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..."