Julian Wachner - Recent Press

This Friday, we thought it would be fun to take a break from singer profiles so you could get to know the person who LEADS all of our singers... Music Director Julian Wachner.

Learn a little more about him through Patrick McCoy's The Wachner Project:...29 Hours in the Life of Noted Composer.

Or hear him describe this Sunday's Mahler program to Classical WETA's Deb Lamberton in this "Mostly Mahler" conversation.

Best of all, come experience the concert and his conducting in person on Sunday at what is sure to be the choral marathon performance of the season. With huge orchestra, massive choir, children's chorus, and stellar soloists, this "Mostly Mahler" concert is one you won't soon forget!

Reflections from Dianne Peterson

Guest Blogger: Leah Wu, Alto I

Dianne Peterson, Executive Director of TWC, has been with the Chorus for 27 years. Read about her rich and varied time here, including some of her favorite memories.

Dianne, center, with members of the TWC staff at the French Embassy, November 2010 (Photo: Wayne Guenther)

How long have you been with the Chorus, and what brought you to TWC?
Well…it’s hard for me to even remember life before The Washington Chorus. My husband and I moved to this area in 1984 and two weeks later I was singing Beethoven’s 9^th at Wolf Trap! My priority wasn’t unpacking, or worrying about my baby at home—I just needed to find a great chorus, and quickly before the season started.

How has your role and the Chorus itself evolved since then?
There's no simple answer to what happened to the last 27 years since that first audition. I came to this job through the back door; it just happened. My degrees are in music and I had always sung, but with the move to DC I ultimately left a career in retailing. Instead of going back to the pressures of the fashion industry I wound up taking on the challenges of the performing arts. In 1987, I slipped into the position of the Chorus’ first full-time administrative employee. My first job was General Manager. I was responsible for handling all the concert arrangements, including those on performance day when I lined up the chorus, gathered the soloists, then scrambled to get on stage… and sing.

In the late 80’s our wonderful volunteer-staffed community chorus was quickly turning into a business with escalating expenses—union orchestras, expensive venues, nationally recognized soloists, etc. We knew that we needed to step up our fundraising capacity. We rented our first office space. We changed the structure of the board, slowly hired more professional staff, and my job morphed over the years into what it is now. We grew and grew, and the time has flown by in a flash! In 2006 I stopped singing in the Chorus; it just got to be too much. But my heart is still on stage with the altos!

Do you have a favorite concert memory?
That’s a really tough one. There have been so many, and for me, each concert has a story (sometimes more like an adventure!) behind it. A story that starts with the initial concept and budget, the marketing fundraising, etc., and all the things that can go right, or wrong (like the blizzards of 2009!) along the way…right up until concert day. But in the end, it’s the magic that happens on stage that makes it all worthwhile.

If I had to pick one concert I would have to single out our Britten War Requiem in 1995 and the connection with the Department of Defense as a part of the 50^th Anniversary world-wide commemoration of the end of WWII. We had hundreds of veterans in the audience, and the NPR recording of the concert led to our Grammy win in 2000. It was a five year long adventure! I was at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles and will never forget when they announced us as the winner! We never expected to win. That was a thrill of a lifetime and quite the fairytale story.

At the Grammy Awards in 2000

I also have so many memories of many times when the Chorus has come together in song for the loss of loved ones—so many memorial services, when our collected emotions were best expressed in song. And certainly the Fauré Requiem we put together right after September 11^th is in a category of its own.

What’s a favorite TWC travel memory?
Oh, I could write a book on our six tours, most especially the first one to Spain in 1994! Talk about adventures. No one could make it up -- falling 17^thCentury gargoyles, corrupt tour directors, falsely advertised concerts, getting stuck in Majorca with no round-trip plane tickets to get to Barcelona for a concert the next day, and then finding out minutes before that concert that the soloists hadn’t been paid and had gone home without telling us—this all happened, and much more. And yet, those fourteen days are seared in my mind as some of my all-time greatest concert memories. We sure did bond as a group!!!

The evening of the falling gargoyle, Spain tour 1994

What’s your favorite part about working with the staff? And the board?
My pride in them—that’s the favorite part. I’ve been lucky to have hired so many talented people through the years. And many have gone on to great jobs in the arts all across the country. In a small office, everyone has to be a team player and everyone should be prepared to do what’s needed to get the job done, and to work long hours. We have a great time and all support each other. And our wonderful TWC board is so committed to the Chorus. At board retreat last fall our facilitator commented that he had never seen a board where “everyone was on the same page.” How great is that?!

What keeps you going season after season?
We’ve accomplished so much in these 50 years. I’ve had the opportunity to work side by side with two outstanding musicians – with Bob Shafer for over 20 years and now with Julian.

I’m so motivated about where the Chorus is going! The search and appointment of Julian as our music director was a critical time in the history of our wonderful organization, and for me personally. It’s been a wild ride and I haven’t looked back since. Under Julian’s artistic leadership we are doing great things and diving into the next 50 years!

But more importantly, it’s the wonderful people in our organization that keep me going. We’ve always been like a big family and I don’t believe that the spirit of a volunteer chorus can be found in any other of the performing arts. There’s nothing like it. It’s not a gig for the singers, it’s a passion. And although I’m not still singing, how lucky am I to be working in a field where so much enthusiasm and passion is the norm!!

Meet two more singers! Want to meet more of our singers? Want to share your own story? We'd love to hear from you. Happy weekend, everyone!

Musicians, New Age Tools and Music (New and Old)

Guest Blogger: Lloyd Randolph, Bass II

This season's "New Music for a New Age" concert on April 3 prompts these reflections about how humans interact -- with each other and machines -- in creating, delivering and enjoying music.

The human voice is mankind’s oldest music-making device. On April 3, in Gospel Cha-Cha, we sang of "the cry that became music."

But humans tend toward tool-creation, and in time (precisely when is debated), we developed tools to assist us in music-making. Some think the first dates back more than 50,000 years to a carved Slovenian bear bone capable of playing a diatonic scale.

In this new age, to create and consume music, we’re more inclined to use some form of computing device. These were quite evident in our preparation for our April 3 concert. In a dress rehearsal, composer Elena Ruehr revealed that she used the software Finale (and I suspect a personal computer) to create the score for Averno. Electronic files (in .mp3 format) of this never-before-performed work were created (presumably with this hardware and software). The files were made available to members of The Washington Chorus from a server connected to the internet. To familiarize ourselves with Averno, many chorus members downloaded these files with our computers and played them back with some sort of electronic gizmo. And in rehearsal, Julian relied on a tablet computer with a metronome app.

But our tools cannot replace or even fully replicate what singers convey. Julian reminds the Chorus of this truth when in rehearsal he sometimes instructs us not to create the merely precise but cold sound he calls -- wait for it -- "digital." In the talkback session after our April 3 concert, Elena made a similar point when asked whether, for Averno, the Chorus had generated the sound she intended. She acknowledged that her computer’s rendition of Averno influenced what she expected (and said that the Chorus had performed the work with a high degree of accuracy). But then she said that what the Chorus delivered so far transcended computer-generated sound that if forced to choose, she'd have to throw her computer away.

By this I understood her to mean that the human elements in any musical performance are irreplaceable. Random bleeps from a machine cannot match what musicians deliver to people. And tools, however sophisticated, may process, but cannot truly grasp, what humans perform. Rather, sentient beings convey meaning to the similarly conscious. Singers’ ability to do so is not unique (for example, a bugler conveys meaning to troops when he plays reveille or taps). But singers have greater capacity for conveying meaning with more specificity to a broader audience than musicians relying solely on tools to generate sound. The reason is simple: uniquely, singers use words. In this 50^th year of our organization devoted above all to the human voice, that reality provides cause to reflect – and to celebrate.

What electronic tools do you use in your music experiences?

Photo credit: Patrick Carlson

Friday Singer Profiles

This Friday, meet two special singers: an Alto I representative and a Bass II who also serves as a member of our fabulous Board of Trustees. You can check out more singer profiles here, or click here to fill out a profile if you're a TWC singer yourself.

Meet Two More TWC Singers

Here are two more singers from our wonderful TWC community. Happy Friday, everyone!

You can check out more singer profiles here, or click here to fill out a profile if you're a TWC singer yourself.

New Music... It Really IS New!

Guest Blogger: Catherine Davies, Soprano II

So, we did it. We "slid into home," to use Julian's analogy, performing at our peak for the New Music for A New Age concert: Elena Ruehr edition. Sure, it wasn't perfect. Sure, I know I could and I'm sure each of us on stage could point to at least 3 things we did flat-out wrong. Who cares? What a special afternoon it was, and here are three reasons why (for me).

First, this one: "What a joy it was to walk into the performance space and see such a diverse audience: young, old, black, white, college students, professional musicians and music lovers in general," Patrick McCoy wrote in the Washington Examiner. Amen. Who says new music is anathema to Washington DC audiences? A friend in the chorus told me that she recognized one of her former students in the front row. She hadn't seen him in quite some time, and seeing him after the concert, he explained that he had seen 'New Music' in the title, thought it sounded interesting, and came with his whole family!

Second, this one: the three minutes of silence at the end of "Averno." OK, so I wasn't in the audience and I don't know how many people were letting it all sink in vs. wondering if the piece was really over. Regardless, after that whole, complicated work that dealt with an important idea and which we sang as well as we possibly could, I felt an amazing sense of communion between all of us in that room: singers, instrumentalists, soloists, Julian, Elena, and the audience. And some friends of mine, whom I know from a completely different part of my life and didn't know they liked choral music at all, found me afterward and told me how transfixed they had been by "Averno."

Finally, this one: Performing new music presents a wonderful and (seemingly) overwhelming challenge. The sense of accomplishment for singing a concert like New Music for a New Age is wholly different from that of singing Messiah. It's like the Race to the Moon, or "going where no man has gone before," or getting an A in Physics in high school (English was more my subject). You have to eat your Wheaties, as my college choir director told us--in other words, stay sharp, use parts of your brain you haven't recently, count like the dickens--all in service of music for which you have no frame of reference. And then suddenly, when everything comes into focus, like it did with Elena Ruehr's music at New Music for A New Age, I'm hearing it for the very first time right alongside the audience. And it was beautiful and moving. And, of course, unlike anything I'd ever sung before.

For further reading: Find Anne Midgette's review of the concert in the Washington Post here, where Ruehr's music is described as "melodic and luxuriant, [bathed] in the springy rich sound that massed voices create on the ear and studded with quotes from past composers..."