We’re a week away from our last concert of the season. “Seikilos to U2″ promises to be a great show! We are delighted to tell you that in addition to our ambitions – of covering 2000 years of Western Music History in 90 odd minutes (including intermission, because why do anything by half measure?!) – you can also expect a pre-concert talk by our creative director, Jennifer Rodgers Beach.

In her own words, you can expect much music geekery, including “Gregorian chant as medieval scat.” Really, you gotta be there.

This is also our season’s concert for a cause, to support arts education in Fairfax County and beyond. And to that end, we’re also very proud and delighted to partner with two great organizations, OneVoice and Creative Cauldron, who represent the best of that mission.

OneVoice brings together children from across the globe through the universal language of music – OneVoice helps them sow the seeds of peace, love, and understanding in themselves. Or as they put it, brilliantly, “Power to the (little) people.”

And in fact, money raised at this event will fund art supplies (brushes, paint, paper) and music supplies (recorders) for the children at the Kakenya Center for Excellence (www.kakenyasdream.org), the primary school that OneVoice will be visiting in Kenya in just a few weeks.

Closer to home, Creative Cauldron is a not-for-profit arts organization providing opportunities for learning and participation and enjoyment of the performing and visual arts whether you’re eight or ninety-eight. Each year, Creative Cauldron provides about 7,000 in scholarships, so that children from families with financial need can participate in its after school and summer camp programs.

Please do come! We’ve had one of our most successful seasons and we’d love to finish it on a high note and with a full house. We still have plenty of tickets. And you can now avoid the rush at the door and buy them online!

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The Danish Radio Concert Hall, Copenhagen - terraced seats allow for a better view and sound for all.

Ada Lousie Huxtable’s review of Victoria Newhouse’s book, “Site and Sound” is good reading for anyone who enjoys live music, especially of the formal-ish/performed in a concert hall variety of live music. Huxtable, like many others, makes some trenchant observations of how our idea of performance spaces came to be and, frankly, how lame they are at times.

What really happened during the Byzantine artistic and political process of creating Lincoln Center? How did a group of “patrician white males,” as she so coolly characterizes them, and a consortium of architects working at a time when modernism had developed its own “establishment power elite” create the model that set the conservative consensus for a generation of performing-arts centers that followed? (Think Washington’s Kennedy Center, a bland box of posh banality in a location of daunting public inaccessibility.)

Needless to say, that last bit about the Kennedy Center resonates. And then some!

For far too many today, live music is expensive, remote, and two-dimensional. And we’ve been conditioned to think of this situation as the norm, the logistics especially – musicians on stage, audience in seats, director’s back to the crowd. Which means audiences routinely lose out on one of the most interesting, human, sometimes funny, and occasionally very revealing parts of a performance – the give and take between conductor/director and performers/choir.

We singers know all the ways in which a familiar piece of music is interpreted and shaped. The audience doesn’t see how that happens because they don’t see how the director coaxes that out into performance. The audience doesn’t see that that the director, at all times, has near constant eye contact with all the performers, so she can lead, time, warn, or encourage. And it’s fun to see that!

C3P0 conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in 1977 - maybe he had eyes in the back of his head?

As for the performers, if it’s a traditional box-shaped room, we don’t have any clue how the audience is responding in the back. They’re a many-tiny-headed blur, especially if the lights go down when the music starts. We’re almost glad when we see people waving their lighters or cellphones in solidarity or appreciation, “Oh look they’re still there!” Or, just as bad, they’re on three sides, so the audience is looming over us from all directions – gee, no pressure there! – and we don’t see anyone over the first level unless we crane our necks.

Enter the idea of music in the round. It can be tricky for the singers, and it can take audiences by surprise when the music organically emerges out of the crowd without a declared start. VCS should know, we’ve done it several times, especially in our last concert, the Celtic Arts Festival. And it is work. But it can be so much warmer, so much more human.

Audiences tell us that an evening became that much more unforgettable because they felt like they were part of us, of that wall of sound. All of a sudden they were part of this big thing that carries as much as it sustains. And you, the audience, have no idea how much we enjoy your reactions when a lone voice begins to chant Latin, or a perfectly harmonious hum floats over the murmurs of intermission. Kids stop fidgeting, heads bob, your voices still, and then you simply settle into the warmth of great sound. We know you’re listening, we see your faces and if you like what you hear. And like all performers, none of it means squat to us if you don’t like what you hear.

Mark Vogel, at Aesop's Fables, March 2011

You know that image of the swan? The one where all you see is the quiet, graceful, efficient glide above the water while the feet are pedaling furiously under the surface? Yeah, that’s Mark Vogel for you.

Buy tickets online here: http://theravishinghourmcclean.eventbrite.com/
Orc-20 will reduce the $30 orchestra seats to $20
Stu-10 will reduce the $15 student tickets to $10

Mark (far back, at piano) at VCS rehearsal, March 2012

Poster art for May 2012 concert - artwork by Steven Keen/Keen Method

Seikilos? Who’s that? More like “what is that?” Per handy Wikipedia, the Sekilos epitaph is:

…the oldest surviving example of a complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone, near Aidin, Turkey (not far from Ephesus). The find has been dated variously from around 200 BC to around AD 100 but the first century AD is the most probable guess….While older music with notation exists (for example the Delphic Hymns), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.

We’re going to go from that to U2. With the history of Western music in between. In 90 minutes.

Tickets will be available shortly – stay tuned!

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Vienna Choral Society Poster for the Celtic Arts Festival - March 17, 2012 (double click to enlarge)

It’s “concert week” for the VCS, but instead of perfecting our line-up, getting our folders in perfect order and pressing our concert blacks (well, okay, we’re doing that too!) – VCS is preparing for a festival!  It’s a joyous and, in my mind, BEAUTIFULLY executed chaos of artists:

• from the full 75-member chorus to a minstrel and his guitar (Rich Follett), from a Celtic fusion band (Tinsmith) to the more traditional Irish Breakfast Band and from a gaggle of energetic youth drummers (the VES Jammers) to two accomplished youth soloists – a dancer (Katherine Hughes) and a fiddler (Eammon Carolan).
• Jewelers, weavers, bakers, printers, facepainters, crafters

We’re a choral society – why not have you sit down and sing you a concert?  Well, lots of reasons!

First – great art welcomes and complements great art!  The mixing of our large chorus sound with bagpipers, banjo and flute, fiddle and drum is a chance to fill you up with rich experience and surround you with sound and music.

Second – a body of culture as old as the Celtic tradition is a rich tapestry and it’s wonderful to be able to present it as such.  Sure, there are lots of great choral arrangements out there, but so much of the music has its roots in smaller settings and we’re able to bring you all those pieces – so why wouldn’t we?

Third – I could go on and on, but I’ll make third about my reasons for the singers – this concert is an opportunity to dig into the music in a different way and develop skills that are more rare to find time for.  Here are some examples:

• We have gotten to know our choral arrangements on a deeper level – exploring the nuances of the text and shaping and bringing out subtleties that sometimes are hard to get to.
• We have had the time and confidence-building to present difficult a cappella singing
• We have added more atmospheric elements and have the opportunity to surround you and sing with you!

So – we are full up this week with not only rehearsals, but play lists for the two stages, call sheets for the various artists, decorations for 3 large spaces, arrangements for craft tables and vendor sales, volunteer coordination, and on and on…  And we are excited to do it!

I hope you’ll join in the chaos and take it all in this Saturday afternoon (Vienna Elementary School, 1-5pm!!)

Jennifer

Vienna Choral Society's Celtic Arts Festival Schedule, March 17, 2012

Here’s a sneak peek at who’s singing where next weekend at the Celtic Arts Festival.

Join us for an afternoon of music and art.

March 17
from 1 – 5 pm
Saturday, March 17, 2012 
at Vienna Elementary School

We’ll have this schedule conveniently in the concert program as you walk in the door, but since some of you have asked, we’re happy to give you a quick look!

So. Got your tickets yet? They’re available right now, buy them online.

delicious pasties with savory fillings - all sorts!

Per the company’s website, “Some say it’s the oldest food to go.” And, “the pasty is best known as the traditional food of Cornish tin miners (dating back to the 16th to late 19th centuries). The pasty was easy to carry and provided a hearty, substantial meal to keep a hard-working miner going all day. When the tin in Cornwall was mined out, the miners emigrated all over the world and took their dish with them, including to parts of the United States.”

We asked Mike “The Pasty” Burgess to tell us more about himself, his company, and pasties. He obliged, just has he has when some of us have gone in to ask for that one last pasty.

Q: Five fun things you’d like to share about Pure Pasty?
Fun Thing 1, having fun working in Pure Pasty is really important. All our staff are happy and willing to joke with everybody. Attitude is everything and it has to be a good attitude.
Fun Thing 2, although tasting new dishes is vital testing, we really enjoy that process.
Fun Thing 3, it’s soooo hard not to eat chocolate and pasties all day.
Fun Thing 4, all the team are so passionate about food, they bring in all kinds of items they made at home as treats for their colleagues.
Fun Thing 5, Our customers are the best. Seriously. I have never met a nicer, well-mannered crowd, I really look forward to serving them every day. As people know I like to chat.

Q: Tell us something fun we don’t know about you.
I have wanted to do this for so long, it’s like a dream come true. My original plan was to open in Colorado so I could snowboard every day in winter, little did I know how precious spare time would be. I have never had a restaurant before, I was an IT manager for HSBC.

Q: What does St. Patrick’s day mean to you?
Beef and Guinness pies. I love them. I sometimes don’t want to sell them so there will be more for me.

Q: How many pasties a day?
How many do I eat? Too many.
How many do we make? It averages out about at over 1000 per week.

Q: PASS-ty, not PAY-sty. How many times a day do you have to tell people the difference?
I only tell people if they ask me, how it’s pronounced. I feel it’s rude to tell people uninvited. We are always having fun with British versus American pronunciations, plus words and phrases.

Q: What music do you and your staff listen to while you roll out (is that the right term?) all those pasties? Do you sing?!
We have a huge range of music tastes. It’s more of who can get their iPod on the docking station. Mines more cool Britannia, Oasis, Coldplay, Snowpatrol. But we fly off with jazz, and big band sounds too. Liz is obsessed with U2. Nicola starts dancing to anything from ABBA. Sometimes I get tempted to sing along, but that is usually drowned out by the complaints from the kitchen, and apparently it attracts stray cats.