Overtones

Walden Green on new rituals for choral music.

BASSO

Choir camp was always lonely—it was striking to learn, at age fifteen, how alone you can feel in a cabin full of bunk beds. Every year going back decades, my high school choir would bus out to a campground in New Jersey before the start of the fall semester for a weekend of singing and team-building. I, however, was closeted, horny, and deeply preoccupied with the notion that all the seniors were sneaking out at night and having hot, unprotected sex on the green between the pool and field houses.

I was here because a friend of mine had told me he was auditioning and I decided I would, too. I was here because I’d loved singing and performing for years until I hit puberty in the 10th grade and suddenly could no longer land any of the musical theater roles I wanted. I was here because, even though my voice cracked twice during the audition, I’d charmed the school’s longstanding choir director by dedicating my rendition of “Happy Birthday” (it was the only song I could think to sing) to him.

We had a new director now. This worked in my favor; he and I were both new. My voice had also gotten stronger over the summer, which made it easy to out-sing the other boys as we were called up, one by one, to perform “Bring Me Little Water, Silvy,” a song that scholars of choral music assume to have originated from slaves working on plantations in the Antebellum south. Probably the definitive version comes from early-20th century blues singer Lead Belly, a jaunty ditty of which about 45 seconds have been preserved by Smithsonian Folkways.

Anecdotally, school conductors have a gnarly habit of pairing their often predominantly white pupils with music from the lineage of Black spirituals. It’s a microcosm of a classical music education system yet to fully reckon with its relationship to race, still corny even in its best attempts at inclusion. Whether out of this or the sins of former drama kids like James Charles, songs like “Silvy” can rapidly become irony-poisoned. To give into this impulse, though, is to not only neglect a great and essential part of the American musical canon, but to reject what makes them, in part, so remarkable: their mutability.

“Bring Me Little Water, Silvy” stuns as performed by Lead Belly and it stuns in four-part harmony from a group of high schoolers who have only half-learned their accompanying body percussion parts. One of the beautiful things about all choral music is that it is modular. The staff for each section of a traditional four-part choir—Bass, Tenor, Alto, and Soprano—is an art object and an exaltation in its own right, one laid atop the other to create something that reaches for a higher transcendence than any could alone. In that way, a great choral piece is not unlike a great braided essay. Both create overtones: notes that aren’t sung or played by anyone, but are newly born, like atoms in the primordial soup, from different frequencies of air rubbing against each other. It’s the friction I’m after.

TENORE

Eric Whitacre is the closest thing to a celebrity that the choral music world can muster. To paint a mental picture, he roughly resembles a cross between Keith Urban and Woody Harrelson’s character in the Hunger Games series (i.e. a Chad) and is known for assembling massive “virtual choirs,” which, over the years, have increased exponentially in size to the order of tens of thousands. His notoriety and success make him an easy target for morbid obsession from other conductors.

Over the course of my two-year tenure in high school choir, I performed three compositions by Whitacre: “Lux Arumque,” “The Seal Lullaby,” and “Sleep,” all of which exist in their definitive recorded forms on the album Light & Gold. A fourth piece, “Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine,” was attempted but shelved for its difficulty (within the first of the song’s almost nine minutes, one unlucky soprano must use her voice to replicate the sound of whirring helicopter blades). The irony, as our choir director confessed one day, was that he didn’t even like Whitacre.

Neither do I—I’d go as far as to say Whitacre is anathema to much of what I love about music, and yet I can guarantee that I will return to Light & Gold several times each year with an almost quantized regularity. Among those without formal training of any age, the adolescent voice is particularly rife with imperfection—cracks and breaks, strains for notes it can’t quite reach. That’s why Italian choral music and opera has a tradition of castrati, young boys who were castrated to preserve their voices in their pre-pubescent, “angelic” state. Whitacre’s compositions are engineered to smooth over and conceal not only these symptoms of shifting hormones and vocal cord growth, but any difference between singers at all. The desired result is a shimmering, frictionless, monolithic wall of sound, about as beautiful as a wall of cheap, stained-glass Christmas ornaments. 

Whitacre is akin to the kind of essayist whose work confuses ease of consumption for substance; pull one thread though, and the whole thing falls apart. For this reason, his singers become totally interdependent on each other. Of course he would be so fond of the massive virtual choir; besides the control afforded by post-facto editing, the “blend”—a homogeneity prized in small doses—of voices continues to increase with number. “Virtual Choir 6: Sing Gently,” which features 17,572 individual singers, envisions the ideal choir as gestured toward by Whitacre’s work—barely human. Which, of course, begs the question of what would happen if one were to remove the human aspect from choral music altogether.

ALTO

The impetus for this piece came a few months ago, when Holly Herndon and her husband/creative partner Mat Dryhurst announced “The Call,” an installation currently on display at the UK’s Serpentine Gallery. A scholar of choral history and preeminent thinker in the space of AI-human artistic collaboration, Herndon has released music at the intersection of those domains for over a decade, the best of which can be found on 2015’s Platform and 2019’s PROTO.

“The Call” is something else entirely; not a fixed, recorded composition, it centers around a generative AI that composes in real time and “sings” through “The Hearth,” a white-and-gold structure loosely resembling an organ, which houses more than 120 GPU fans precisely tuned to create music. “The concept of the show is to really take the visitor through the full process of the making of a machine learning model,” Herndon said in a video accompanying the show’s opening, “how we work with AI, how we think about it as a kind of collective achievement, and then how to allow the visitors to experience that in the physical space.”

To train their model, Herndon and Dryhurst composed a book of hymns that included all the phonemes in the English language, then sent it to 15 choirs around the UK. The choice of the hymnal form is relevant here, not only for the historical lineage it places the project in—specifically that of the Medieval and Renaissance eras—but because it is a form with a purpose: to glorify a higher power and edify the self. While generative AI is so often wielded to churn out low-grade slop content, “The Call”’s AI composer is given pride of place in the gallery, encased in a brass box etched with the image of a child blowing into some sort of brass instrument. 

“I think the spiritual undertones from the show come from this searching for new rituals around these new technologies,” Herndon noted in the same video. That ritualism extended to the data collection process, recording sessions with real choirs that drew from the American Sacred Harp tradition. In Sacred Harp, songs are learned in real-time and sung in shape notes (your standard Do-Re-Mi and so on). Often practiced in religious gathering spaces, Sacred Harp singers sit in circles—a contrast to the Whitacrean full-frontal assault of the traditional choral performance, which typically situates performers on a set of staggered risers at the front of a concert hall. 

In this way, Sacred Harp is dedicated more to transmission between the singers than it is to an audience, to allow one to marvel at the capacity of their own voice and what it can do together with other voices. In her review of “The Call” for The New York Times, Emily LaBarge wrote that the exhibition “makes you feel like you are the microphone at the center of a vast chorus.”

While I agree with LaBarge that the accompanying sculptural installations are largely “cumbersome and artless,” that image of a “microphone” has stuck with me, because it positions the observer as both a recipient of that sound and, later, a transmitter of it. The good critic knows that to encounter a truly great piece of art is to become a conduit for its divinity, to commune in the most basic sense. Otherwise, the beauty of a church, or of a hymn, would be totally besides the point. 

SOPRANO

My favorite choral composer of all time is Thomas Tallis, one of the greats from the High Renaissance period of the mid-to-late 1500s. I first discovered Tallis in high school, in an entry of “The Song I Wish I Wrote,” a short-lived video series produced by Pitchfork—where I now work. The episode’s guest was Holly Herndon.

The composition she describes, “Spem in Alium,” represents one of the most historically significant breaks with tradition in any style of music. It was written for 40 singers—choirs of eight spread across five different vocal parts—who, it is speculated, would arrange themselves in a U-shape around the performance space. Herndon calls it an “early, multi-channel surround experience, but using human physical technology instead of using some crazy speaker system.”

“Spem in Alium” begins with only one voice, then one choir. It builds to a massive, harmonized crescendo and, for the rest of the piece, shifts emphasis and weight around between different registers and melodies. Recorded versions hardly do justice to the multi-dimensionality of a live performance, but it’s strikingly easy to imagine cocking your head in one direction to follow the coloratura soprano as she glides atop the staff, in another to catch the countertenor’s buttery tones before they’re swallowed up again by his deeper-voiced brethren. This was Tallis’ great gift: to let the braids form themselves.

When I was in college, I developed strong, verging-on-manic feelings for a guy who I only knew over Zoom. At night, when I wasn’t walking down to the playing fields, I would lie on the floor—back flush with the IKEA rug that was about as long as I was tall—listen to “Spem in Alium,” and levitate. I once put the first section on a playlist I made for him, and felt like I had given a part of myself away, wishing for years after that I could somehow get it back.

I recently went to visit my boyfriend and his family in California. One evening, we were laid up in his bed watching videos of Sister Wendy, a nun who, for many years, hosted a BBC show on the history of art. Then I noticed, in the background of one of the videos, “Spem in Alium” was playing. For maybe the third or fourth time that weekend, I almost cried. 

“You can’t take music out of context,” Herndon reminds us. “What’s beautiful about music and musical expression is…responding to your place and time, and your environment, and your own personal expression of that.” She and Whitacre and Tallis all matter to me and always will: one is the reason I’m writing this piece, one gave me my voice back when I thought I had lost it, and one—though I had conflated his ecstasy with my own hormonal surges before—still returned to me, meaning something new.

So if it sounds like I’m making the most a-critical argument possible—to just “let people like what they like”—I promise I’m not. Rather, my case is that the unexpected resonances that art can have with our lives make for their own kind of music. After all, the genius of Tallis is, in part, the genius of radical experimentation within rigid parameters—the church, the queen, the human voice. All music is vibration. All vibration is things trying to slide past each other. 📯

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON