Giving Voice: Settings of Speeches

Dear Friends of Sacred and Profane,

I feel like I’ve been a bit redundant in my last few letters to you. I often say things like: “I had no idea when I programmed S&P’s upcoming concert how relevant it would feel when the concert arrived,” but this one is quite a bit more on the nose in that regard. Building a concert program takes anywhere from 1-3 years. S&P’s upcoming concert on May 10th and 11th, Giving Voice: Settings of Speeches started to percolate a number of years ago. I love settings of non-poetic texts, so I started collecting settings of speeches. This program was finalized last spring. And then November 6th happened, January 20th happened, and everything since happened, just as we were digging into settings of speeches of all kinds, some light hearted, some poignant, but several political, purposeful, and defiant.

I’m happy to kick off the concert by celebrating our own San Francisco-based composer, Kirke Mechem, who turns 100 this coming August 16th! We will return to his masterful setting of astronaut Russell Schweickart’s poignant speech about being overcome by the beauty and fragility of the earth during his unattached spacewalk in 1969. By weaving the text with the Latin “dona nobis pacem,” “grant us peace,” Kirke sets it as an urgent call for peace and protection of the environment. We then turn to the Swedish composer Anna-Karin Klockar’s very challenging Speeches, with three movements that span a wide emotional gamut. The first movement is a comical take on the French suffragist Olympe de Gouges’ speech in which she asks men to justify their oppression of women, based on scant evidence of intellectual superiority. The second movement is an emotionally devastating setting of the surrender speech given by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe. This piece brought up a lot for many singers, and we had a long discussion about how to create a respectful space in our performance. The final movement is a rollicking setting of the courtroom statement that has become known as “a dog is a man’s best friend” speech, a sentiment I personally deeply share (well, cats too). The Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ The Time Has Come provides a bit of warmth in its gentle presentation of Nelson Mandela's 1994 inaugural speech, in which he asks for national reconciliation and healing. I am hopeful that we will have a reason to return to this piece in the near future.

The awesome Trevor Weston has become a go-to composer for me in the past several years. I love Trevor’s skillful and complex writing and I’m excited to return to Visions of Glory, a poignant setting of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech. In dialogue with that important speech, we will sing Joel Thomposon’s Hold Fast to Dreams, a setting of Langston Hughes that includes a virtuosic piano part, expertly performed by our fabulous pianist Paul McCurdy. 

Paul also shares his pianistic gifts in Dale Trumbore’s Half the World, a setting of a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass before the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C. in 1888. By the way, Sacred and Profane is going to Washington DC in a couple of weeks to sing in the WorldPride International Choral Festival on May 24th and 25th! Tell your peeps in the DC area!

I am thrilled to present premieres of two commissions by phenomenal composers who set critical texts for us. I felt that we needed to include the words of our local gay rights activist Harvey Milk in this concert, and the best person to write that was in our own musical family, Adam Lange. I met Adam years ago, when he was a member of the University Choir at USF. I eagerly invited him to join S&P, where he now serves as the bass section leader. Adam’s Brick, his setting of Harvey Milk’s Gay Freedom Day Speech is poignant and beautiful, even imploring, where a lesser composer might have created something bombastic. Several of the singers, including me, are often moved to tears when we sing this one. We close our concert with Zanaida Robles’ The Root, her setting of Angela Davis famous quote: “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” It’s been a dream of mine to work with Zanaida – I have always loved how she tackles difficult topics in challenging ways in her music, and The Root is no exception, with neo-Medieval references in the use of modes and rhythmic structures that energetically builds to its powerful conclusion. We were honored and thrilled to receive Dr. Davis’ blessing for this musical setting of a quote that I have turned to often and that feels particularly relevant in this moment.

As singers, sharing our voices with each other and with you, our audience, is everything for us – our therapy, our community, our solace, our joy, and our expression. The way many of us know how to engage with this moment is with our voices. I hope this concert will be one small part in the fight to restore common sense and care for all people and the planet. I hope to see you there!

-Rebecca

Languages of Love

Dear Friends of Sacred and Profane,

I feel like we can all use a little love these days, something gentle and kind to soothe the rancor out there. As is often the case, I had no idea when I programmed S&P’s upcoming International Valentine’s Day concert how deeply we would all be needing something soothing and sweet at concert time. But here we are, and we’re really looking forward to sharing this uplifting music from all over the world with you on Valentine’s weekend. When I started looking for music to sing, it occurred to me that we have singers from far and wide around the globe in our group, and of course all choral singers are masters of language and various international traditions. So I reached out to singers and asked for their favorite choral love songs in languages other than English. The ideas came flooding in, and as a result, the concert feels even more collaborative than usual.

Our longtime singer George-Ann had lots of ideas (G-A knows all the choral music!), including a return to Adinu, the Arabic call for love as the only true religion, as well as La Rosa, a love song in Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jewish people. Our soprano Katherine suggested a beautiful a cappella piece about universal love by the nineteenth-century Russian composer Sergei Taneyev. Hayley and Enya both longed to sing Lauridsen’s popular Soneto de la Noche, a setting of a poem by the Chilean poet-politician Pablo Neruda. Our tenor Lorenzo raved about the Haitian-American composer Sydney Guillaume’s Renmen Renmen. We got to coach that piece with the composer on Zoom, resulting in some exciting changes, including the addition of a new conga part. Our bass Niek, a native of the Netherlands, recommended a setting of the oldest known Dutch poem, Hebban olla vogola. I was happy to find a beautiful arrangement of Tian Mí Mí, our soprano Jenn’s mom’s (a great S&P supporter) favorite Chinese pop song. Dyana suggested the danceable Son Mercedes from Cuba; Dyana also booked a fantastic percussionist, Rebecca Rodriguez, to play claves on that piece, as well as percussion on a couple of other numbers. Our Chorus Manager Kat turned me on to the Swedish women’s folk quartet Kraja’s romantic Jag såg dig a couple of years ago, and I added in a few of my favorites, including music by the often overlooked and wonderful sixteenth-century composer Maddelena Casulana and the not-at-all overlooked and completely-deserving-of-the-admiration-it-receives Dieu! Qu’il la fait bon regarder by Debussy. I’m also excited to sing the wonderful Filipino American composer Saunder Choi’s Itanong Mo Sa Bituin, a setting of one of that country’s most beloved poets, and Nesta Rua, a Brazilian folk song beautifully arranged by my friend from grad school at the University of Iowa, Daniel Afonso. He will come down from Cal State Stanislaus, where he’s the Coordinator of Vocal and Choral Studies, to coach us before we share it with you. 

The result is this moving concert with songs about all kinds of love – from fulfilling love to unrequited longing, from romantic love to universal love of humanity and love as a universally needed source of healing and connection. I hope you’ll come to bask in all this affection at our concerts! 

-Rebecca

Norden: A Scandinavian Holiday Celebration

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,

Two years ago, my husband Pete and I spent the holidays in Stockholm with my family and friends. We had three reasons for going – we had been to Sweden the previous summer and were itching to go back, we wanted to see what it’s like to be there at the darkest time of year and take in the holiday charm, and Karin Rehnqvist, the composer who Sacred & Profane and I champion regularly, had an opera premiering at the Royal Opera. The trip was wonderful – I loved how everyone lit their windows with Christmas decorations, it was lovely to spend time with people I love and rarely see during the holidays, and hearing Karin’s opera, Strandad (Drifted in English) remains among the most profound artistic experiences of my life. Even though there wasn’t a ton of snow when we were there, the long walks with my cousins and close friends in the country as the snow reflected the light gave me the opportunity to experience what I’ve been told: the holidays in Scandinavia are magical. I’m excited to share that feeling of warmth, charm, and some mystery with you in Sacred and Profane’s upcoming concert. 

True to S&P’s style, our concert will be filled with a broad mix of music, featuring household name composers (Grieg, Sibelius), arrangements of traditional music (There is a Rose, Silent Night), Scandinavian classics (Jul, jul, strålande jul; Nu er det jul igen, Sikken voldsom trængsel og alarm), folk songs (Et lydet barn from Norway and Tomten from the Swedish woman’s folk quartet, Kraja), haunting modern music by Rautavaara and Leifs, and charming music by young composers – the Canadian-Finnish composer Matthew Whittall and the Icelandic composer Finnur Karlsson. 

The singers have been working hard for the past several weeks to get their mouths to mold to five complex languages – Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish and Icelandic, and they are sounding like natives! We have been grateful to our own Freddy, who is from Sweden and has studied all of the Scandinavian languages, and to the many native speakers who sent recordings of the texts and coached us in person. All of it has been making me feel like I’m back in Sweden, soaking in the traditions and warmth of the holidays. Writing this on Thanksgiving,  I’m forever grateful to have the opportunity to work with these gifted musicians and to then share their talents and artistic achievements with you! I hope we’ll see you at the concerts!

Happy Holidays!

-Rebecca

Songs for Solace and Restoration

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,

In the past few years, it seems like we have become more open to talking about health – both physical and mental. I’m inspired by younger people like my students at USF, who are better at reaching out for support and empathy than my generation was. While resilience is still valued, we are recognizing that life entails highs and lows and we need space to grieve, struggle, and heal both alone and with others. It is my hope that Sacred and Profane’s upcoming concert will allow you to experience both ends of the emotional spectrum – sadness and joy – in community. This concert is a bit of a departure for S&P – we’ll still sing the rich classical canon works you’ve come to expect from us, but we will also bend our style toward pop and musical theater in some of our offerings to lift your spirits as we shed the winter and head into spring and summer.

We will open our concert by inviting you to sing with us! Some of you may remember Ysaÿe Barnwell as the female bass in the African American women’s a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. Dr. Barnwell is also a public health specialist and a prolific composer. Her Wanting Memories invites us to remember our elders who have passed and go through the process of grief – from sadness to honoring the lessons we’ve learned. 

I heard one of the first performances of Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil at the ACDA conference in Salt Lake City in 2019. The text, written with Whitacre’s best friend Tony Silvestri, tells the story of Tony’s wife Julie who died from cancer. When I was a doctoral student at the University of Iowa, the chair of the choral program, William Hatcher, retired with his wife Darlene to return to California to be with her daughter, the same Julie, as her health declined. Hearing this work brought back the memory of this moment and allowed me and my U Iowa colleagues who were there to return to the empathy we all felt for the family, and I’ve wanted to program pieces from the larger work since. It’s a deeply intimate and powerful piece that has been very moving for the S&P singers in our rehearsals. We follow The Sacred Veil with another work that has connections to my U Iowa days. Shawn Kirchner completed his master’s in Choral Conducting at Iowa just before I arrived for my doctorate. He went on to establish a remarkable career as a composer, pianist, and singer in Los Angeles. We met a number of years ago through a close mutual friend and I’ve since regularly programmed his works for both S&P and my USF choir. I first heard his setting of Sylvia Plath’s seminal poem Tulips a couple of years ago when the LA choral ensemble, Tonality, sang it at a conference. When I found the recording, I couldn’t stop singing this piece about emerging from a dual physical and mental health crisis. Of everything on our program, this is the piece I live with all day, every day – it has become part of my inner life and it's been particularly meaningful for me to hear our Sacred and Profane community of singers give it life in our rehearsals.

I’m excited to bring you two works by Dr. Zanaida Robles, a composer we have begun to champion in recent years. We’ll return to She Lingers On, her thoughtful piece about a woman’s struggles with depression that we first sang a couple of years ago, and also her Veni Sancte Spiritus, a pop-classical hybrid work about resilience. Veni Sancte Spiritus was written as an assignment for a composition class that Robles took with the much-loved choral composer, Morten Lauridsen. In honor of that lineage, we are returning to Lauridsen’s classic setting of James Agee’s poem about health and healing, Sure on This Shining Night, which we last presented as a virtual choir video during the Covid lockdown. Our concert includes quite a few California-based composers. In addition to Whitacre, Kirchner, Robles, and Lauridsen, we are excited to return to Dale Trumbore with her You Find Yourself Here, a setting of her own text about personal change and discovering self-acceptance. 

I am a loyal subscriber of the theater company Berkeley Rep. One of my absolute favorite productions that that company has presented is Dave Malloy’s brilliant Octet – an a cappella musical for eight performers about a self-help group for people in recovery from various forms of internet addiction. It was both poignant and hilarious – we listened to it nonstop in our home for months afterward. Two of the pieces in the show are presented as hymns and I can’t wait to share them with you. We will also return to the Swedish composer and ethnomusicologist Sten Källman’s arrangement of the Haitian song Frè O, a call for the spirit of healing. 

I couldn’t be more delighted to be sharing this concert with the remarkable Haitian percussionist, Jeff Pierre, the fabulous cellist and gambist, Amy Brodo, and not least of all with my musical partner-in-crime, the wonderful pianist Paul McCurdy. I hope you’ll be able to join us for this emotional and nurturing concert and be uplifted as we head into the warmer months.

Looking forward to seeing you at the concerts!

Warmly,

Rebecca

Escape: Music to be Transported By

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,

The phrase “time flies” is definitely overused, but has it really been twenty years since I began conducting Sacred and Profane? How did that happen? The experiences I’ve had over these twenty years have been among the happiest and most transportive of my life, and I’ve formed many of my closest friendships with the intelligent, sensitive, and witty people that make up the S&P community. We have sung music from history’s verified geniuses like Mozart and Bach and presented US premieres and several commissions; we’ve collaborated with chamber orchestras, a Venezuelan instrumental ensemble, and a Haitian percussionist; we’ve celebrated music from local composers and sung lots of  music by Swedish composers. We’ve experienced joys and losses together and grown closer along the way. 

In selecting repertoire for my upcoming twentieth anniversary concert, I wanted to choose the works and the composers that I love most – my “desert island music.” The first piece was easy – we will welcome the audience with the opening kulning, or herding call, of Karin Rehnqvist’s uplifting arrangement of the Swedish hymn i Himmelen. I had just met Karin when she composed this piece in 1998 for Bo Johansson’s girl’s choir at Stockholm’s advanced music school, Adolf Fredriks Musikklasser. She invited me to join her at her first rehearsal of the piece with the choir, and I feel that I witnessed the making of history, as i Himmelen has become her best known choral work. I remain as enraptured of the piece now as I was then, and following two performances of the piece with S&P over the years in its original version for treble choir, I’m excited to present our first performance of Karin’s arrangement for mixed choir in these concerts. The piece always brings me a feeling of tremendous joy and I know it will for you as well. 

There are many geniuses among the composers of the late sixteenth-century, the High Renaissance. But of them, William Byrd is probably my favorite, and chief among his works the Mass for Four Voices. It is one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching works I know, full of sublime melodies and a deep sense of longing. A piece like this requires the intimacy of only a few voices, and we will be performing it with a small group. They are singing so beautifully that I feel like I’m hearing one of England’s elite chamber ensembles dedicated to sixteenth-century music.

I first worked with the Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir in a summer conducting course I took with the Swedish master conductor Eric Ericson in the summer of 1998. I brought the pieceto Sacred and Profane, who performed it early in my tenure, way back in May 2006. The group was smaller back then, and while that experience was lovely, it’s been remarkable to return to this masterpiece of choral writing with the larger ensemble that we have now – we’re better able to make the rich sonorities resonate and the glorious melodies shine. This challenging piece takes me to almost every emotional corner with its exquisite writing that seems to contain all things – simplicity and complexity, joy and sorrow, and absolute beauty. 

In that same 1998 conducting workshop, Maestro Ericsson assigned to me Samuel Barber’s miniature gem “The Coolin” from his cycle Reincarnations – so the sole American conductor got to conduct the sole American composer’s work in the final concert. I’ve been in love with this piece ever since, so much so that I asked the chamber choir who sang at my wedding with Pete two years ago to sing this perfect expression of devotion and commitment. 

For those that may not be aware, Sacred and Profane takes our name from Benjamin Britten’s final work for choir – Sacred and Profane, “Eight Medieval Lyrics,” Op. 91. We performed that complete cycle in our 40th anniversary concert in May 2018. For many choral nerds, Britten is the composer. His music is fun, lyrical, and somehow perfect. I am not alone in naming his Hymn to St. Cecilia as one of my favorites – I love how W.H. Auden egged Britten on to embrace his sensuality and sense of playfulness in the piece, and while it is said that Britten resented Auden’s goading, he complied and gave us one of his greatest choral masterpieces. It is such a blast to sing and I can see in the singers faces that they are having as wonderful a time singing the piece as I am hearing them.

Caroline Shaw, the composer of  the final work on our program, is the only one that I haven’t conducted before, but I was eager to include a work by this composer who has become one of my favorites. I regularly listen to her Partita for 8 Voices, which she wrote for Roomful of Teeth, the avant garde vocal ensemble that she sings with. Partita won the Pulitzer Prize for Composition in 2013, making her the youngest composer to receive that award. and the Swallow feels like a perfect place to end the concert (well… almost… there may be an encore!) – it is reflective, poignant, complex and yet simple – like a meditation.

While I programmed this music selfishly – it is the music I love most in the world – I hope and believe that you will be similarly transported. The choir couldn’t be singing more beautifully – I can’t believe I get to work with such a fantastic group of musicians. I hope to see you there!

Warmly,
Rebecca

Reflections of Peace

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,

Last year, as I was brainstorming Sacred and Profane’s 2023-2024 season concert themes and repertoire, I could never have anticipated how relevant our upcoming December concert theme Reflections of Peace would become Even more, the specific works that I chose for a variety of reasons became much more poignant a couple months ago, well into our rehearsal process, as the war in the Middle East erupted and the catastrophe of that conflict has continued to reverberate across the world, adding to the horrors already felt in Ukraine, Congo, and elsewhere. We have been feeling the emotional pain of these conflicts in Sacred and Profane, and singing this music in our weekly Tuesday night rehearsals has been a salve. I am hopeful that you will also receive peace and comfort as you listen.

The first work in our program is Adinu, an Arabic setting of texts by the 13th century Sufi mystic and philosopher Ibn’ Arabī, who proclaimed at the end of his life that the only true religion was the religion of love. I had the opportunity to prepare this piece with one of its arrangers, André de Quadros, when we co-directed a Prison music – University choir exchange program in 2015. This experience was life-changing for me, and the opportunity to work with André demonstrated to me the potential of choral music to be a force for social change. Preparing the piece with Sacred and Profane for this concert, our bass Niek Veldhuis connected us with his UC Berkeley colleague, Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed, a professor of Middle Eastern literature and philosophy, who helped us to gain a deeper understanding of the Arabic text and Ibn’ Arabī’s important contribution to Sufi mysticism. Staying in the Medieval era, we then turn to the great early Renaissance master Josquin des Prez’ “Agnus Dei” from his Missa sexti toni “L’homme armé.” I first heard this piece when a fellow graduate student prepared an edition for an early music chamber choir that a few of us put together when I was a doctoral student at the University of Iowa. I’ve never forgotten how the imitative melodies swirl around each other, creating a cascading sea of beauty. Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine is a perfect follow-up, as Pärt seems to be the modern-day Josquin, with his neo-Medieval musical language and deeply moving music that has earned him so many fans and made him among the most popular living composers of Western Art music. 

The biblical text Peace I Leave With You has inspired numerous composers to write choral settings. There’s something about the poem’s message of unconditional acceptance and escape from the daily stresses of the world that we can all use. The first time I heard this text I heard was when I sang the Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt’s setting years ago. His beautiful and complex piece is much loved in the choral world and I’m happy to share it with you this weekend. We’ll also be singing settings by two Swedes – Fredrik Sixten, whose music is championed by the previous SF Symphony Chorus conductor Ragnar Bohlin, and the up and coming Martin Åsander, whose music I’ve recently discovered. I was happy to find that the wonderful early-20th century composer, Amy Beach, composed a lovely setting of the text – I love her choral music and I’m excited that she’s beginning to receive more attention. 

When I attended the Chorus America conference in San Francisco this past May, I met Vince Peterson, whose work with crossover pop-classical choral music is remarkable. He’s written a few fabulous arrangements for San Francisco’s own Chanticleer. Sacred and Profane created a virtual choir video of his Cells Planets during the Covid lockdown year and we’ll be singing his Bigger Than My Body this coming May. Vince told me about San Francisco-based composer Nick Weininger, who sings with and writes for International Orange Chorale. Nick has a number of Jewish works, and we are excited to present the premiere of the mixed-choir version of his Oseh Shalom in this concert. This complex and mystical setting of the last verse in the Mourner’s Kaddish delivers moments of light and peace that we are all needing these days. We had the opportunity to coach with Nick recently and we’re happy to have a new connection in the local composer community. We’ll also be returning to the elder statesman of local composers, Kirke Mechem, whose Island in Space is a setting of a speech by Russell Schweickart, the first astronaut to make an unattached spacewalk. Kirke weaves Schweickart’s speech with the words “Dona nobis pacem,” Or “grant us peace,” from the Agnus Dei of the Latin Mass. Kirke suggested this piece to me for Sacred and Profane when we sang his phenomenal cycle Winging Wildly a couple of years ago. I feel so honored to have the opportunity to get to know both Kirke and his remarkable work and we’re lucky to have him in our backyard. 

Sacred and Profane audience members have had the opportunity to hear the music of the Swedish composer Karin Rehnqvist in many of our concerts over the years. I love everything about Karin’s music – there’s something truly honest and deeply connected to the earth in her musical language. We last sang Karin’s When I Close My Eyes, I Dream of Peace in 2016, when we presented its U.S. premiere. The setting of the eleven-year-old Croatian boy composed during the Yugoslav Wars is in two movements – the first combines Swedish folk-style singing with a simple, warm statement of the text. The second movement has the choir singing in multiple languages and international musical styles – a call for international peace. When I recently told Karin that we’re singing the piece, she responded “Den passar verkligen in nu,” translation: “it is especially suited to this moment.” 

Another composer we’ve become dedicated to in the past few years is the incomparable Trevor Weston, whose Martyrs we co-commissioned with New York’s C4 Ensemble during the lockdown year of 2020-2021 and whose setting of Martin Luther King, Jr.s’ final speech, Visions of Glory, we sang last year. In this concert, we sing his The Gentlest Thing, a setting of the Tao Te Ching. This piece is at once truly peaceful and highly complex. Our solo quartet includes our bass and board president, Mark DeWitt, who has a special connection with Trevor – Trevor was the best man in his wedding to his lovely wife, Sue! 

Although he now lives in his hometown of New York, I think of Trevor as an honorary local since he spent several years in the East Bay, completing both his masters and doctoral degrees in composition at UC Berkeley. It’s fitting to follow his work with another local composer and choral devoté, Sanford Dole. Sanford and I have become friends over the past few years as East Bay residents and lovers of what we call “crunchy” choral music. Sanford’s music is more than just crunchy, however. He is a master text painter – his music suggests 1940s film noir, with dramatic shifts that feel like moving through various film-like scenes. We sang Sanford’s Dance Steps in our local composer’s concert in May 2022, and now happy to present his Peace on Earth, a setting of the Bay Area’s own Lynne Morrow’s translation of Friede auf Erden, the same text that Arnold Schönberg set in his famously difficult choral work. We had a blast coaching this piece with Sanford last week and can’t wait to share it with you.

Our final offering will be A Prayer, by the English crossover pop-choral composer and conductor, Ken Burton. The choral world has been introduced to this piece over the last couple of years by the remarkable Jason Max Ferdinand Singers. We often sing in the more refined, clear tone you come to expect of high level choral ensembles, but in this piece the singers get to cut loose a bit and sing with their full, rich voices and our soprano Esther Hulme will give you goosebumps with her awesome solo work in this powerful piece. 

While A Prayer is officially our last piece, I’ll end with an enticing hint: you will get to sing with us at the end of our concert! I hope you’ll be able to join us at one of our three performances this weekend as December begins and the holiday season goes into full swing! 

Warmly,

Rebecca

Shalom: Music of the Jewish Tradition

from the DIRECTOR'S DESK

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,

As we observe Jewish American Heritage Month this May, I have the opportunity to reflect on my own multiple identities as a Jewish, and Swedish, American woman. Things were never very clearly delineated in my household – my Jewish American father was an expert Swedish folk dancer and spoke the language fluently and my (not Jewish) Swedish mother would always ask if he was Jewish when I told her I had started dating someone new. The way those two cultures both intersect and conflict has largely defined me. The Jewish temperament for debate seems to have won rather than the Swedish reticence for conflict. The Swedish love of nature has to compromise with the Jewish love of urban art and culture. Both have fed an interest in politics and dreams of a more just system that cultivates a healthy and equitable society. That complexity can be found within Jewish culture itself, of course. The upcoming Sacred and Profane has allowed me the opportunity to dig into my Jewish identity in a way I rarely do in my choral expression, and I have been personally deeply affected by the richness of this tradition and the music we’re singing this weekend, as well as the artistry of the S&P singers. Our concert includes newly composed music written with a complex harmonic palette, heart-warming accessible music, arrangements of both Ladino and Yiddish folk songs, and more. 

Sacred and Profane has been singing the music of Karen Siegel for the past few years, when the Covid lockdown allowed us to explore pieces that she wrote expressly for singing online. We first sang her Ana el na in the version for online singing in March 2020 and we return to that beautiful chant for healing now. It’s been wonderful to sing it together in the same room and to experience the interlocking melodies of the canon. Karen is one of the composers that we featured in our “Choral Connections” interview series in our 2020-21 season (which you can see on our YouTube channel), and I’ve enjoyed getting to know her as a committed choral composer, singer, conductor, and fellow Jewish woman. 

We first sang the young virtuosic Swedish Jewish composer Jacob Mühlrad’s music this past December and I’m thrilled to return to his music in this concert with his Anim zemirot. When I met Jacob a few years ago when he was in San Francisco, he gave me several scores and specifically suggested that I consider his Anim zemirot for Sacred and Profane. This work is complex and organic, exciting and warming, intellectual and spiritual, much like the Jewish tradition itself. Jacob is a champion of Swedish choral complexity, and I am thrilled that he is continuing to build on that remarkable canon of work with such skill and beauty. 

Stacy Garrop has become increasingly familiar to Bay Area audiences, as she has recently had high profile performances of her works presented by the San Francisco contemporary choral ensemble Volti, the San Francisco Symphony, and others. Stacy writes compelling, challenging music that is always deeply felt. Her Lo Yisa Goy is a setting of Micah 4:3-4, well-known in its translation “Nation shall not lift sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war anymore” – a sentiment that certainly speaks to our current global experience. She weaves together three traditional melodies to create a beautiful work that twists and turns, taking you places you don’t expect. 

When I was building this concert, one of our sopranos, Mishaela DeVries (who we are now missing terribly while she takes up residence in her home town of Portland, OR) introduced me to the Norwegian composer Kim André Arnsen’s Even When He is Silent, a setting of a text that professes a belief in the goodness of humankind. The words were scratched onto a wall in Cologne during World War II by a Jewish person in hiding. I often find myself on the edge of tears when we rehearse this piece, and even just when speaking about it. The range of behaviour toward others that we human beings is forever shocking – from torture to risking one’s life to bring food to someone in hiding. Arnesen is the only composer on our program who is not Jewish, but I felt it was important to include this moving work.

While there are many Jewish identities, the two most populous groups are the Ashkenazi, who come primarily from Western Europe and Eastern Europe, and the Sephardim, who come mostly from Southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The Ashkenazi’s traditional language is Yiddish, which shares elements with German and Polish. The Sephardic language, Ladino, is a Romance language and has a strong common ground with Spanish. Singing arrangements of four Ladino folk songs by the prolific Julliard-based composer David Ludwig has been wonderful – each piece is unique from the others, and it speaks to the breadth of this rich artistic tradition.

Last but not least, singing the Yiddish classic Tumbalalayka has been a true treat for me, and a bit of a blast down memory lane, as my paternal grandmother, the musical matriarch of the family and a fluent Yiddish speaker, used to sing it to me. We are singing an arrangement by our own local Michael Kaulkin, who came to coach with us a few weeks ago. We had so much fun being his “test kitchen” choir, trying different tempi, articulations, even diction to realize what his inner ear had been hearing since writing the piece several years ago. It’s always so gratifying to be able to work directly with a composer, and Michael, with his hilarious sense of humor and beautiful writing, made working with him especially fabulous.

We are excited to bring you this beautifully varied and lovely concert this weekend, one so deeply personal to me. I hope to see you there and please say hello after the concert!

Warmly,

Rebecca

May 12, 2023

Considering This Moment: Music With Strings

 from the DIRECTOR'S DESK

Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,
 

Three years ago, almost to the day, Sacred and Profane was five days from presenting our concert with strings, featuring the fantastic Circadian String Quartet and fellow local players. I had just returned from the American Choral Directors Association conference and my head and heart were swimming with choral music, my car was packed for that night’s dress rehearsal, and I was so excited to hear the music come to life after wonderful separate rehearsals for strings and singers. And then the lockdown happened – at 4pm on a Monday afternoon, we made the call – there would be no concerts that weekend and, as it turned out, no live concerts for almost two years. But we knew we’d return  to this moving and compelling music and I’m thrilled to present our concert to you, at long last, this weekend!

I first began dreaming of a concert for choir and strings when Karin Rehnqvist, the fantastic Swedish composer whose music we frequently perform in our concerts, told me that she was working on a work for string orchestra and eight solo voices, for which she was choosing texts from the same collections of poetry by indigenous poets from various regions that had been the source of Songs From the North, the remarkable four-movement work she composed for us for our fortieth-anniversary concert in May 2018. I was struck by the opportunity to perform a work that was something of a partner to Songs of the North, and asked her if she thought it could be re-conceived for soloists and choir. She liked the idea, and we agreed to discuss it more when the work was complete.

We needed an excellent string orchestra to work with to make this concert a reality. The first group that came to mind was the wonderful local string quartet Circadian, whose first violinist David Ryther is an old friend of mine from our undergraduate days at UC Santa Cruz. David’s remarkable skill, expressive musicality, and commitment to new music is something that is shared by the entire quartet, so I was thrilled when they agreed to partner with us, and recruit a top-rate ensemble of colleagues to complete the orchestra.

Choosing repertoire for a concert for choir and strings was a challenge, as there are many options to consider. Our original program in 2020 included Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang to celebrate the 250 year anniversary of that composer’s birth. This time, we decided to replace that piece with No Fairytale Here, Zanaida Robles’ powerful work about Ida B. Wells, the suffragist and journalist who exposed the evils of the Jim Crow South. I’m excited to present one of the first performances of this work for mixed choir, strings, and percussion, featuring my college music school friend and master of African percussion Wade Peterson on djembe. It’s been wonderful working more closely with Dr. Robles the past couple of years – she was one of the interview subjects for my recent Masters of Nonprofit Administration capstone project on Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Performing Arts Organizations, and I had the opportunity to experience her remarkable music leadership as the director of a choral festival my university choirs participated in this past November. She’s becoming an increasingly sought-after composer and you’ll understand why when you hear this phenomenal work.

I’m excited to return to the music of our own local David Conte, chair of the composition faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory and fellow choir-nerd. David and I have gotten to know each other over the years since my USF University Choir joined a group of ensembles in a performance of his Elegy for Matthew, composed in memory of Matthew Shepard to a text by David’s frequent collaborator, the poet John Stirling Walker (coincidentally, I also met S&P’s phenomenal pianist, Paul McCurdy, in this project). When I discovered David’s September Sun, a multi-movement work that he wrote to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks, also to a text of Stirling Walker, I knew I found an ideal work for our concert. This remarkable piece contains soaring lyrical melodies alongside the excited energy of New York City. We’ve invited members of the UC Alumni Chorus to join us on this piece, and some S&P singers will join that choir in a performance of the same work in the UCAC concert this April.

We needed something lighthearted to compliment the heavier works in the concert. Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs for choir and string quartet fit the bill beautifully. Whitacre composed this piece as a graduate school student at Julliard, setting brief love poems by his then girlfriend and future wife, the Israeli soprano Hila Plitmann. The work was originally composed for Plitmann to sing with piano and solo violin, and Whitacre later arranged for a variety of vocal and instrumental combinations. These sweet songs are a lovely testament to new love in its early moments of delight and discovery.

Back to Karin Rehnqvist’s work for voices and strings. When she completed the piece, Day is here, and it had received its premiere in Stockholm, she sent me the score. We worked together to determine which parts could work well for the full ensemble, and which would be best in solo voices. Making this a reality with Sacred and Profane, our eight remarkable soloists, and the string orchestra in our rehearsals over the past couple of months has been thrilling and hugely rewarding for me. It is a demanding and moving work about the birth of the planet and our current situation confronting climate change, using Native American and other indigenous texts, as well as a beautiful Swedish hymn, to celebrate our abiding relationship with the natural world. Knowing Karin as I do, a person who spends weeks at a time on backpacking trips with her husband Hasse, and whose home outside of Stockholm sits perched on a wooded hill above a large and beautiful lake, I know that the health of our planet concerns her greatly, as it does all of us.

I hope to see you at this wonderful concert, full of variety, with poignancy and joy, depth and levity!

Warmly,
Rebecca

March 1, 2022

Dreamscape: Realizing a Better World

 from the DIRECTOR'S DESK

Dear Friends of Sacred and Profane,

I don’t know about you, but I was more surprised than usual this year by how quickly the days became short and the nights landed earlier than expected. There’s something about that darkness that makes me want to hibernate a bit, spend more time both with my dreams themselves and contemplating the idea of what dreams can represent – the possibility of the future. Dreams have long served as a poetic metaphor for building a more just world for all and of realizing our true selves. Sacred and Profane’s upcoming concert, Dreamscape: Visions for a Better World, mines the idea of the dreamworld as a space where all things are possible, including mystical imaginings, hopes for the future, and actualized personal experience.

Our concert will include the Finnish composer Sibelius’ Drömmarna (Dreams), an evocative work that imagines a world in which our deceased ancestors walk among us in the shadows. We will sing Vaughan-Williams’ “The Cloud-Capp’d Towers” from Three Shakespeare Songs, a harmonically rich setting of the soliloquy from The Tempest in which Prospero states “We are such things that dreams are made of.” This is among my favorite of Vaughan-Williams’ works. It reminds me of Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books, a brilliant surreal interpretation of Shakespare’s final play.

The singers and I are excited to return to Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, which we last sang in 2015. The text by Whitacre’s best friend and frequent collaborator Tony Silvestri tells the story of Leonardo fantasizing about his crazy idea of building an airplane. Whitacre paints Leonardo’s position in 16th-century Italy beautifully by referencing every trope of Italian Renaissance madrigals. I attended the premiere performance at the 2002 American Choral Directors’ Association Convention in San Antonio by the Kansas City Chorale under the direction of Charles Bruffy, and was riveted by the Italian madrigalism in the writing, the evocative word painting, and the brilliantly colorful performance of the ensemble.
 

Composer Melissa Dunphy

A concert that explores dreams as metaphors for social justice would be incomplete without a work about DREAMers, the thousands of DACA recipients who dream of permanent residency and citizenship in the United States. Melisssa Dunphy is a composer I have long admired and I’m excited to present her “#United We Dream” from the multi-movement work American Dreamers. I love how she adopts an American musical language, a la Aaron Copland, musically stating that everyone who lives here is an American, regardless of origin or background.

People started telling me about the Jewish-Swedish wunderkind composer Jacob Mühlrad several years ago, maybe because as fellow Jewish-Swedes in choral music, we are a rather rare breed. I finally met him at an SF Cappella concert in San Francisco a few years ago and he generously loaded my arms up with a bunch of scores that I’ve been pouring over since. I love Jacob’s complex and yet mystical musical language and I’m excited to share his Dreams, a powerful setting of a poem by the inimitable Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, in this concert.

Composer Trevor Weston

S&P co-commissioned Trevor Weston’s remote choral work Martyrs about the twin pandemics of Covid-19 and the murder of Black and Brown people at the hands of the police for our March 2021 virtual concert. As a result of that experience, I became a true-devotee of Trevor's music – I think he is one of the most profound voices in American music today, period, and now that I’ve found him and his music, I’m not letting go. I can’t wait to bring you his moving setting of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final speech, Visions of Glory, in our upcoming concert and I guarantee more to come in the future.

I first heard a vision unfolding, Derrick Skye’s setting of his own text, sung by the remarkable choir EXIGENCE under the masterful director of Eugene Rogers, at the Chorus America Conference in Chicago in the summer of 2018. Hearing that performance was life-changing and I’ve been chomping at the bit to perform the work with S&P ever since. Skye’s piece is an affirmative statement of racial justice and social change – something that we need much more of in this world in which we spend so much time examining the torment of oppression and not enough time celebrating the joy in communities of color.

Composer Michael Bussewitz-Quarm

I first met the gifted composer Michael Bussewitz-Quarm at a Chorus America conference several years ago. Ever since, I have wanted to program her music, but the right moment didn’t present itself until earlier this year, when I contacted Michael to see if she might be interested in writing a piece for us. I told her about our plans for this concert’s theme, and she eagerly accepted the challenge of composing a work based on her experience of realizing her dream of becoming a woman and the journey that has led her there, with the full support of her loving family. A few months ago, Michael delivered to me a remarkable tour-de-force, Now is the Time, a piece that celebrates the joys of family life, while also honestly portraying the struggle of living in a body that does not match one’s gender identity. She is now living as a woman and happily married to her wife of many years. Sacred and Profane and I are deeply honored to be entrusted to present Michael’s story in what I am convinced will become a significant work in the choral canon.
 

I’m looking forward to seeing you at these remarkable concerts December 9, 10, and 11th! And also wishing you all a very happy holiday season.

Warmly,

Rebecca

December 8, 2022