S2 E09: Who's watching whom? Mass Observation by Tarik O'Regan
On this week’s episode of In Unison, we focus our discussion on a specific composition and its premiere performance: the remarkable “Mass Observation” by composer Tarik O’Regan, premiered in 2017 by the University of Michigan Chamber Choir and Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Jerry Blackstone.
Music excerpts
Mass Observation, by Tarik O’Regan, performed by the University of Michigan Chamber Choir and Percussion Ensemble under the direction of Jerry Blackstone.
Episode references
“Oresteian Trilogy,” by Darius Milhaud
“Ecstasies Above,” by Tarik O’Regan
Choral Singing in America (documentary)
Theme Song: Mr. Puffy by Avi Bortnik, arr. by Paul Kim. Performed by Dynamic
Episode Transcript
Intro [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to In Unison, the podcast for choral conductors, composers and choristers, where we interview members of our choral community to talk about new music, new and upcoming performances, and discuss the interpersonal and social dynamics of choral organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. We are your hosts. I am Zane Fiala, Artistic Director of the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. And I'm Giacomo DiGrigoli, a tenor in IOCSF, the Golden Gate Men's Chorus and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. And this is In Unison.
Zane [00:00:44] Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of In Unison. Today, we're going to be focusing our discussion on a specific composition and its premiere performance. And that composition is the remarkable Mass Observation by composer Tarik O'Regan, premiered in 2017 by the University of Michigan Chamber Choir and Percussion Ensemble. Now, of course, we know you are all very interested in hearing from the talented people who helped bring this composition to life. But we also wanted to be sure to give you some musical context as well. So we will be playing multiple extended excerpts from Mass Observation's premiere performance at various points within the conversation. We also want to encourage you to go and check out the whole piece. It's available on YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify and links are in our show notes. All right. Without further ado, let's get right into it with the opening movement of Mass Observation, the Prelude.
[00:01:39] [Music excerpt: A bass drum is struck loudly followed by rolls on goblet drums, accompanied with low notes sung from the bass section of the choir. This pattern is repeated several times with the addition of other percussionists and more sections from the choir]
Zane [00:04:54] I think that set the stage nicely, and today we are very fortunate to be joined by several musicians who were involved with the premiere. So talking with us today are the composer of the piece, Tarik O'Regan, a British and American composer who has worked with a wide variety of ensembles and organizations, including the Dutch National Ballet, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and well, a whole lot more. Tarik has also been recognized with two Grammy nominations, as well as two British composer awards. He has been recorded on over 40 albums and he was just named the first ever composer in residence for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Chorale. Welcome, Tarik.
Tarik [00:05:40] Hello. Thank you so much for welcoming me. A delight to join you from here in San Francisco. And despite being a composer-in-residence for a baroque orchestra, I am in fact, alive. So thank you.
Zane [00:05:52] [laughter] Fantastic!
Zane [00:05:54] Also joining us today is Dr. Jerry Blackstone, professor emeritus of music. And at the time of the Mass Observation premiere, the director of choirs for the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater and Dance. Welcome, Jerry.
Jerry [00:06:09] Thank you so much, Zane. It's a pleasure to be here.
Zane [00:06:12] Beautiful. With their help we'll be dissecting the technical aspects of the score, the emotional experience of the performance, and, of course, asking all of the best nerdy choir questions on our listeners' behalf.
Giacomo [00:06:26] [laughter]. We are also lucky to be joined by three of the performers who participated in the premiere. And those folks are Dr. Adriana Tam, a singer and conductor and one of the soloists for Mass Observation, who is also the director of choral activities and at Randolph Macon College. Hello, Adriana.
Adrianna [00:06:43] Hi, everyone!
Giacomo [00:06:44] And lastly, we've got Tanner Tanyeri, one of the original percussionists in Mass Observation, who is currently a percussion grad student at Juilliard, as well as the first place winner in the Solo Division of Black Swan Percussion Ensemble Showcase in 2018. Welcome, Tanner!
Tanner [00:07:01] Thanks for having me!
Zane [00:07:03] Yaay! Welcome, everybody.
Giacomo [00:07:05] Woo-hoo!
Zane [00:07:05] We're so, so glad to have you all joining us today to talk about this amazing work. So let's jump right in. Tarik, maybe you can begin by giving us a description of this remarkable piece of music. So what is Mass Observation and how did this piece come to be?
Tarik [00:07:22] Well, I'll do my best to answer this. There's obviously some very tricky composers talking about their work, but I'm gonna give it a go. So, the first thing to say is it begins all the way back in 2009, I think, with a... Jerry reaching out to me about a commission for University of Michigan ensembles that he ran. And over various discussions, I decided I wanted to write quite a significant piece. So the work's about 40 minutes long. And I remember... um, step in at any point if I get any of this wrong, Jerry or anybody in fact. I remember, you know, as you end up having these discussions going to... I already knew Jerry's work from his, you know, phenomenal career. But I went up to University of Michigan to see the... specifically, the choir in action, but also some of the other ensembles. And you were performing that gargantuan Milhaud work. And it's so, just it's staggering. It's a staggering piece. It's huge. And, you know, what I was immediately taken away with was a moment in the piece that felt almost like sort of spoken word, poetry with percussion. And this sort of specific combination of voices and percussion and equal partnership suddenly began to sort of dawn on me.
Tarik [00:09:06] And I was very aware being in the room, watching just how skillful the percussion ensemble and players were, and this dynamism between the voice and the percussive instruments to me spoke very strongly. So I started thinking that I wanted to write this work for those two forces and for them very much to be in dialogue, sort of a piece of equal parts. And in that there wasn't always this idea of the choir being accompanied, let's say, but rather that there's a discussion going on between the percussionists and the chorus. So I decided I was going to write a piece that ended up being for six percussionists and for a, in the way it was premiered, a chamber choir. And how big was the choir when we did it?
Jerry [00:10:01] Probably about 40.
Tarik [00:10:02] Yeah, right. So and it was, it was... that kind of... that kind of forces. And, you know, it's a credit to, you know, both the University and to Jerry that they went along with this idea [laughter], which was, you know, I mean, this was this was a commission very much coming from the choral side of things. And for me to come along and say, "Look, would you mind sharing the limelight with the percussionists?" So, and in my entire... you know, my career, it is a joy to work with people like Jerry and everyone else on this, you know, call who are open minded. I think that's a lot of the way that music begins. So, over the years, I began thinking a lot about devices, for want of a better word, devices that we hold in our hand, um...computer devices that we are using now, for example, and just thinking and thinking about other things like very, very long terms and conditions that we sort of automatically click "yes" on before we download the latest, whatever it is, iTunes or Apple Music or whatever it is. And just beginning to think about this sort of mixed relationship that we have with devices and the way that we have a complicated relationship in that we want to utilize all the, all the elements of their ability to follow us around. But the relationship is somewhat symbiotic. So we like it, but they like it as well. And it's... it can feel a sort of tricky relationship over time.
Tarik [00:11:49] So I started thinking about this a lot and then just really starting from there. And I remember reading an article, for example, about... It was an article about drone pilots actually. And it was about this idea of psychological trauma that drone pilots incur because they have this sort of very, very deep sense of surveillance, visual surveillance with regard to, you know, the things that they're asked to do and if they're violent and horrible, involve killing people.
Tarik [00:12:29] There's a, there's a direct psychological trauma. So there's, again, this idea of sort of surveillance that is really problematic. Problematic and at the same time, I'm on my phone with my Google Maps and wanting to like, you know, know and it knows where I am. So... so that began happening. And I started going forwards and backwards in time trying to find texts that would speak to this sort of complicated relationship that I have with the subject matter.
Tarik [00:12:59] And so I put together, as I've done in several other pieces, a sort of libretto of excerpts from a variety of sources. You know, going right back to things like Jeremy Bentham's treatise on criminal surveillance called the Panopticon, which, you know, sort of gives you an idea of what the 18th century jail might look like. But the idea is not only that prisoners can be surveilled, but they always are aware that they are under surveillance. And so, again, it's this... it's this bidirectional thing. And then I created this sort of framework that is a... is a large sort of palindromic framework. So it begins and ends in the same way. And really, again, it's sort of looking in on itself in that regard.
Tarik [00:13:55] And so, yeah, the piece is in sort of 13 movements, some of which are for percussion only, some of which are for voice only, some of which are mixtures of the two in various combinations. And really, it's... it's a sort of meditation. The piece is a 40 minute meditation on our ambivalent relationship with surveillance in which large percentages of the piece, not everyone is performing. So there are elements of listening and watching each other in the work because you might have sections where it's just the percussion and you have 40 people who would ordinarily be singing, you know, in silence. And those so that's the work really. It's that the sort of rough background and what and a sort of sense of where it is.
[00:14:45] And I should say one thing about the title: Mass Observation plays on a number of things. This idea of the performers observing each other and the idea of a group coming together in a ritualistic sense, such as a mass, but also it's named after a sort of British, not quite governmental surveillance program, but actually as a sort of an early way... going back to the 1930s, a program that was ended up being called Mass Observation, which was the idea that sort of social science experiment to surveil and get a sense of what people were thinking, what the average person on the street was thinking using very old fashioned methods, which was overhearing what someone might be saying in a pub and writing it down, but also interviews. And it really... this is a program that ran from the 1930s, late 1930s to the 1960s, and involved some pretty interesting people putting it together, documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. But interestingly, also people that I've worked with that whose work I've come across in completely separate environments, such as the poet Kathleen Raine, who I have set, particularly a piece called Threshold of Night. That's her poetry. I... until I was writing this piece, I didn't know of her connection with this sort of social experiment called mass observation - this British social experiment. So that's... I mean, that's a sort of long answer to a short question.
Zane [00:16:17] OK, here's a bit of Movement Two, titled "Watching: Argus Panoptes", which sets texts from a couple of different sources. At first it's a part of Poem 72 published by Emily Dickinson in 1890. And then towards the end of the excerpt, the text is from "Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica", written in 1914 by H.G. Evelyn White.
[00:16:41] [Music excerpt: Several pitched (crotales, glockenspiel, tubular bells, vibraphone, etc.) and unpitched percussion instruments are played to produce a shimmering, chiming effect before the chorus enters on long sustained notes. This trade-off between percussion and choir continue to increase and diminish in volume and complexity over the course of the excerpt]
Zane [00:19:35] Jerry, how much back and forth did you have with Tarik during the composition process? Did you guys get to chat about the piece before it came to you in its finished form?
Jerry [00:19:48] We chatted often, I think, and there would be, you know, spaces where we didn't interact too much. I went to Tarik and said, you know, we're interested in commissioning you for this. Well, actually, the genesis was this: A donor to the University got to the... to the music department, the school of music, and said, "I'd like to give some money to commission something substantial. And you can choose a composer and you can choose the subject. And... and here's what I'll do." And so that opened the door for us to dream. And so then I went to Tarik and said, "We'd like to commission you on a major commission to write a long piece, a long(ish) piece for choir. And I'd love to have something else, you know, whether it's percussion or..." The door was wide open. I didn't suggest subject matter. I was interested in seeing what Tarik was interested in writing about. And we went back and forth. We chatted in New York City one time. And you came out and we would... we'd go maybe stretches without communication. And then and then we'd say, OK, here's where we are.
Jerry [00:20:55] So I knew the subject matter, the overall subject matter of observing and and watching and sort of the... slimey is not the right word, but a little spooky side of [laughter]... of being watched all the time, you know? And I was thinking about this just yesterday, in the little preparation for this, and I thought... You know, this was premiered in 2017. The difference is... we settled for so much more observation right now than we did in 2017.
Jerry [00:21:22] I mean, if someone could come up to you and say, "Where were you on March 15? Someone has just come down with COVID. Were you there? You know... did, did you... you came down with covid. OK, who did you see in the last 20 days?"
Jerry [00:21:35] I mean, we would never have thought of that in 2017. So we did think of, you know, stoplights. Somebody's watching you, you know? It's all being... and if somebody commits a crime now and if it's not on tape, we just think, "Well, that's horrible! Why didn't they have that on tape?" And we're just used to that now. Everything that's criminal is on tape. So... and it sparked the performance in rehearsal, sparked a conversation. You probably remember, Tarik, having lunch with a fellow at the university who was in charge of basically hacking, you know, guarding the university's grades from being hacked.
Jerry [00:22:19] His office was security for the university, about hacking of financial information from people at the university. And he was so interested in this piece because of that. It didn't really go much further. But it certainly opened up some good dialogues. And...
Tarik [00:22:33] I think... well, I think you've hit upon something. Which is the way that the subject matter from when we first, when I first started thinking of it over 10 years ago to when it was premiered four years ago, to now...
Jerry [00:22:47] Mmm-hmm.
Tarik [00:22:47] ... Has, has stayed with me and just keeps changing over and over again. And I, I describe it as my own personal relationship is deeply ambivalent and deeply pendulum like. And so, you know for example, body cameras on police officers. Without that kind of surveillance, the... the critical and urgent reckoning we've had with racism and police... that simply wouldn't have, you know, really wouldn't have happened. And not only with that, but also with people with the ability to record things in their hand. You know, cell phones have an instant ability to record, you know, mass injustice that we've been aware of for some time. But I think there's this critical thing that's happened with that. And so I feel very, very complicated about it, you know. I feel to this day and I think that was always in the piece with that.
Tarik [00:23:49] I was trying to create an unease. That's sort of the fact that this is a living technology. And my own thoughts go back and forth and sort of... To this day, it's very complicated. I personally have a very complicated relationship.
Giacomo [00:24:07] But that's actually very interesting and leads me one of the questions I wanted to ask the performers, which is... We are all suddenly very self-conscious of the fact that we are performing for whatever it is that's observing us. And as performers, this is a question for, for you all. We live and breathe and die based on our sensitivity to one another when we're performing. In preparing this piece, what did you think about, what was going through your mind? Did you think about things like the imagery of the Panopticon? And how did the topic of this piece impact your sense of self reflection as you were preparing it?
Adrianna [00:24:47] I will say that when that solo came up in movement, let me see, I have the score here, in Movement Four, [starts singing] "to say all in one word", I have to admit, I was not thinking about the Panopticon whatsoever. [laughter from Jerry] I was counting. I was counting. I was counting... [laughter from Giacomo] The percussionists have been playing for a while. I think I grabbed the pitch from a tuning fork and I just thought, "Don't mess up. Don't mess up." [laughter from Jerry] That's one... one of Jerry's favorite things to say. "Don't mess up." And so that's really primarily [laughing] what I was thinking about at the time. It's a nice melody, Tarik. Thank you! Like, you know... Tritone followed by another perfect fourth and then a tritone and another tritone. Perfect! [laughter from many]
Tarik [00:25:34] Yeah, it's really hard..
Adrianna [00:25:36] What I love waking up to sing! [laughter]
Tarik [00:25:36] That's really... I mean, I ought to say from the outset this is a very hard piece. Uhhh... Yes, a very hard piece.
Zane [00:25:45] Let's get a little taste of Adrianna's difficult solo in Movement Four titled "Boundless Informant: The Inspection Principle". Here, Adriana sings a text from Panopticon written in 1791 by Jeremy Bentham. And then the chorus follows with text from Ballad of Dead Friends, written in 1910 by Edwin Arlington Robinson.
[00:26:08] [Music excerpt: marimba, temple blocks and vibraphone are played for a few bars before the soprano soloist enters, followed by chorus and additional percussion]
[00:27:27] But yeah, Adrianna, that section [quotes passage from soprano solo] "To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception to all establishments whatsoever in which a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection." Which, you know, lends itself to this discussion. But obviously, I feel it's quite a nasty text to sing also as a soloist, because you're under Jerry's inspection and uh conducting and the audience is... You know, performing... performing is a form... You know, think about that as a form...
Adrianna [00:27:57] Absolutely!
Tarik [00:27:57] ... As a form of surveillance as well. So but I remember you, you performed it with such elegance and panache, Adriana! [laughter from Zane].
Adrianna [00:28:07] Thank you. But you're right. Jerry's observing me, who at the time was my teacher. Everyone in the audience is observing me. All my peers are observing me. But I remember rehearsing that. And you were in the room with us and you asked me if I could sing it. [sound of dog collar jangling] Oh, sorry! That's my dog. You asked me if I could sing that with maybe more... menace?
Tarik [00:28:28] Oh, right!
Adrianna [00:28:28] You know, thinking about the imagery that makes total sense and watching the performance on playback, I thought, "Oh yeah, I wish I had sung that with a little bit more creepiness." [laughter from Zane] When I was... in my opinion, in hindsight, it was too elegant.
Tarik [00:28:44] [laughter] It was great. It was great. [laughter from Zane]
Jerry [00:28:46] Tanner, how about you? As a representative of those percussionists who... you had to count like monsters? [laughter from many]
Tanner [00:28:53] Well, yeah, I do remember the I mean, the percussion parts were quite tricky. Especially, uh... it's kind... the very metered... I remember you describing it as like this, like surveillance. Very like... Uh... it's hard it's hard to describe. But the running, like, sixteenth note runs on marimba. I just remember, umm... and the harmonic language is very hard to get a grasp on, you know. Nothing really repeated either, which, you know, while you're learning, it was kind of a huge headache. But listening back, I was like, yeah, very effective.
Tanner [00:29:32] I do remember generally in the rehearsal process feeling like I was in a... I had to be in a heightened state of awareness for a lot of things. I mean, the choir behind you and also as a percussionist, normally we're in the back of an ensemble. But for this performance, you're in the front. And I remember being significantly more aware of how I was presenting myself just because, you know, you couldn't necessarily, like, take a little breather, like, you know, let yourself slouch over. You're just standing in front of the choir, very clearly observed. So, I remember it being quite a challenge to put together. So, yeah, it was fun.
Tarik [00:30:14] You... you were all great. I remember.
Zane [00:30:15] [laughter] I wanted to pivot a little bit and talk a little bit more about the technical specifications of this piece and especially the percussion part, because I'm not a percussionist and I think that it's fascinating to see the number of instruments that only six individuals played. So I was hoping, maybe Tanner, if you could take just a second to kind of give us a list of all the percussion instruments that are featured in the score and maybe give us an idea, a better idea of what some of them are like. I know what a marimba is. I know what a cymbal and a triangle are. But like some of the other instruments I was a little bit perplexed by. And so I thought maybe you could kind of give us a rundown.
Tanner [00:30:59] Yeah, of course. I'm just gonna pull up the video just to give myself a visual reminder of everything. Probably the most unconventional, which I thought was a really unique orchestrational choice, were the umm... I think we all had a doumbek, which is a Middle Eastern hand drum that normally you play on your lap. And I think for logistical reasons, we had found ways to mount them just so it made getting to the other instruments easier. But like at the very beginning of the piece, we have these pretty fast tremolos—rolls on the head. I believe it was to like I mean, I always heard it sounding like, you know, rainfall or something like that. I'm not sure if I'm misremembering that. That's probably the most striking, at least of instruments. There's a there's sort of a hodgepodge of a drum kit on one side, which with several racks of gongs and behind the player and woodblocks, your sort of standard keyboard percussion instruments you might find in the back of an orchestra, like a glockenspiel, chimes or the tubular bells, many actually a lot of metallic percussion instruments, which we play in canon at the very beginning, this theme that comes in and out first on crotales, which are antiques cymbals that are tuned similar to glockenspiel. What else did we have? We have triangles, a bass drum, bongos.
Zane [00:32:36] What's a tam tam?
Tanner [00:32:36] Oh, a tam tam is um... yeah. [laughter from many]
Tarik [00:32:42] It's like a jeopardy answer [indecipherable conversation with laughter]
Tanner [00:32:47] It's a... it's a gong. Most people would recognize it as a gong.
Zane [00:32:58] Oh....
Tanner [00:32:58] Not to get too percussion-nerdy but a gong is usually pitched and a tam tam is unpitched. It's the only difference. Yeah...
Adrianna [00:33:04] I am unpitched. [laughter from many].
Jerry [00:33:04] Except when needed. Then, you're really pitched.
Tanner [00:33:13] But yeah I think, I think that about covers it. I think the more striking ones are the resonant metals, like the sparkly canon that's at the very beginning and the... those doumbeks that come in and out at the beginning and at the end of the piece.
Zane [00:33:27] We're going to back up just a bit now and hear the section of Mass Observation where the sparkly pitched percussion instruments are playing in canon. This is the beginning of Movement Two, "Watching: Argus Panoptes" and all of the text you hear is from Poem 72, published by Emily Dickinson in 1890.
[00:33:47] [Music excerpt: Sopranos sing a long sustained note, gradually decrescendoing to a stop. Pitched percussion instruments of crotales, glockenspiel and vibraphone are then played in an extended passage marked with intricate interplay between these instruments and additional percussion, i.e. tam tam and tubular bells]
Zane [00:36:15] How difficult was it really this piece of music for a percussionist?
Tanner [00:36:20] I think it depended on the passage. Some, some parts were... Honestly a lot of it... Let me think of the best way to... Well, a lot of it was like just rehearsing as a percussion section. I think we were just a little confused because it didn't it didn't quite make sense without the choir or, like, it made so much more sense once we heard the choir that was playing. Because, I mean, we would play for X amount of bars and then in our parts it's just blank space. But there's this gorgeous, like, choir writing that's happening in between these episodes. And I think a lot of... the most challenging ones were the uh... those kind of more rhythmic sections where the drum set comes in, where you're constantly playing up and down the instrument as well. I remember those taking the most time and preparation ahead of time.
Zane [00:37:18] Yeah. What about Jerry for the choir? So I'm assuming that the choir learned and rehearsed this piece a whole lot before the percussion ensemble got involved. So what was it like that very first time that you brought the percussion ensemble in and you got to hear the whole piece start to come together the way that it was intended? What was that emotional experience like?
Jerry [00:37:41] Well, we have a really, really great pianist, rehearsal pianist who can play everything at the keyboard. And if, if it was unpitched, he would tap on the piano or whatever.
Zane [00:37:50] Wow!
Jerry [00:37:50] So there was really not a big surprise when we came to the instruments the first time because we were used to that... to the pitches. Now, what we weren't used to was the timbre, you know, for, you know, as Tanner talked about, the sparkly set, well, were very different than you would get on the piano. So I think the singers were sort of surprised at the various colors that were presented. I don't think they were shocked that this is more difficult. I think they were probably shocked that it made more sense about how things fit in.
Jerry [00:38:31] Tanner was saying kind of that as well. It made sense when we all were in the same room. And that's always hard to do, you know when, when the choirs have a rehearsal schedule and the instrumentalists have a rehearsal schedule. And somehow we kind of have to break those bonds and get everybody in the same room at the same time. And it's never as much time as you'd like to have, especially in a difficult piece. I would say one of the challenges for me as a conductor and I think also maybe for... Well just I would say several challenges. First of all, the overall tempo is relatively slow. And Tarik asks for real subtleties, maybe from 56 to 60, you know, beats per minute or 66 to 72. I mean, those are very subtle differences. And they make a huge difference when it comes to the pacing of the piece. And because it's palindromic, you're going to some place and maybe increasing the tempo, just very microscopically and then coming back from that tempo. And as a conductor, it's easy to sort of get carried away in the heat of the moment and then say, well, that's not what's on the page. [laughter] That's not what he's imagining. And then you begin to breathe more and can put it in perspective. And then somehow imagining this whole thing as a unit, you know, how do we know how do we make sense of the whole piece? It was a real challenge, I would say. You know, some of the meter changes were tricky. And... but it made more sense when, when everybody was together.
Tarik [00:40:14] It's... it's really interesting hearing everyone say that, because that's one of the things that fundamentally the piece doesn't make sense, right? Until it's all put together and or just doesn't make sense. No. It's a piece that doesn't make sense [laughter] until it's put together.
Tarik [00:40:32] But I mean, one of the pieces of mine that is done a lot is a piece called "Ecstasies Above", which is a setting of Edgar Allan Poe, and that's for string quartet, chorus and a soloist. Now, that piece is often rehearsed completely separately. And it's a piece that I hear over and over again from people singing it, particularly the vocalists, but also from the string quartet. There's like... until we were all in the room together, I had no idea what this piece was. And that really stuck in my mind specifically about that piece when I started writing Mass Observation because it came back to this idea for me and I could touch on the various things that other people have said and getting back to this idea of dialogue and this sense of being in this strange relationship with surveillance. And so, you know, dialogue for me, I find the concept of rehearsing separately extremely interesting. I find... And I know, I knew that this piece would be rehearsed separately and I know that's the nature of the way these works are. And there is something about getting each group, sort of getting locked into a comfort zone of what they know. And it's still not quite making sense. Then coming together and it being a little, a little uncomfortable. But you begin to see the whole. But this idea of sort of separate dialogue then coming together and being forced to watch and listen to each other, you know, really was of interest to me. And it affects all the many of the other aspects of the piece, you know. For example, Tanner, this idea of the... I mean, the first thing about the, you call them doumbeks, my family's North African, so we call them darbukas. So I was very interested in handheld percussion because of handheld devices. I wanted this idea of something that's, you know, a tapping and.... it's, it's that beginning of something that's we're holding, you know. It's so intimate, this thing, this device that we hold in our pocket or in, uh... You know it physically vibrates sometimes. You know, this intimacy, it's tactile intimacy that also has this slightly colder surveilled, problematic sense as well. And that's sort of the same canons that you hear in the percussion. Ah. Or rather the same canons. Yes, the same canons you're hearing in the percussion are in a sense, given melodic contours in the metal. So you get this relationship between the, the handheld unpitched percussion and the metallic pitched percussion. And there is this dialogue taking place there. And I think similarly, Shohei, with regard to this sort of very homophonic tonal center to the work "I listen to the stillness of you", versus the more dissonant contrapuntal gnarliest sections, again, is about contextualizing the "I listen" moment because that piece exists. You know, I extrapolated that section as a piece in its own right. And I can tell you that that piece works a certain way in the concert hall as an extrapolation. It is an entirely different experience when you hear it in the middle of Mass Observation. And again, it's all about our relationship and dialogue and viewpoint and contextualization. So those are some of the things that I'm sort of thinking about hearing you talk about how not only just how he put the piece together, but remembrances of the work. But it's I mean, the other thing I should say is it, it was very hard to write and it was late. It was either delayed or late because, because it was... [laughter] What Jerry was saying is, is this idea of very, very small differences making a huge impact.
Tarik [00:44:37] And I would sit there with this piece more or less written thinking, "I need this, you know, I need to move this around so that the whole is perfectly balanced." And it was these ridiculous things where it was like, "No, it needs to be fifty six, not 60." [laughter]
Tarik [00:45:00] But it's one of those things. And in that process, you know, you end up changing other things. But it was a very strange piece to write. Which was, in some sense, it was written... 90 percent written months and months and months before I handed it in. It was just sort of sitting there [laughter] with, like, sort of trying to balance it. Very hard!
Jerry [00:45:19] One of the challenges of, of working on a piece like this is to be, as a conductor, to be the same person with the choir as you are with the players. So, meaning... not psychologically so much as... you know, if you're working with a choir, you know, you can take a little stretch there. You can take a little more time there. You know, if you're working with the players, they need it, it's probably going to be a little more reliable. The tempos need to be reliable with both groups.
Jerry [00:45:45] And so when you get together, then there is a certain amount of time that's, that's spent in meeting in the middle. You know? Hopefully you don't have to meet in the middle too much, but you can. People are used to this. They're used to that because we have drawn together in a unified way.
Zane [00:46:05] Yeah. I want to go back to the conversation we were having about the tinny, the bright, the high-pitched percussion parts. And I wanted to ask the singers about what that experience was like trying to tune to those types of instruments. Had you had much experience, Adrianna, in tuning to, you know, these high-pitched percussion instruments?
Adrianna [00:46:32] You know, I don't think I was necessarily trying to sing in tune with them, per se, just in tune in general, which might be a good rule of thumb, I suppose. But I do remember... this isn't directly answering your question. But I do remember doing the solo portion, which comes after a long percussion section. And not only was pitch challenging, but also rhythm in the sense that I could not react to it. I remember telling myself I couldn't react to what I was hearing from the percussionist because then I wasn't, I was no longer with them. So I was relying a lot more on sight than I was on my ear in that particular instance. So in... with the crotales, with the sparkles, I don't think that I was necessarily listening to pitch either. But more so I was listening to color and I think we hear that as well. The sparkle kind of color in the duet that later on Allison Prost and Megan Smania sing in this beautiful crystalline tone that they do so well.
Zane [00:47:36] Here's an excerpt from Movement Six called "Prism I: We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves", the text of which comes from two sources: "Glukupikros Eros" written in 1881 by Oscar Wilde, as well as excerpts from "Kew Gardens", written in 1921 by Virginia Woolf. The title of this movement is taken from "Confessions of a Drone Warrior", published in GQ in 2013 by Matthew Power.
[00:48:08] [Music excerpt: percussion and chorus trade and exchange passages with each other. The texture of this passage grows with the addition of the full chorus, two solo sopranos and rolled, sustained notes on bass drum].
Zane [00:48:08] Tarik, I wanted to also ask you about, you know, the juxtaposition of the percussion ensemble versus the choir. You know, they rarely overlap, which we've already discussed. It's kind of a handoff of back and forth. And it strikes me as a conversation. Is that what the idea was? Can you talk a little bit more about why you chose to set it in that way as opposed to, like, choir with accompaniment?
Tarik [00:51:37] Yeah, it's different forms of conversation. So there are different types of, on the one hand, you have sections where there is no singing whatsoever and just percussion and vice versa. And then you have these sort of overlaps as they sort of creep into one another. And so it's kind of... on a macro level it's dialogue between one group and the other. But on a micro level, it dialogue in the way that anyone that scripts movies will tell you one person doesn't stop talking in real life and the next person starts talking. That, that doesn't work. That's unrealistic. If you watch, if you watch a movie and one actor starts to speak, then stops, then the next actor speaks and stops. That's not how people talk. We, we're very used to this problem on Zoom because of the delays. And that's why we have this slightly strange experience on Zoom, because we're not used to hearing ourselves stop talking and the next person starts. We're used to these overlaps in the way that natural dialogue occurs. So my piece, on the one hand, is this broad sense of dialogue, but really it's a microcosm of a conversation where someone, you know, interjects, people pick up the end of a sentence. And so, there's a lot of, there's a lot of that going on in the piece. Almost as if, you know, as if people are sort of arguing about surveillance, you know. [laughter] People would be like, you know, cutting in, cutting in and out of each other. It's a... yeah, it's a... that sort of relationship between the two groups is really important.
Zane [00:53:16] Yeah. I couldn't help but notice that a lot of the percussion parts have a little bit more of a dissonant characteristic to them. They come across a little bit more menacing, for lack of a better word. Whereas the chorus parts, for the most part, they feel to me musically a little bit more reassuring, a little more comforting. The sonorities tend to be a little bit more pleasing. Was that an intentional choice to give those two voices different characters?
Tarik [00:53:44] There's some element of it. I think partly there's a natural way to feel that way, because we are drawn to, I think there's a sort of biological connection as humans listening to other humans sing. That is a sort of strange relationship in itself. But I think what happens with both groups is there is this shift from a sort of tonal... a sort of a more dissonant tonality to a tonal, a more tonal tonality or more modal tonality. And I try to make it almost sort of imperceptible, the sort of general shifts as we go from, you know quite extended chromaticism through to more modal harmony. Both groups do it. And, and the chorus, you know, and they also both go to a sense of being unpitched because there are moments of spoken word in the chorus part. So it's this spectrum of unpitched, moving gradually towards more dissonant tonality, to a more modal tonality. And I think there's something about the human voice that makes it feel less direct than the percussion. But both groups, both groups are involved in that journey.
Giacomo [00:55:15] And speaking of the miracle of the human voice versus percussion, you get to do some interesting things with the human voice, which is to introduce text. And one of the questions I had is, you know, clearly you've got a range of text here, ranging from ancient texts, I think, or references to ancient text, to GQ articles, to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Tarik, how did you settle on the different texts for this piece?
Tarik [00:55:41] I mean, my process for a piece like this is... I mean, if it's an... It sort of goes back and forth. But if it's a subject that I have been thinking about for a while, and that tends to be the way that I think these larger commissions come into being, which is that you don't get the opportunity to write something and then one day wake up, "I know I'm going to write about this!" For me, it tends to have been things that I've been thinking about for some time and feeling that there's a relationship between the commission and a general area of interest that I've had and with general areas of interest, I tend to sort of bookmark articles and reading that I may have come across or just sort of connect things that poetically feel connected in my mind.
Tarik [00:56:36] And so what tends to happen is, for a piece like this, it's just like a big sort of reading list that I make for myself. And I go back into text that I've been collecting and or articles or links on the web or whatever it is, and sort of go back to it and go back to it. And I literally print it out and draw circles to things that I feel are connected. And I whittle it down and whittle it down and eventually sort of try and make a little drama like as if I were just reading this on a stage and I sort of imagined myself doing that. And if I find that I can compel myself, that I can hold interest just as spoken text, then that's where I feel that I've got somewhere to then tell the story musically in terms of, you know, pitched and unpitched sounds.
Zane [00:57:30] So, Tanner, as a percussionist, you know, obviously you never sang any of the text. You never had a chance to have any experience with performing it with your mouth open and saying the words. But did you still find that you were connected to the text when you were rehearsing it with the percussion ensemble? Did you guys talk about the text or look at that aspect of this composition?
[00:57:54] I don't know if we ever explicitly discussed it as a group. But I do remember there's one section where the choir is the... I just remember “niner niner,” like reciting numbers pretty rhythmically. Like I remember, I remember that section in particular. It just colored a lot of the character of what we were already trying to do. And I think that because it's one of the few moments where it really is both choir and percussion ensemble playing simultaneously. So I just remember those accents really popping out and, I don't know, it just kind of informed the articulation that we were going for, or at least that I was like we were trying to think about. So that's the spot in particular that points out to me. But I do remember the "I listen to the stillness of you". I just, I mean, we weren't playing at all there. I just remember really being taken by that in particular, because, again, it was on our page, it was just blank space. But, you know, while you're in the room with it, it really comes alive in a different way.
Zane [00:59:10] This next excerpt is from Movement Seven titled "Interlude III: Numbers Station". And the text of this movement is a transcription of an active numbers station known informally as E11 or Oblique, which for over 30 years has continually broadcast a female voice reading groups of numbers. We will also hear some of Movement Eight, "Prism II: They witnessed the carnage", which sets some more text from "Kew Gardens" by Virginia Woolf. The title of that movement is taken from an article titled "Drone Pilots are Found to Get Stress Disorders, Much as Those in Combat Do" by James Dao, published in The New York Times in 2013.
[00:59:50] [Music excerpt: chorus shouts out unpitched names of numbers, interspersed with fast notes from marimba and drum set.].
Jerry [00:59:50] I remember Tariq saying at one point in the rehearsal, and it was during a long passage of percussion, I don't remember exactly where it was, but he said this is data floating in the air.
Jerry [01:02:04] And there are you know, there are places... very seldom does any of the percussion line up in those long you know, you might have triplets over four beats or you might have triplets and you play the first and you play only the third one or something of that triplet. So all of those things were not it just feels random, but it's absolutely spelled out on the page. But it's like, you know, we're surrounded with this haze. There's these notes, these sounds, these bits of data that are all over the place. And I thought that was beautifully, beautifully put. It put a real image on that.
Jerry [01:02:41] Composers are not always so generous with saying, "I was thinking about this." Tarik, you were very generous with that, which is fantastic. [laughter from Tarik] I've worked with other composers where they'll say, "Hmm..." [laughter].
Zane [01:02:51] [laughter] Yes, I've worked with composers like that, too.
Jerry [01:02:57] Yeah. What were you thinking? You know, why did you choose these tracks? Hmmm... [laughter] And I really appreciate that and found it to be very helpful as we were working on it.
[01:03:07] Yeah. Speaking of "I listen to the stillness of you". You know, this is that text in that part of the piece, obviously, it makes perfect sense that it's something that could be a standalone piece. And of course, Tarik has turned it into a standalone piece. But one thing that strikes me is that it's in a different key. The standalone piece is much... it's voiced much higher than what's in Mass Observation. And I was wondering why the difference and is there a reason it's set low in mass observation? Like, is there a character you're trying to convey?
Tarik [01:03:42] I think it's because the standalone piece has a sort of coda to it that brings it to a resolution. And I wanted it to sort of be landing in quite a low, low on the voice for the basses moment when it resolves. And I think that kind of meant actually pushing the rest of the piece up. So you have this arc where it begins to fall down. And what happens in Mass Observation is, in effect, the piece is cut off by a sort of recapitulation. It's not the sort of... the data, if you like, that the twinkling sound starts breaking into the end of the piece. And so it can sit low, it can sit there. It doesn't need... It doesn't need to further resolve lower. So I think that's why I did it.
Jerry [01:04:37] I will say it's easier to sing it in the higher... in the, in the not Mass Observation key than it is in the latter, which I think is... I didn't have that score here. I think it's a little higher. Starting in C Major always... We had a hard time keeping that in tune.
Tarik [01:04:55] Yeah.
Jerry [01:04:56] Because it's, you know... C Major is death. If you're trying to keep something in tune that's a capella. If it's in E Major or, you know, D sharp or B major, that's all easier than C major. So this was trickier to keep in tune. I remember we really had to think about that.
Zane [01:05:10] Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're getting getting closer to the end of this conversation, but I wanted to take just a second and go through with Adrianna and Tanner and ask each of you to give us give us a little bit of a taste of what this experience, the experience was like for you. If maybe you can give us a memorable moment in either rehearsal or in the performance or a particular part of the piece that stood out for you. You choose. It's totally up to you. But maybe if you could give us a little bit of a flavor of what it was like, because, I mean, in preparation for this interview, I listened to this piece probably four times from start to finish. And it's, it's incredible. It's a long piece of music for our listeners out there. You know, we'll put links in the show notes to the video and to the recordings that are streamable. But it's like 40 minutes of music. It's a, it's a long, it's a long haul. But as a listener, I get to the end and I'm like, "Wow! That was..."
Giacomo [01:06:08] It flies right by.
Zane [01:06:10] Yeah, it flies right by. It just progresses so well and it's just,z it's exceptionally written. But I wonder what it's like as a performer. Does it feel like 40 minutes? What you know, what moments in the piece were really highlights? You know, if you can give us a little insight into that, that experience as a performer. And let's start with you, Tanner.
Tanner [01:06:31] I think the... the experience I remember while performing is once this recapitulation comes back of the sparkly canon as we're calling it, after the middle of the piece, I just remember that, like it just feels... Like feeling really settled somehow or like, I don't know how to describe it eloquently, I guess, but I just I just remember that being not like a relief, like, oh we've we've made it, but I just remember it feeling like we had gone on like some kind of a journey and that we were, you know, it was just a notable recapitulation, I guess.
Zane [01:07:10] Adrianna, what about you?
Adrianna [01:07:12] Apart from the anxiety of coming in at the right time [laughter from many], and with the right notes? I think easily the most memorable part of the piece is "I listen to the stillness." Jerry is such an artist who's in tune with the words, and he used the word "reliable" earlier with tempo. But I think you're also really reliable in terms of how committed you are to the text. And I felt that, you know, as much as we were trying to stay in tune, we were all so committed to that imagery. The length of... is it "the length of a spark, my words fly off a forge."? We were all ready to do that, even though it had been like, I don't know, twenty five minutes and we were tired and counting that we were ready to do that moment.
Jerry [01:08:07] There is a sense when you get to that spot that you can say. I'm just going to relax and sing from my soul. You know, there's been a whole lot of concentration and not only finding your pictures and so on, but your focus, everybody's focus, the percussionists and the singers, you know. It's... You need to be in the zone. And at that moment you can sort of take the blinders off and just say, "Aah, I can just relax." And, and really... maybe there's some hope on the other side of this observation that can be pretty onerous when I just think about a person. I listen to the stillness of you. And that's a really, really sweet moment.
Zane [01:09:00] Well, you've been hearing references to the central movement of Mass Observation throughout this entire conversation. So we imagine by this point you are dying to hear it. All right. Here it is, Movement Te, called "Listening I: Stillness". And the text is from "Listening", written by D.H. Lawrence in 1916.
[01:09:20] [Music excerpt: a choir sings a capella, with all sections of the choir singing the same words together. Long sustained notes marked by beautiful harmony and ultimately accompanied with a few bright notes from crotales]
Giacomo [01:09:22] That is incredibly beautiful and I think a great note to end on for us this afternoon. Thank you for that. One last question as we're wrapping up our time here together for each of you individually, we'll go around. I would love to let our listeners know where can we best observe you online? And do you have any projects that are coming up that you're excited about that you'd love to share with our listeners? So, Tarik, maybe we can start with you?
Tarik [01:12:11] Well, yes. I mean, it's the great social media channels that we all know and, you know, the ubiquitous streaming of various services that, you know, pay fractions of a penny. [laughter from many] You know, keep doing all that lovely stuff. [laughter] In terms of projects, I'm actually... it links back to, you know... I've been on this sort of long term interest going back to my North African heritage on my mother's side, where I began with the ringtone and mentioning the darbukas in this piece... I'm writing a concerto for oud, which is the Arabic lute, or as I like to say, the lute is the European oud.
Tarik [01:13:03] And it's... I'm very excited about it because it's about recontextualizing, you know, those instruments. And I'm, I'm always... I'm always interested in context. And I think a lot of this discussion has been about, you know, recontextualizing things. So that's that, for Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and Richard Egarr, Concerto for Oud. I don't know... everything's so up in the air with regard to seasons and going back to live performances. But watch this space.
Giacomo [01:13:38] Jerry, how about you, where can we find you online and what, what's coming next?
Jerry [01:13:43] I'm really involved in a documentary series of three episodes about choral singing in America...
Zane [01:13:49] Ooh!
Jerry [01:13:49] Singing... the power of choral singing, singing in the community, singing in worship and singing in the academy and the... three or four episodes. It's a huge project, but I... we were spurred on to do this at the beginning of the pandemic when nobody was singing at all. And Tim Sharpe from the American Choral Director Association said, "You know there's really no documentary that sort of says: here's all that's happening and here's all the groups that are singing in America." Now, the research is saying that there are over 50 million people who sing in a choir across the country. And yet, the other side of that is that if I live in Chicago, I don't know what's happening in Kalamazoo. I don't know what's happening in New York. You know, nobody... Everybody knows their choir and their conductor, but not what anybody else is doing. So we want to open that up a little bit. It's pretty exciting. We have choralsinging.org. We have a teaser, we have a trailer. We have a stream-a-thon this coming Thursday night that we're... That we release publicly the trailer. It's... a lot of people are very excited about it and it's pretty cool.
Giacomo [01:14:57] That's fabulous. Adriana, where can we find you online and what are you excited about? What's coming up?
Adrianna [01:15:02] Yeah, you can find me on Facebook, but otherwise I kind of eschew social media. Maybe not the savviest, but yeah, Facebook is great. I will be doing a virtual recital at the end of May through the Yale Club of Washington, D.C., and centered on the theme: mother tongue. So as an Asian-American first generation, my mother will be at the piano. She's a musician as well. And we're gonna put together songs that either meant a lot to us as a mother-daughter pair or... we'll see.
Giacomo [01:15:38] And last but not least, drum roll, please...
Zane [01:15:42] Ha-ha.
Giacomo [01:15:42] Dad pun firmly intended... Tanner, where can we find you and what are you excited about?
Tanner [01:15:47] All the normal, like social media channels, Facebook, Instagram or whatever. Um... As I said at the beginning of the program, I'm still finishing my master's degree here at Juilliard in New York. So a lot of projects with that, even though it is quarantine... some projects with the orchestra, a percussion ensemble giving a recital in May. And besides that, looking forward to, you know, having... sort of incubating a couple of projects for a post-pandemic world. I also... I mentioned a part of this very quirky band with two electric bassoonists, which I'm not sure will interest many choir directors out there.
Giacomo [01:16:26] Oh, what's it, what's it called? Let's give them a shoutout.
Adrianna [01:16:28] I want to know.
Tanner [01:16:30] It's called Slap Slap, [laughter] which might give you some insight on the kind of music that we play.
Tanner [01:16:36] But it's very it's very upbeat, very different from, you know, the more classically trained stuff that we've been talking about here. But, yeah, working on a couple of like an album with that group as well.
Jerry [01:16:48] Tanner, were you a freshman when we did this piece?
Tanner [01:16:51] Uhhh... freshman or sophomore? Can't remember. Yeah, I think sophomore.
Jerry [01:16:55] Yeah. Yeah. Those percussion players were all pretty young.
Zane [01:16:59] Yeah. Yeah.
Giacomo [01:17:01] Well, this was really exciting and great to chat with you all. I know all of these projects you're talking about are super exciting. Selfishly, I'm wondering because I know Zane and I would love to follow up with you all and maybe have another chat someday about anything you are excited about.
Zane [01:17:15] Yeah, for sure. Thanks for joining us.
Adrianna [01:17:16] Thank you for having us. Thank you, Tarik, for writing such a killer piece of music, man, we could talk about for an hour and a half and at the end of an hour and a half feel like I could still go for another hour and a half because there's some questions I didn't get a chance to ask still... [laughter]
Giacomo [01:17:30] Just just listen to it four or five more times. [laughter from many]
Zane [01:17:34] Exactly. Exactly.
Tarik [01:17:35] Thank you very much for focusing on the piece. Thank you for Jerry for bringing it into the world and wish Adrianna and Tanner a big, big part of the piece. And Zane and Giacomo I thank you so much for...
Giacomo [01:17:47] It's an honor.
Tarik [01:17:48] ... Bringing us together.
Zane [01:17:49] Yeah, this is really great. A little reunion for all of you. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you all for joining us. And have a great day. And we will look forward to talking to you again in the future.
Adrianna [01:18:01] Thank you!
Tarik [01:18:05] Awesome!
Tanner [01:18:05] Take care.
Zane [01:18:05] Ciao!
Zane [01:18:05] As we heard mentioned a couple of times during this conversation, Mass Observation is palindromic. So let's go ahead and end this episode like we started, but this time with the final movement of the piece, "The Postlude".
[01:18:16] [Music excerpt: altos sing a sustained note, until accompanied by goblet drums and other percussion. Other sections of the choir enter and the full ensemble, both percussion and choir, make music together]
Outro [01:18:24] Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the In Unison podcast. If you've got ideas for our podcast, please send us a message at ideas@inunisonpodcast.com. And who knows, maybe Chorus Dolores will ask us to talk about it during announcements. In Unison is sustained, nourished, and fostered by you, our loyal and loving listeners. And don't forget to subscribe to In Unison on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @inunisonpod. And hey, if you like what you heard, tell a friend or a section mate. Thanks again for tuning in. See you soon.
Chorus Dolores [01:22:24] Scores will be collected after the concert by Chorus Dolores, who knows you didn't mark anything in pen, right?
Credits [01:22:35] In Unison is produced and recorded by Mission: Orange Studios. Our theme music is Mr. Puffy, written by Avi Bortnick, arranged by Paul Kim, and performed by the Danish vocal jazz ensemble Dynamic on their debut album, This Is Dynamic. Special thanks to Paul Kim for permission. Be sure to check them out at dynamicjazz.dk.