His Majestie’s Clerkes and Chicago a Cappella
Nothing is more formidable for choral singers than performing a cappella, but few things are more basic to their art. The essence of singing in a chorus is to listen to one’s colleagues and perform in a way that complements them and blends with them. An unleashed ego is a luxury a soloist can sometimes afford (or get away with), but the chorister must consciously work for the good of the whole group and the group’s sound, holding back even when it would be so much more fun to blast away. A cappella singing demands that one not only listen with all the care one can muster, but also manage without a fundamental prop–a piano or an orchestra, the loss of which makes singing in tune a much greater challenge.
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Staying in tune is tricky enough for unaccompanied solo singers (barring the minority blessed with perfect pitch, who for some reason rarely seem to have beautiful voices to go with it). Most people tend to get flatter and flatter (musical entropy?) as a work wears on. A group of voices, whether a quartet or a large chorus, faces even more downward pressure, and it’s not unusual for intonation to drop a full step or more in only a few measures–something that’s particularly embarrassing when the orchestra enters in tune, painfully revealing the fact to the immediate world. What sounded just fine by itself–the voices tend to go down together, maintaining their subjective pitch–becomes unbearably sour when the right pitches are authoritatively proclaimed.
Groups that specialize in a cappella choral singing are at their best when they’ve worked together for a while, when they know their colleagues, their voices, and their idiosyncrasies well. At that point some of the labor of listening and adjusting becomes automatic and less difficult. At that point they can begin to perform almost as an organic unit; they can overcome the problems of a cappella singing and concentrate on its advantages.
Successful on its own terms, but not as happy in combination with the rest of the evening’s music, was a medley of spirituals, “Where the Sun Will Never Go Down,” arranged by Joseph Jennings of the San Francisco-based group Chanticleer. The score attempts to create authentic gospel sounds using a small professional singing ensemble, and the results are somewhere in between a down-home black church choir and the homogenized version of “Ride On, King Jesus” that every high school and college choir seems to keep at the ready. The members of Chicago a Cappella carried it off quite well, though the final section, “I got shoes,” was a little too solemn. The voices were swinging, but with a couple of exceptions the faces would have been more appropriate to Faure’s Requiem. Still, these are minor quibbles, and this is an outstanding group.
