Kids Around the Bay

On the Horizon: Battle Hymns

There’s an exciting, huge event on the horizon: April 26-28, the enterprising Volti Chamber Singers join forces with the San Francisco Choral Society, the Leah Stein Dance Company of Philadelphia, and the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir to present David Lang’s Battle Hymns. The piece, which includes writing from Sullivan Ballou, Stephen Foster, and Abraham Lincoln, had its premiere in an armory in Philadelphia in 2009.

It has not been performed since, owing largely to the demands it makes on would-be producers. Large forces,choreography and on top of that, a suitable space. Indeed, finding a home for the project in San Francisco was itself a project: Fort Mason was too big and stark; Fort Point, under the Golden Gate Bridge, was too noisy; Pier 70 has a concrete floor that doesn’t encourage dancing; Theater Artaud at Z Space was too small; the Presidio wouldn’t open buildings that might have been suitable. … All of which left Kezar gym, next to the stadium. It seats 4,000 but this production is designed for an expected audience of around 500.

But chorus master Robert Geary was not to be denied and he has communicated his enthusiasm to everyone involved.“It’s hard to convey the emotional impact of this,” says Barbara Heroux, executive director of Volti. “When I saw it in 2009, I was just blown away. It kills you. And then with the addition of kids it becomes even more powerful.”

A whole family is singing in the performance. Cynthia Adams, 48, is a teacher from the East Bay who has been with the Choral Society for five years. Although she didn’t study music in college she has participated in several community choruses over the years. Her children are in the Children’s Choir, one in middle school and one in high school. When the children heard about the project they begged their father to join the Choral Society so the whole family could sing the piece together, and he did.

“The piece is really important to us as a way to think about war and its impact on society,” says Adams talking about her initial interest in the project. “Also Battle Hymns is just so different from standard choral repertoire. You think of a group of singers standing in rows on a stage with an orchestra in front, but this is completely different: The singers and dancers are moving throughout the space in a very choreographed way. The music is a cappella and it all comes together as a very moving reflection on the Civil War, and war in general.”

“One of the parts of this that I particularly like comes at the end. The particular music is called Beautiful Dreamer and you hear that as the singers, including members of the children’s choir, wander through the battlefield, among the wounded and dead. The battle has ended and they are observing, and perhaps reflecting on, the ramifications.

“As a performance, this is very engaging. There’s so much movement going on, there’s a lot to watch.”

Music in the Schools Series: Bay School of San Francisco

Periodically, the Kids Around the Bay column profiles one of the local school music programs, to provide parents with a sense of the resources and philosophy offered, as well as how programs compare. This week we spoke with Colin Williams of The Bay School of San Francisco.

The Bay School of San Francisco was the brainchild of Malcolm Manson, one of the most revered, and modest, private school educators in the Bay Area. He lead the school initially and since then has tried to withdraw from time to time; he remains the school’s assistant chaplain. ‘Bay’, which has 311 students, opened in 2004 in the Presidio. It has a reputation for being focused on science and technology and, always in the background, the study of ethics and religion. The school’s academic culture grows out of a sense that in the long run the world is better served by specialists rather than generalists, and as a broad notion, depth of knowledge trumps breadth.

“I would say that overall we also value a mindful approach to education,” says Colin Williams, a history teacher, who also oversees the school’s instrumental music program. The program tends toward jazz, but includes electronic music and a very successful 20-member school choir. “Having said that, we’re not a Buddhist school by any means, but certainly we believe that meditation can play a critical role in helping students master their emotions and achieve their goals.”

“When it comes to music, this mindful approach asks students to be both thoughtful and deliberate in their creation. Recently, I had a beginning jazz student who kept asking me, should I do this, or should I do that? And I said, I can give you some suggestions but really the question is, did you like what you just played? And, if not, what are you going to be about that? How can you rethink this?”

“One of my goals is to make students more self-reliant and get them out of ‘body’ habits and into habits of mind. That’s one reason I get them to sing scales and melodies before they play them. It’s so easy, as a musician, to fall back on what’s easy, what’s been achieved, and so I press musicians to get out that trap, because, of course, repeating what you’ve already done is not improvising. My question to students is, what can you create, what’s something new you can do with this?”

Williams has been with the Bay School for eight years, He graduated from the Loyola University, New Orleans, plays electric bass and upright bass, and appears with his trio, from time to time, at various venues around the Bay Area.

“I’m interested in the art of improvisation — this is really what distinguishes us from other school programs — and one way to do that is to get students to notice structural similarities. And so we might study the Gershwins’ 1930 hit “I Got Rhythm” and those famous “rhythm changes” as a way to introduce 500 other songs with the same chord structure. In other words, the idea is to see a template and work toward an intrinsic knowledge of songs and playability. Naturally, we also study scales and melodies and how using one approach might not sound good but then you can use another approach and get the sound you want. The idea is to use your knowledge and creativity to make the music your own.”

Music studies include courses in electronic music, jazz, and composition. Facilities include a band room replete with instruments that students are encouraged to experiment with. There’s also a practice room and, occasionally, private teachers have used the facility to work with a particular student. Bay does not recruit music students, which would be “contrary” to the school’s culture, as Williams put it. But ensembles do play at various middle schools around the city, and if that attracts students so much the better. Students who are musically inclined at Bay have gone on to such places as Oberlin and the Berklee College of Music. Tuition for 2013/13 is $37,600.

About Town

March 23-34, various times in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Mateo: San Francisco Chamber Orchestra family concert, “Shall We Dance.” For entertainment and educational value the SFCO family concerts are the best shows in town — inventive, relevant, interactive, and hosted by the funny, down-to-earth, and expert conductor/educator Ben Simon. And this particular one is even better because it involves not just the orchestra but also members of the Berkeley Ballet Theater’s Youth Company. What’s better than that? It’s free, just like all of the SFCO offerings.

March 24, Saturday, 2:30 p.m., Stanford's Bing Hall: Making Books Sing: Louis Armstrong, Jazz Ambassador. We feel kind of bad recommending this one, since practically every event at Bing Hall, Stanford, this season is completely sold-out. Still, some ticketholder or other might die between now and Sunday, and you’d want to be first on the waitlist, wouldn’t you? Making Books Sing is a company that turns books (or nonfiction stories) into musical theater. In this case, they’re working in collaboration with an all-star band assembled by the Stanford Jazz Workshop, to tell the true story of jazz legend Louis Armstrong, who, in the 1950s, was a cultural ambassador for the U.S. State Department. Then came the first big tests of the Civil Rights Movement, the Little Rock nine, and Armstrong, perhaps to his own surprise, made strong statements on the politics of race at the time. An artist, even one as dedicated to music as Armstrong, cannot always stand aloof from what is happening around him or her. It’s a genuinely human story backed by superb music. What more could you ask for?

Composer of the Week: Johann Sebastian Bach

You probably have heard of today’s birthday boy: Johann Sebastian Bach was born on the first day of spring, 328 years ago, in 1685. One of the most widely performed and beloved musicians of all time, Bach was a ferociously virtuosic organist and keyboardist who, crazy as this might sound, actually did improvise some of his incredibly detailed fugues and preludes, writing them down later. He was a workaholic, which, given his schedule of teaching, composing, and ensemble-directing, was probably the only way to survive his main gig as the Cantor of Leipzig.

His most famous music is instrumental: the Brandenburg Concertos and several other concertos, the Orchestral Suites (from the second of which comes the “Air on a G-String”), unaccompanied suites for violin, cello, and for keyboard, the Goldberg Variations for keyboard, the 48 short preludes and fugues of the Well-Tempered Clavier (meaning “The Well-Tuned Keyboard”, the most famous music pedagogy books of all time), not to mention the preludes and fugues for organ (including my favorite, the “St. Anne” fugue.)

But don’t forget to check out the best of his many vocal works: Besides the Mass in B Minor and the two settings of the Passion, there are a number of wonderful cantatas (and since it’s just about Easter, you could start with the Easter Oratorio). Among musicians, Bach is the man with two brains, the unapproachable apotheosis of great music-making in the Western European tradition.

Don’t forget to look up Bach in SFCV composer directory, for more fun facts, music, and useful info.