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