In the Front Row at "An American Christmas"

So already, my husband Scott and I have been going to the Boston Camerata's annual Christmas concerts for years. But last Saturday night was the first time we got to sit in the front row.

We were already very excited about Saturday evening: "An American Christmas"* has always been our favorite program because almost all of the music is sung in English, making it just that much easier for us as English-speaking listeners to immerse ourselves in the interplay of music and narrative characteristic of Camerata programs.

Interior of Old Ship in Late December

Just the night before, Scott and I, as members of an ensemble called Crossroads that reassembles in the late fall of each year, had performed at the annual Winter Solstice Poetry Circle at Old Ship Church in Hingham. So the joys and challenges of being the only singer on a voice part were fresh on my mind. When you're an amateur singer, musical multi-tasking--thinking about that upcoming musical passage that you finally learned; connecting with your fellow singers to do something deliberate and musical together; and reaching out to the audience who've come to be moved, entertained, or both--is no small challenge. As a Crossroads member, I often find myself hungering for those moments of a cappella automatic pilot that my college close-harmony singing group** had when singing songs that we'd performed at least a hundred times.

The Camerata This Christmas, But Not Last Saturday

But groups like the Boston Camerata*** don't sing and play together week in and week out during the year. To read the biographies of the singers and instrumentalists is to understand how their diverse musical specialties and interests, varied musical commitments, and different home bases make the group like a garden that blooms luxuriously and differently in different seasons and different years, always simultaneously and artfully evoking its previous incarnations while incorporating beautiful, provocative changes.

I mention this because from our front row seats, Scott and I were treated to "an apprenticeship of observation," as Steve Seidel, the director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Arts in Education Program, might have called it. We had an up-close-and-personal experience of this group as professional music-makers using everything they knew separately and collectively about singing and performing to inform their inspired collective exertion. 

But that wasn't the most important benefit of our proximity to the music and music-makers: the real benefit  was our intensified experience of the spirit of the Camerata's music-making--something we've felt and cherished even when we've attended performances and sat in the last row of the hall. Scott, who'd loved the idea of front row seats just because he wanted to add to his enjoyment of the singing and the program, remarked later, "We got to hear the singers make the music, not the room make the music." Scott often describes the Camerata singers as "excellent, confident but not showy." And we could discern the shape of particular vocal lines when the singers sang in small groups and as a whole ensemble--which meant pieces we thought we knew pretty well kept handing us musical surprises.

As first-row sitters, we couldn't have been more involved in the program. So when it came time for the audience to sing, we gave it all we had. And that mattered. As Camerata Artistic Director and singer Anne Azéma said at the beginning of the evening, it was important not only that the Camerata sing to us, but that we sing to them, and with them. Music--in general, and this music in particular--belonged to us all, and we were all entitled to the experience of making it. In American music, she explained, the high is the low, and low is the high. Classifications embraced by critics and historians don't hold. As audience members, we were not being directed to venerate the old and the high as a beautiful remnant; rather, we were being invited to enjoy and appreciate its humble and still healthy roots, and its continued ability to inspire communities to embrace it, and sometimes even to reinvent it. Ultimately, communities, not scholars and reviewers, determine what animates our hearts and spirits.

My introduction to the Boston Camerata came when I was in my early twenties. A required college English literature survey course initially aroused my interest in the medieval; a production of the York Mystery Plays performed on a stage pitched on York's Roman ruins confirmed it, and made it downright enthusiastic. As a student in the Brown M.A.T. program, I pursued my interest through a graduate-level course devoted entirely to the Mystery Plays--and a seemingly endless clearance sale in the Brown University Bookstore's music department that regularly featured early music LPs priced between one and three dollars. So when I saw an advertisement for the Camerata's A Medieval Christmas program--I'm actually listening to the CD right now--I bought my ticket and went.

My first live Camerata experience was a musical and spiritual homecoming. The small band of musicians conveyed their eagerness to share the wonderful old music about which they were deeply knowledgeable and passionate so that we would appreciate it and love it. The opening strains of the Christian holiday program reached out to include me in a way that I, a Jew whose college choral experience had given me the ability to recite from memory the Catholic Mass in Latin, had not expected. I can still remember that moment: "Wait a minute? Isn't that Hebrew I'm hearing?"****

Even though I'd experienced modern Jewish choral music--my college choir had performed Bernstein's "Chichester Psalms" when I was a sophomore--that was the first time I'd seen my own cultural heritage as a source drawn upon in the development of Western music. For years, the Boston Camerata, especially with programs like The Sacred Bridge (which will be performed in late March in Cambridge and Portland, Maine) has been helping "cultural outsiders" (and "cultural insiders"!) understand the roles their cultures and musical traditions have played in the development of the dominant cultural/musical mainstream. Simultaneously, it's been breathing new life and new relevance into music frequently dismissed as arcane, precious, high brow, and rarefied--and of cultivating respect for and openness to music frequently dismissed as low brow, common, or folksy.  "An American Christmas" exemplifies these goals and traditions, drawing on diverse American traditions and regions to create a program sometimes heart-wrenching, sometimes heart-soothing, always heart-opening--and always musically worthy.

This year's American program opened differently than it had in the past*****--this time, with a brass version of "Wayfaring Stranger" both sobering and soothing. The last time I'd heard that song, Maria McKee was singing it (on the Songcatcher soundtrack CD) as if her life depended on it, conveying both deep desperation and passionate certainty of deliverance from that desperation. So the Camerata performance began by establishing all of us in the hall as sojourners in a "world of woe" whose hope lay in a world beyond. Darkness and light have always shared the stage in "An American Christmas," but never had the program begun by linking that darkness to the harsh loneliness of so many "strangers" making their way in this vast, difficult country. Given the current divisions among so many Americans, and the profound feelings of alienation and disenfranchisement that accompany those divisions for so many Americans and aspiring Americans, it felt to me like just the right way to begin the evening's journey.

And that's what I've always loved about the Camerata: its willingness to fix what isn't artistically broken because some new idea, some new conviction, some new insight, some new enthusiasm, some new concept, some new context creates a reason to try something new--to reconsider an established program's overall architecture; to add or subtract from an established program's musical selections, re-envision new voicings and orchestrations, reach out to new musical collaborators; to present programs featuring beautiful yet seldom performed works, or works inspired by those works, guided by the belief that imagination and scholarship play crucial, complementary roles in the realization of such projects. Innovation and tradition make excellent partners when the goal is meaning for both the performers and the audience.******

Manuscript sources for Daniel leave much room for the imagination. Its stage directions are scant and the score preserves only the text and melodic pitches. Azéma’s version, based on her own meticulous transcriptions of the music from a facsimile of the original sources, is a purists’ take in one sense—a welcome departure from Gotham Early Music Scene’s use of modern instrumental colors—as it relies solely on the vocal lines to deliver the majority of the dramatic content.
But her edition is wonderfully unstuffy with the music sounding as fresh to the ear as any well-crafted new piece. The lines of chant flow together in one smooth tapestry and, dramatically, work to splendid effect. When the mystical writing appears on the wall in the palace of King Belshazzar, the men of the chorus chanted lines that moved independently of one other for an apt confusion of sound as well as sight.
- See more at: http://bostonclassicalreview.com/2014/11/boston-camerata-provides-enchanting-new-take-on-the-book-of-daniel/#sthash.Zxvdcgjt.dpuf

Manuscript sources for Daniel leave much room for the imagination. Its stage directions are scant and the score preserves only the text and melodic pitches. Azéma’s version, based on her own meticulous transcriptions of the music from a facsimile of the original sources, is a purists’ take in one sense—a welcome departure from Gotham Early Music Scene’s use of modern instrumental colors—as it relies solely on the vocal lines to deliver the majority of the dramatic content.
But her edition is wonderfully unstuffy with the music sounding as fresh to the ear as any well-crafted new piece. The lines of chant flow together in one smooth tapestry and, dramatically, work to splendid effect. When the mystical writing appears on the wall in the palace of King Belshazzar, the men of the chorus chanted lines that moved independently of one other for an apt confusion of sound as well as sight.
- See more at: http://bostonclassicalreview.com/2014/11/boston-camerata-provides-enchanting-new-take-on-the-book-of-daniel/#sthash.Zxvdcgjt.dpu

Since my first time hearing the Boston Camerata, I've felt certain of the group's appreciation and affection for their audiences, their trust in our capacities to engage fully with the nuanced musical programs they carefully and enthusiastically design and present, and their hopes that we'll be delighted, lifted up, and inspired by our experiences. Last Saturday night, I fulfilled their hopes and my own. Front row seats provide great vantage points from which to look forward and to look back. On the fifth night of Chanukah, I felt my kinship with the singers on the stage, my fellow audience members, and all the wayfaring strangers making their way through this "world of woe." And I trusted in that kinship to help all of us to make it through. What a great gift of the Boston Camerata's music and spirit!

* Screen shot of "An American Christmas" CD <http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51DKS7I9kSL._SY300_.jpg> 
** I was one of the original Radcliffe Pitches, and we're celebrating our 40th birthday this year. We can sing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" under any circumstances!
*** Screen Shot of Boston Camerata from their Facebook page: <https://www.facebook.com/thebostoncamerata/photos/a.10150767982824048.462632.140537234047/10152995447854048/?type=1&theater>
**** You can hear Isaiah's prophecy as it was performed that night by using the link I've posted right here.
***** I think it was different--or maybe it was my own experiences and changed sensibilities that were making me more attentive to something I hadn't noticed before. 

****** I was out of the country in November when the Camerata performed its version of The Play of Daniel, but I know from people who saw it and reviews that I've read that it was "a purist's take in one sense" but also "wonderfully unstuffy with the music sounding as fresh to the air as any well-crafted new piece." (Keebaugh, Aaron. "Boston Camerata Provides Enchanting New Take on 'The Play of Daniel'" Boston Classical Review RSS. N.p., 22 Nov. 2014. Web. 24 Dec. 2014.) 
******* Screen shot of <http://icons.wunderground.com/data/wximagenew/j/Jay0Byrd/302.jpg>