A Conversation with Craig Hella Johnson

We sat down with Conspirare founder and artistic director Craig Hella Johnson to get the inside scoop on how the group came to be and the magic behind their success.

Chorus America: Let’s start with the name Conspirare. What was the inspiration for it?

Craig Hella Johnson: It comes from the Latin words con and spirare—to breathe with, to breathe together. When we were trying to figure out how to name this group, we had a difficult time finding something that captured the essence.

I was reading a book called Borrowed Time, Paul Monette’s memoir about his partner, Roger, and their journey together. He talks about the two of them having a difficult time naming what they were to each other. They didn’t like some of the typical names like partner, spouse, lover… so they called each other conspirators. I thought, “Oh my gosh, I think there is something here.” It just jumped off the page at me.

So I lived with it for a while and Conspirare became the name. It was certainly against all good advice of wonderful marketing people—when you develop a brand, don’t come up with a name that everyone is afraid to say! But it’s simple, in the sense that breath is the canvas that we all work on as singers and basically as human beings. Breath is the one thing that we all share in common. So the name stuck and we are happy that it stuck.

There is more that goes with that name. “Craig Hella Johnson and A Company of Voices” rather than the word chorus or choir. Was that also part of the reimagining?

That was intentional also. We’ve had lots of conversations about this thing “choir” that we all love so much. That’s what I, and all of us [in Conspirare], have dedicated our creative lives to. We are still fully a choir, proudly and boldly, a choir with no apology, but I think we sensed as we were reaching out to new audiences, that choir means different things to different people. For those whose associations with that word were not as positive as ours, I thought maybe we could open a door.

As creative artists we are always looking for what is on the front end of our creativity and how do we continue to push the envelope in terms of creating within our art form. Since day one with this group we have explored all meanings of choir that are traditional to us and then also some that are new to us. I see colleagues doing that in dance all the time and in the visual arts in particular—I’m always surprised at their boldness, courage, and inventiveness. I have sensed in myself and in other colleagues in this profession that we are less bold in imagining.

And why do you think there is hesitancy within the choral world to be bold like that?

That’s an important question. There is such a huge and vast repertoire of vocal music, so certainly there’s a very natural inclination to look back. We tend to engage in what we love, and there’s such a broad collection of wonderful music from the canon that we all are so attracted to. And then there is simply that common caution or fear to engage in moving forward. It takes courage and all of us have those moments when we feel a hesitancy to take risks.

I wonder if a similar thing happens in symphony orchestras. You put a well-known piece on the program so that then you can maybe experiment with a newer piece.

People are drawn to the familiar. But I think one reason that new music performances fail is because they are not performed well and prepared well. So the onus is really on us to offer a higher level of performance.

Imagination
It was at my first rehearsal that I first caught a glimpse of Craig’s imagination. It is still with me four years later. We were rehearsing the Kyrie [of Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir], the ordinary mass text that we as singers see all the time. It can be mundane, but he had a soaring of images, of feelings in his mind that he brought out as he conducted us. I see Craig as a musician who has as much to say textually as he does harmonically. There is a message within the texts that he plays with, that impress him. He was exhorting us to come with him on this journey, and I said, “I am ready for this. I want this kind of stimulation as a choral singer. —Max Paul Tipton, baritone, joined Conspirare in 2005

Also, we’re talking not just about new music, but new ways of thinking about choir. I’m very interested, for example, in choir being a dramatic voice in the theater. In the next 10 to 15 years I really want to explore choir, not just as a background, but as a dramatic voice. That might mean commissioning works and creating mediums where we can explore this.

Another thing is that so much of choral music has been deeply rooted in the sacred repertoire, in music of the church. Those traditions are strong, and there is an orthodoxy, if you will—a traditional template that much of our repertoire comes from—that is born in ecclesiastical garments. So someone who is led in a spiritual direction that may be different from one’s original religious tradition—that’s sometimes hard to break free of.

Your Christmas at the Carillon concerts are a whole different animal from the traditional Christmas concert. How did you conceive of those kinds of concerts?

For years I had been involved with traditional Christmas concerts that were very lovely. It was music I loved, but there was a sameness to it. It seemed like audiences were dutifully coming and were attached to the familiar in a way that felt almost numbing to me. There was a quality to the audience reaction that was almost ritualistic, like they had experienced the exact same thing before. I questioned, is this what we’re called to do in this particular place and time? What would speak more, musically? And from the personal place, what would be more inspirational to lead us out with?

The other side of my interest and concern was, what are the true, simple core messages of the season that this music is meant to communicate? Certainly the gift of love and care for one another, that connection with our human community.

I asked, are we really transmitting that? Is it coming through? And then I personally came face to face with this question of where all the music is coming from. Is it indeed an open door? We can say until we’re blue in the face that this music speaks of love and inclusiveness, but if I am doing everything that is Palestrina, Schütz, Schein, and Scheidt, then it’s coming from a very specific Christian tradition, a very strong liturgical tradition, which is not an open door to a large part of the world. If I’m going to take this very seriously, what am I going to try to do here?

So is that were the collage idea got started?

That was the beginning. And as we did it, then I thought, let’s extend the idea of Christmas into the holiday season because it’s really about living in the middle of all these kinds of dualities. I was puzzled when people would say there’s such a distinct difference between sacred and secular. I understood that on a surface level, of course. But there was so much left in the middle between secular and sacred.

In these collage concerts we’re really riding that new and invigorating area between secular and sacred and between art music and popular music, having music of these different styles talking to each other. So we used the text of a 13th-century mystic right next to the text of a song by Annie Lennox, letting these texts talk to each other. You bring all those into the mix and try and shape them and confuse them, in a way.

Then to me it becomes a powerful and subtle kind of symbol of how we’re all meant to live together, with all our uniqueness and all of our diversity, in the human community. We all come into one room and this is a living, breathing manifestation of that idea for us, without having to preach or teach with words. Music carries the message, and I think people get that.

We do it with formal dress, of course. We are in tuxes and black formal wear and we do it in a very reverberant chapel. So there’s a sense of connecting to chant and to a choral tradition. But then it opens up to a variety of places. People who come for that traditional experience might feel some discomfort. To hear a song of Johnny Cash or a song of Sting and Dolly Parton—they might have to work through that.  And someone who is completely unfamiliar with classical repertoire maybe gets a door opened because of that Johnny Cash tune, and because that door was opened, there’s a willingness to experiencing some of the other classical things. So, it’s been a really interesting process for us.

Where have you come from and where have you traveled on your own spiritual path?

I grew up a Lutheran preacher’s kid and clearly in a liturgical tradition. It was in northern Minnesota. I went to St. Olaf College, with its rich choral tradition, and I studied with Helmuth Rilling in Stuttgart, so I have a deep rootedness in the chorale and the music of Bach.

The evangelical Lutheran tradition is where I come from, but all of us journey into life. I have a friend who says, “If your god is not an expanding god, then it’s not god. I have found that to be true in my life. God is ever expanding and even, in fact, the name God sometimes means to break apart. There is a hugeness and an expansiveness and a vastness that if we really tap into, is a source of quietness, stillness, and love. It becomes unnamable. My spiritual journey has been that way, going deeper into stillness and finding quiet discoveries there.

These concerts for me are connected to my personal experience, which says that unless we can all somehow listen and be in the same room together, unless my god and your god and whatever we’re perceiving of that in our experience, if that can’t dwell in the same place, then we’ve got a deeper point toward which to move. I love that music is the talking force.

Connection
What sets us apart—and I can say this because I have been a part of lots of professional choirs—is we really want to connect to the audience on a personal level. I have never seen a conductor who takes this to heart like Craig does. He has no qualms about programming something that will at least try to speak to everyone. Whoever walks in the door, the program is going to reach them on some level. It’s not just about how good we are. It’s really about how music heals people and touches them where they really need that connection.—Kathlene Ritch, soprano, joined Conspirare in 1994

If you look at the printed programs, there are all kinds of extra poems and fragments. They really look like a mess on paper. When we were doing these programs initially, people started wanting to see them and I would say, “Oh no!” I was cautious about sending them out because they look like complete cacophony on paper--what crazy person is putting these together?!

But for me, underlying all of this is a liturgical template. I stay close to what I know, even though I don’t see these programs in any way as specifically Christian. I see them within a much broader context, but I know liturgy in a practical way. I know it starts with an entry, an introit, and we have a Kyrie and a sense of a confession and an absolution. So underlying all of the craziness is an operating template that comes from where I grew up and what I knew.

How does your inspiration come?

Everything is a resource. That’s first of all. The muse can speak in silence, and I need a lot of silence. But the muse can also speak through other people, through something I hear on the radio. Deadlines are incredibly helpful. Sometimes just before a deadline, if something doesn’t feel right, I’ll hear a song on the radio and I think, “Oh my God, that’s it. Thank you.” Many things can present themselves as possibilities, because I believe everything is connected to the whole. Because of that, everything is possible and a resource.

In a practical way I also use something that Twyla Tharp modeled and advised. I keep in my office these big file folder boxes. Anytime a poem or phrase comes along that I think is a possibility or a choral piece is amusing me, then I put it in the box. Come July or August, I’ll start digging into that box (and I’ll keep a back-up file on my computer). I try to put everything on the monkey pile and then start the editing and distilling process during the summer.

In your concerts and on your CDs, you tap so many different sources. Where did all of those come from?

I’m reading and I’m keeping my ears and my eyes open. I have a little black notebook that I haul around all the time. Much like a writer waiting for that thing to cross your path, I have to write it down or I’ll forget. People know what I’ve been doing and will share things, too. It’s a neat way to be connected with singers, with patrons, with audience members.

People have a sense that everything is welcome here. So I’ll get an email saying, “Hey here’s a song I thought you might like. Here’s a poem. Here’s my favorite choral piece from when I was in college.” You get a chance to see the diversity of how people project onto this canvas.

So then it’s Conspirare—you and the singers and the whole audience breathing together.

They love that. I’ve often said that we have the most deep listening audiences I have ever experienced. They really come ready to hear. I say to them a lot—and this is not just a little useful phrase, I really mean it—that the thing we do in singing is incomplete without them. It makes a full circle. I hope that our work will empower an audience to see that when they are on that side of the performance it’s a very active and engaged part. I want them to really own their seat. I tell them that—own your seat and engage with us actively because it is far richer with that engagement.

Is some wisdom here about how to engage your audience?

We are all asking those questions together. I do think that this engagement has been a positive factor in not just the growth of the audience but also their staying power. We see people coming back, and not just to the collage programs. Many of these people will come to hear the Rachmaninoff Vespers or the B-Minor Mass in a new way.

Unity
I have been around musicians all my life, and I can say with pretty much certainty that this is the first organization where singers check their egos at the door. When they walk into a rehearsal they are no longer a solo singer, they are part of the group. They are able to pull back that particular solo voice and blend with the rest of their colleagues in the most amazing way. They are there to make music. It is no longer I, but we. That feeling permeates the entire organization. —Erich Vollmer, former executive director of Conspirare

What’s really fun is when someone comes to hear the St. Matthew Passion, for example, and the light bulbs go on and they say, “Oh my gosh, Bach was doing this [collage] way before anybody. He just put these chorales right in the center of the passions.” They see Bach’s very deep desire to create music to connect with the audience. You have his grand and glorious structure that spoke of eternal things and things of such incredible importance in a spiritual way.

And yet perhaps these new structures were so grand that some [in the audience] could not find their way in, so these chorale tunes that everyone knew from their Sunday morning services were devices, as well. So we can take our cues from the master.

The current financial situation is challenging for everyone. What would you say to other choral executive directors and music directors about how to hang on to a vision?

We’re all in this together. I haven’t talked to any colleagues who haven’t said that the current situation isn’t presenting challenges. We’re all feeling it and we need to link arms with one another and share ideas. We’re looking very seriously at how we can maintain the quality of the product and be smart and prudent stewards of our resources and make it through this.

So it’s one decision at a time and sometimes it’s a hard decision. It may mean one less concert or a different repertoire, because it needs to be a smaller number of singers. I think there will need to be a lot of adaptability, with the goal being that no matter what we do, we want to keep artistic quality as a pure part of our commitment.

What do you think are essential ingredients of real innovation in choral music?

I have so much respect for the work that’s going on in this country chorally. It’s amazing. I feel quite inspired by the work that so many people are doing. I think this is a question of choral artistry. I notice a lot of wonderful colleagues who get so busy and beleaguered with the staggering amount of work involved in keeping a choir going, whether it is a community or a professional choir.

There is unending work in making the music even possible, to get the singers together and get an audience in place. And there’s not a lot of support for it. This isn’t a culture that totally gets what we do in a way that the art form warrants. When we are so beleaguered, sometimes we forget the invitation that we all have to be artists first and foremost. That means something different for each of us.

I use the dance world a lot as an example. These dancers did not grow up thinking they were going to be leaders of dance companies. When you think of Twyla Tharp and José Ramón and Alvin Ailey and Paul Taylor and Tina Bausch—all of these visionaries love movement and dance and shape it through the prism of their own experience.

Whether we are leading a school-based, volunteer, or professional choir, I continue to hope that all of us can have more courage in just being choral artists. Not one of us can say to another, “This is the path that you’re meant to follow,” but I do think we can dig down deep and seek the courage and then the willingness to follow one’s artistic leanings and to bring that to the fore. There’s a richness there that I long to see and hear more of. We can all do that in our unique ways.

For me, it’s a deep love for the canon. I have never been able to leave the music that I was taught. Yet I’m a Gemini spirit and for me there’s this dissonance in the disconnect that’s happening now. Millions of people don’t have a connecting point to that literature, that repertoire that I love so much. I happened to grow up in middle America, loving pop music as much as anybody else, so I find that I’m exploring very humbly the music that’s speaking in me and it takes risks. I’m passionate about it because we need to be willing to risk and willing to fail.

I love that phrase “fail forward.” I keep it in my pocket sort of invisibly all the time. And every time I go out with one of these collage programs I think, “Oh, this will certainly be the one that fails.” I think we need to be willing to fail in order to move forward.

This sounds different from trying to figure out what the market wants. It’s looking inside one’s own creative self and letting that come forward.

Exactly, and finding the riches that are there. We deprive our field and our profession of the richness and the diversity of our imagination when we get caught up in fear.

This article is reprinted from The Voice, Spring 2009.