Beard of the Week XXXIX: Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt
This week's beard belongs to Philip Cave, who has recently taken up the post of music director at All Souls Memorial Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.†
Philip Cave (his website) is an accomplished tenor who has sung with the Hilliard Ensemble, The Sixteen, the Choir of the English Consort, and the King's Consort, among others, as well as his own ensemble Magnificat. As you can surmise he makes a specialty of renaissance and baroque music.
This past Saturday, 21 June, as part of the Washington, DC Early Music Festival he led an all-day workshop that he called "Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt: Early Music Masterpieces from Germany". Isaac and I went, along with our early-music cohort HelenJean. It was an exhausting but exhilarating experience.
There were about 60 participants in the workshop. We had a pretty good assortment of men's and women's voices with, perhaps, a slight excess of sopranos (in number but not in vocal power). There was a wide range of musical experience, but everyone shared a keen interest in the music and most were not timid about singing lustily and with often surprising accuracy.
The pace of the workshop was quite brisk. We had a good chunk of repertoire to get through:
- Heinrich Schütz, Cantate Domino canticum novum, SWV 81
- Heinrich Schütz, Ehre sei dir, Christe (from "St. Matthew Passion")
- Heinrich Schütz, Selig sind die Toten
- Heinrich Schütz, Die mit Tränen säen werden mit Freuden ornten, SWV 378
- Heinrich Schütz, Jauchzet dem Herrn alle Welt ("The Echo Psalm"), SWV 36
- Johann Hermann Schein, Die mit Tränen Säen (Psalm 126)
- Johann Hermann Schein, Studentenschmaus: "Frischauf, ihr Klosterbrücker mein" and "So da, mein liebes Brüderlien"
- Samuel Scheidt, Benedicamus Domino, SSWV 259
From about 10am until 1pm we spent our time reading through each piece and then rehearsing bits of it (generally back to front) and then going through one more time. By lunch time we had gotten through each piece, a total of 55 pages of music. We had a brief lunch break and were back to singing by 1:45 in the afternoon. Here our strategy was to revisit each piece in our repertoire to check for tempi and to have one last look at the rough spots in each piece. Our time for rehearsing was limited because at 4pm we had about a dozen people show up to listen to our concert (who knew?) at which we performed each piece. To be honest we performed them surprisingly well, too!
It's all glorious music. I become a bigger fan of Schütz with each new piece I hear or learn or perform. It was just a year ago that I performed the Jauchzet dem Herrn alle Welt with Isaac's choir (see "Beard of the Week XXI: Renaissance Polyphony") and I was delighted to see it again in our music booklet. I'm sure there was a bit of relief from seeing something familiar, but also I was excited to be singing it once again, it is so much fun to sing. The ending of it, a doxology with amen is stunning to hear but even more stunning from the inside, as it were.*
The other pieces were largely unfamiliar to me but they were all good choices, each one with some choice bit to savor. Music of this period is rich in complicated rhythms and delightful and surprising combinations of independent voices that sometimes produce the most startling harmonic effects. you can hear some of that in this not entirely successful performance of the "Cantate Domino". Finding out how the effects are produced by singing one of the parts is a real ear-opening experience. You also find out, if you had any misconceptions about it, that four-hundred year old music is not simplistic music!
You may recall that I don't sing in performance all the much. A couple of musicals a year, maybe, and perhaps a few pieces a year with our early-music nonette (more or less) at Isaac's church. I've been singing early music like this with that group for maybe seven or eight years and loving every bit of it, but this workshop probably doubled my personal repertoire.#
I feel pretty sure that my sight-singing has improved by one big chunk because of the experience. There was no coddling in this workshop. Philip was a good choir leader, effective and efficient and good natured, although he did seem to keep saying, after we'd been through a section once: "Okay, now that you've got the notes let's pay some attention to the words!" Okay, my vocal German pronunciation has also improved substantially and I know more about the words and all the musical painting that goes with them, too.
As I said, it was an exhausting but rewarding–if unusual–way to spend a day.
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† The church is located in Woodley Park, just off Connecticut Avenue on Cathedral Avenue. The rector since last summer is John Beddingfield. This is the church where Isaac became the new parish administrator last December.
* First, remember that his setting is called "The Echo Psalm", because he uses two choirs, the "large choir" and the "small choir", and the small choir mostly echoes what the large choir sings; large choir sings a phrase, small choir echoes, and sometimes there's overlap. With physically separated choirs you get stereo. Anyway, after mentioning the father, son, and holy ghost there is the "amen", in which all the voices of the large choir sing "amen" in overlapping scales and the small choir echoes, also in overlapping phrases. There's lots of "amens" just tumbling all over the place as the harmony moves towards its conclusion, at which point all the voices come together in the closing chord on "a-men", except the small-choir tenors, who sing "a-". Everyone else stops abruptly and the small-choir tenors are left alone singing the closing "-men". It gives me chills. I loved being a small-choir tenor both times.
# In case you're interested, feel free to look at my "Performance Vitæ", where I try to keep a list of stuff that I've performed since 2000 or so, playing 'cello and singing and doing musical theater.
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art, Personal Notebook