Artist Roundtable: The Composers of MECIENDO

The multi-GRAMMY® award winning ensemble The Crossing, led by Donald Nally, delivers an enthralling program of contemporary choral compositions with MECIENDO from Navona Records. New works from six composers unknown to one another and yet wondrously aligned; their music weaves together seamlessly, even mystically, into a meaningful story of spirituality and interconnectedness.

PARMA Senior Content Writer Shane Jozitis recently connected with the composers of DIMENSIONS VOL. 5 to learn about the inspirations, processes, and realizations behind their works. Read on for an exclusive deep dive into the creative minds of Christopher Jessup, Leanna Kirchoff, Anne Kilstofte, Karen Siegel, Deborah Kavasch, and Carol Barnett.

What do you hope listeners will take away from experiencing the works on MECIENDO?

LK: It seems like an obvious remark to make but it amazes me that given the same choral medium each composer on the album can have such an individual approach and impart such a unique musical stamp. When I first heard the full album it was very exciting to encounter each new piece and find the thematic threads and ways that the pieces complement one another. I am hoping that listeners will enjoy the exquisite performances of these pieces by The Crossing, but I also hope that there may be some listeners who want to try these pieces out with their own choirs and enjoy them in a more direct and personal way.

CJ: The Crossing has been described as a choir that “hates sounding pretty.” I hope MECIENDO will stretch listeners’ ears so that they can truly appreciate the extraordinary beauty of “un-pretty” music.

What are some of the most challenging aspects of composing choral music, and how do you push the boundaries of the genre or experiment with new approaches?

AK: I embrace composing choral music because I love to sing. I play and sing everything I write. I try to create new sounds or encapsulate new meanings by sometimes re-structuring a poem to capture or emphasize what is said. I look for new ways to express vocal sounds, not necessarily traditional sounds, but acoustical — using healthy vocal production (here you see the pedagogue at work, sitting through hours and years of voice lessons, as singer, teacher, or accompanist — always impressing healthy vocal techniques). In Soft Footfalls, for example, I use the “ssssssss” of snake tongues of water, which is a consonant singers avoid. I accentuate it. In Starlight Night I use a dynamic marking found in instrumental music, but because of many text repetitions it creates freshness — something unexpected. I hope listeners feel a new perception of the words. I found Starlight Night, set in several different forms — short, long, and extended. Finally, speaking of challenges, I feel that if I haven’t fully transmitted a poet’s words, I have missed the mark. I will often change it, but it’s disappointing. I hope to always be my harshest critic.

KS: The connection between a singer’s human experience and their instrument is both a source of beautiful expression and potentially problematic. If a singer is feeling nervous about executing a difficult rhythm correctly, that can easily impact the sound they produce. While the singers of The Crossing are uniquely able to sing extremely challenging passages without batting an eye, most of the choral ensembles I work with are likely to see the quality of their sound suffer if the difficulty level is too taxing. So my greatest challenge when composing choral music is finding practical solutions for making my musical expressions comfortable and not too difficult for the singers. I gently push on the boundaries of what an ensemble can do by limiting the area of difficulty to a single musical element. In Love Lines, for example, I use standard jazz harmonies that make the pitches relatively easy for singers to find. This frees me up to do something more complicated with the rhythm, as in the middle section where I layer two different metric patterns.

Choral compositions often engage with texts from various sources. Is there a particular text, be it a classic poem, a historical document, or a contemporary speech, etc. that has profoundly influenced your work?

DK: In my doctoral student days I was attracted to both humorous and serious texts that could be enhanced with both traditional singing and extended vocal techniques. I set Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat for chamber choir with a narrator using inhaled speech for greater pitch and timbral ranges, and vocalists using ululations for a hooting owl, nasality for the pussycat, and an improvised rainforest section “where the bong tree grows,” followed by a long overtone drone on the final “moon.” 

At the opposite end of the spectrum was the text from Mozart’s powerful and emotionally wide-ranging Requiem, especially his poignant Lacrimosa dies illa. In my setting of portions of the mass, I tried to emulate the earth quaking with ululations, the rising of the dead using vocal fry and multiphonics, and both the “dies irae” and “lux aeterna” underlaid with octave singing in various ranges and very different moods. 

Yet traditional singing has a unique beauty and power as heard on MECIENDO in Feather on God’s Breath. Its text by Linda Bunney-Sarhad is based on the writings of Hildegard von Bingen, and the imagery, spirituality, and purity I have sought to portray is beautifully executed by The Crossing.

CB: Poems dealing with the Orpheus legend have always intrigued me. I’ve set two: A Tree Telling of Orpheus (Denise Levertov) and Orpheus (John Fletcher). The chance to enhance the poetic telling of the Orpheus story with music as well as expressing how his music affected his listeners is irresistible. The longer I compose, the more I become interested in researching the historical and cultural background behind the text that I’m setting at the moment. This might include listening to music from the era during which the text was written as well as discovering what else the author wrote and what his life was like when he wrote it. I find that the more I know about the circumstances surrounding the text, the better I can enhance the author’s intentions with music.