Waterloo Region Composers CHORAL SONG CIRCLE

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As a music producer, I’ve been fortunate to encounter classical music composers in our region in a way that has opened my ears to their contributions to the musical vitality of Canada, but not everyone can always as easily have these same encounters.

This September 27, you will have a chance to hear the choral work of these composers, at one sitting, and also be able to connect directly with each composer.

With the "refocusing" of CBC Radio 2, it is now vitally important that we as a community keep our awareness of our creative resources active... this event is an attempt to help us get to know our composers, perhaps even better than ever before!

A Waterloo Region Composers Choral Song Circle will be held at the Kitchener City Hall Rotunda, Saturday evening starting at 7:00 pm on September 27. Hosted by Jurgen Petrenko, a newly formed professional choir featuring well-known and loved voices from our region joined with the Laurier Singers will be conducted by Wilfrid Laurier University’s Dr Lee Willingham. Admission is free.

There will be opportunities to hear the composers talk about their music, and to meet with them and become familiar with who they are, and to develop your own awareness of their craft and their sound, and how they are a vital part not only of the cultural fabric of our community, but our nation as well.

Conductor: Lee Willingham. Dr. Lee Willingham is an Associate Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, and is Director for the Laurier Centre for Music in the Community, Music Education, and the WLU Laurier Singers.

Host: Jurgen Petrenko. Former executive producer of CBC's Music and Company, Jurgen conducts choirs including the Toronto Classical Singers and the Renaissance Singers, teaches at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto, and is organist with St John Anglican Church in Elora.


See you at the ROTUNDA!

-earl

Carol Ann Weaver

In 2002, a Festival/ Conference on art-based and vernacular Mennonite Music bringing artists and musicians from together from all over North America took place at Conrad Grebel College entitled “Sound in the Land” and its principal organizer was Carol Ann Weaver. The Mennonite community is an extraordinary extended family, of which Carol is one of its more prolific and traveled members. Her music has taken her to African nations, often accompanied by her musical colleague Rebecca Campbell and college music students, in support of a number of social causes near to the hearts of many people.

Last year, Carol Ann was commissioned by the University of Waterloo to write a work in celebration of its 50th anniversary celebrations entitled “Water”, and the music was performed by the UW’s resident orchestra@uwaterloo (link) with Rebecca Campbell singing the vocal lines. The orchestra then scheduled a recording session several months later specifically to record the work: this involved the participation of as many of the musicians who played at the concert as possible.

UW is a co-op program, where students will often be on-campus for a term, and then on a work co-operative assignment for the next. Many of the musicians arranged their schedules and traveled distances back to Waterloo in order to take part in this seminal session… a mark of the commitment that both the orchestra’s devoted conductor Erna van Daele and Carol Ann are able to engender in musicians.

You can learn more about Carol and her music at her website.

-earl.

Michael Purves-Smith

If you ever have a chance to work with Michael Purves-Smith, don’t hide, jump at this opportunity. You may live a somewhat shorter life as a result, and your hair might be greyer a bit sooner than if you did not, but you will certainly enjoy an experience that will enrich your musical life. When I first moved to this community in the mid 80s, Michael was the first musical figure I worked with through my association with the Wellington Winds. My experiences range from a candle lit session deep in the bowels of the Wilfred Laurier University’s old Theatre Auditorium facility (we needed the fluorescent lights turned off because of their noise), to full sessions in the beautiful acoustics of Church of Mary Magdalene in Toronto, to a current two-CD production representing much of the vocal solo and chamber works of Michael: it has been a privilege to witness up-close the emergence of a composer better known to us as a conductor and Baroque early music specialist.

Perhaps one of my best recollections comes from a recording session with the early music ensemble Greensleaves, of which Michael’s wife Shannon is a founding and guiding member, and for which Michael arranges and sometimes writes music. We were recording a carol arrangement entitled “Resonet in laudibus” that uses as its foundation this popular medieval carol. Mid-way through the session, we took a break and I heard the sound of recorders from the studio floor. I must have missed the memo informing me about this turn of events, for when I went out to investigate, Shannon and Michael were indeed warming up on soprano and alto recorders, and I was compelled to conceal my surprise… I had not known that Michael was an accomplished recorder player, as well as oboe, harpsichord, and Dixieland piano.

As the session resumed, the carol took an unexpected turn, as Michael had inserted a Polish Christmas carol in the middle followed by a Polish “concerto secondo”, featuring some virtuosic recorder duo playing. The whole effect is seamless, and you would think that this is the way the music had been presented for many centuries.

You can find out more about Michael and his music at his website.

-earl.

Jeff Enns

I have known about and heard Jeff Enns’ music for many years. It has only been in the last year, however, that I’ve attached a face to that name, and not surprisingly it has been a face that I have seen many times, as a member of the DaCapo Chamber Choir. Jeff’s choral music has been published and performed by every major choir in Canada and I am sure many abroad.

But for me, Jeff was always “that other Enns, no relation to Leonard” that I would sometimes hear referred to when his music was being performed in the same concert as Leonard’s. This of course is solely due to my perception, hopefully not shared by others in our community, and which has now been corrected. The last DaCapo Chamber Choir concert featured two world premieres by the two Enns’ and I have mentioned earlier the enormous appeal these concerts.

It is in part because of music such as what these two composers have written that these concerts are what they are.

-earl.

Leonard Enns

It’s curious how you can have a perception of who someone is, and find out much later that you only have one facet of that person in your perspective. I first knew Len as conductor of the DaCapo Chamber Choir, and then as a conductor of the Conrad Grebel College Chapel Choir . A friend had started to talk about a choir, the DaCapo Chamber Choir she had just joined, and about the enriching experience she was having singing in it under Len’s direction. After a year of hearing her reviews, I decided to attend a concert. Possibly as a way to avoid paying admission (I don’t exactly recall my motivation at that time), I contacted Len and offered to record the performance. If you have heard the choir in performance, you will understand how quickly you can become addicted to their sound and music and to Len’s warmth and style. That concert led to further concert recordings, and to eventually producing DaCapo’s first CD. (Both choirs will be releasing new CDs in 2009).

But even after recording his beautiful Sunne of Grace work for harp, soprano and choir with that ensemble, it still had not dawned on me that Leonard has a well-established and highly regarded career as a choral composer well beyond the borders of our region, and it took another trip to Winnipeg and its New Music Festival for me to become aware of that. There I encountered a premiere performance of his music by a choir that had been singing and commissioning music from Len for over a decade. More recently, Len’s choral music has been featured with the Elora Festival Singers, both in concert and on a CD of his music entitled Northwords, and a premier in Seattle, Washington with The Esoterics.

I am at this moment just beginning to develop an awareness that Len writes music for genres other than choir. The first movement of his cello sonata (I didn’t know!) was featured on the CD “Notes Towards” by Timothy Corlis which I produced last year.

For more on Leonard, you can visit his website.

-earl

Barrie Cabena

Four years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Barrie Cabena as part of a CD project I was producing with Timothy Lanigan, at that time a boy soprano. Music director Eric Dewdney had encouraged me to make a recording of Tim’s beautiful voice, and I felt that Barrie was a natural choice for a commission of repertoire that would suit the project.

We met in the rehearsal room at a church in Cambridge, and I described to him our concept of the CD, and the theme, which was centered on the creation text from Genesis and how we were looking for a work that would anchor the entire project. As the meeting went on, and I talked, I began to grow concerned, as Barrie did not appear to be responding to my vision and enthusiasm, and I wondered if I was imposing an onerous task on him. At the end, he (politely it seemed to me) said he would prepare something, and wondered if he could have a month or so to do so. I was certain that he was complying with our request out of professional courtesy, the grant funding we were hoping to get would not be what he could normally command as a fee, and while I was not worried that he would create something that would suit the project, I was uneasy that this would be a “job” for him… I did not wish to put a composer into that position!

So, when a week later I received a call from Eric saying that he and Tim had just performed their first run through of the completed work, I was surprised. I was even more surprised, and relieved, to hear from Eric that Barrie had left the meeting that day, and immediately set out to write a text and then music. Not only was the piece exactly what we had hoped he would write, but it had obviously connected with something meaningful inside of him. Written for Tim in duet with Barrie’s son, male alto Daniel Cabena, and accompanied by David Hall, organ, Cathy Anderson, cello, and the Synergy Handbell Choir, it is one of my favourite pieces of music, and is filled with a sense of wonderment and hope for the future.

-earl.

Glenn Buhr

I first connected with Glenn as a composer on a CD project I produced for the wind ensemble The Wellington Winds called An Artist’s Neighbourhood. The brain-child of conductor/composer Michael Purves-Smith, all of the works were written by composers who make (or made) their home or workplace in the Waterloo region. Glenn wrote two works, one of which was strongly influenced by rock and roll idioms, and included an electric guitar solo… not generally considered a usual wind ensemble instrument! Glenn has a drive and energy that encourages you to reciprocate with the same, and so I looked forward to another opportunity to work with him.

A year later, I attended a workshop in Winnipeg, and I dropped by Glenn’s residence the next day (he held dual citizenship in both Winnipeg and Waterloo), in the hopes of encountering him there. A hard man to catch in one location, he was not there, so I left a note and CD sampler on his doorstep, and heard nothing more. That is, not for another year, when I received a phone call wondering if I would be available to record a performance of Glenn and his wife Margaret Sweatman’s innovative work-in-development musical, Flux, with the KW Symphony.

That was an amazing experience, fraught with challenges from a recording perspective, but an eye-opener to a project that is close to Glenn’s passion. The work, an antiwar musical comedy set in the surreal landscape of medieval Scotland featuring six main solo characters, incorporates some of the ideas that Glenn used for the Wellington Wind CD, and judging by the concert version that was presented by the KWS and a concert version with reduced musical forces presented at Summerworks in Toronto this past summer, will most certainly engage and delight audiences when it is presented in its full version.

-earl.

Profile: Composers of the Waterloo Region

Sometimes it takes losing what you have in order to fully appreciate its value. Other times, what you have can go unnoticed until someone else points out to you what you have, and even then, your reaction may not be as enthusiastic as what should be warranted.

It seems to be the bane of the classical music composer that they must first pass away before their value is recognized by the musical world of the time they lived in, or the community they call their home. It may be that it takes time, or a change of times, in order for us to be able to valuate that which we are immediately experiencing.

Or, maybe we just need to consciously take notice of the music of our time, and become more actively engaged with both the music, and the men and women who create it.

As a producer of music, I am fortunate to have many opportunities to work closely with Waterloo region composers, including an upcoming Choral Song Circle event in September 2008 that will feature the choral works of many of these composers.

The posts in the blog are anecdotes of experiences I’ve had with composers who make their home in our region that are part of my growing awareness of their work and the relevance it has in our musical world.