choral Department for several years. Her work this evening, Stand with us, is a profound statement charging all to stand as allies and to support marginalized communities.

Kati Agócs’ Arise, be enlightened! requires choristers to think beyond the boundaries of traditional text and instead say more with sound via consonant and vowel pairings, partnered with a mixed-meter rhythmic drive and bright, clean timbre. Her work embraces many of the choral techniques that have become popular over the past several decades, but the unique soundscape she builds with these methods is fresh, giving an ancient language an exciting new voice.                   
– Erica J. Washburn

This is an in-person event with a private stream available to the NEC community here: https://necmusic.edu/live.