Straight Tone and Sacred Space: Sonus Choir’s Christmas in the Parthenon
On December 13th and 14th, the Sonus Choir gave a fantastic Christmas concert in Nashville’s Parthenon, performing before Alan LeQuire’s massive re-envisioning of Pheidias’ 42-foot Athena. Situated in the heart of the so-called “Protestant Vatican,” the program drew from Catholic, Protestant, Pagan, and newly composed hymns—a concert that could only, quite literally, happen in Nashville. Sonus is a modern acapella choir led by the indefatigable Timbre Cierpke, its founder and musical director who conducted the concert and composed or arranged a number of pieces on the program.
The evening I attended, December 14th, was ridiculously cold for Tennessee, but the music warmed us all right up. They opened with the traditional Carol of the Bells, which was teased on Channel Four last week. One of the things that allows Sonus to stand apart from other choirs in the area is their sound—a “straight-tone” shorn of the warbling vibrato that typifies choral singing.
To many ears, straight-tone singing is aurally associated with popular singers, folk song or historical/traditional singing (think historically informed Medieval or Renaissance performance of music traditionally sung by a boys choir in a cathedral). As is typical with these types of associations, it is a broad simplification. Popular singers often employ straight tone as a foil to a vibrato—gradually allowing the vibrato to develop in a depiction of the singing character’s emerging passion or maturity. It sounds pure, clear, and bright, and allows for seamless blending, but to be done well and without strain, straight-tone requires strong breath support and consistent diction. In the folk song setting, straight-tone sounds as though the music is of the common folk. In all of this Sonus is outstanding.
The style was remarkable, especially in contexts where the Christ child in the manger is part of the imagery, with the vocal part expressing a childish innocence. Beautiful in Rutter’s arrangement of What Child Is This (featuring Shae Lime’s beautiful soprano) with soaring accompaniment balanced by grounded lower voices. Molly Hanson and Natalie Royal also deserve mention in this area for their performance of Willcocks’ A Child is Born in Bethlehem. I would love to hear Sonus sing the “Little Drummer Boy,” maybe next year?
However, as a music history teacher, I connect that straight-tone sound to the boy choirs of the Medieval Catholic church (and the historically informed exemplars I teach from), which, for me, connect directly to the old Catholic rite. Further, these recordings are often made in cathedral spaces (or with production techniques) that create a very long decay—mimicking the sound of Notre Dame, Paris, or some other ancient religious space. The layers of irony here in the Parthenon, with its high ceiling, columns, stone walls, 5 second decay and its monstrous statue of Athena created a post-modern collage of imagery. This was especially apparent during the performance of Ola Gjeilo’s The Spheres, a piece whose ancient Catholic text belies its content as a spacey, choral work and a “spiritual journey” with a circling five-note motive and gently layered dissonance that created an ethereal sound. The overtones floated like a warm, beautiful haze in the air of the Parthenon. In his music Gjeilo seems to have more universalist inclinations than missioning for his apparent Catholicism.
As I listened to this space music celebrating a Christmas holiday, I wondered if perhaps it was the experience of Caspar, Melchior and Balthazar, probably Zoroastrians, as they might have felt when they looked up to see that star of Bethlehem so long ago. They were, it is said, the first Gentiles to recognize the Child, and their perspective was, one imagines, universalist.
Intellectual associations and ruminations aside, the music was simply beautiful. The people around me were smiling and downright jovial after intermission (cocktails were served during the break). In the sing along I think we all felt a little closer to being part of an authentic community of Nashville at the onset of the holiday. Quite appropriate if one remembers that one of the Goddess Athena’s roles in society was as the Guardian of the City and promoter of its prosperity and peace. Did you know that Sonus just released a new recording?
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