Your Concert As Feast: Notes on Programming

While recently rereading The State of Music, Virgil Thomson's marvelous overview of our professional terrain, I was struck by an anomaly. Although he describes a rich and varied landscape—its premises, its procedures, its practitioners—he makes scant mention of choruses or choristers. This, to say the least, is curious, for Thomson was not only a choral composer of exceptional attainments—the New Grove Dictionary of American Music lists more than three dozen of his works, both major and minor, for choruses both accompanied and a cappella—but a musician of deep learning and endless curiosity. When he wrote The State of Music in 1939 he surely was aware of early 18th-century American choral traditions, of European traditions with which they were complemented throughout the 19 th century, and of leading choruses of his own day, most notably the Eva Jessye Choir and the Hall Johnson Choir, two stellar African-American ensembles, and the commercially oriented professional ensembles led by Fred Waring, the Collegians and the Pennsylvanians.

American cities were fertile ground for choruses—Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Saint Louis, Boston, and New York each boasted major ensembles—and among our major metropolises Chicago was especially rich. The Chicago Musical Union was formed in 1857 and over the next 15 years it was joined by the Chicago Oratorio Society, the Mendelssohn Society, the Beethoven Society, and the Apollo Musical Club, which began its existence as a male choir but evolved into a mixed chorus and then into a symphonic chorus associated with the city's major orchestra. Additionally, the influx of immigrants led to the establishment of German choruses—the Maennergesang-Verein, the Germania Maennerchor, the Concordia Maennerchor were all artistically and socially significant.

Many factors united these groups—the primal joy of singing, the larger sense of community offered by ensembles, and the way in which community is transformed into communion when voices are joined in song. Another factor, and one that's of critical importance, was a thoughtful choice of repertoire. Looking through programs performed by these ensembles is enormously instructive. Much of the repertoire was predicable and workaday, but exceptions abound. From a list that easily could be amplified, we see that the Oratorio Society, having presented Haydn's Die Schoepfung at its inaugural concert, went on to offer Mendelsssohn's Die erste Walpurgisnacht; the Germania Maennerchor presented a concert version of von Weber's Der Freischuetz and Friedrich Flotow's Stradella; and the Apollo Musical Club, in collaboration with the Chicago Symphony, presented Schumann's Das Paradies und die Peri.

For the mid-19th century, this was forward-looking repertoire and programming of great sophistication. Mendelssohn's Walpurgisnacht was heard in Chicago in 1862, 19 years after the revised work had its Leipzig premiere. Though von Weber's visionary opera was premiered in 1821 and Flotow's Stradella in 1837—their first performances in Chicago were both around 1870—it is exceptional to find either work in the repertoire of an American amateur chorus. As for Schumann's wonderful score—courageously experimental," to quote the New Grove—its Chicago performance was the work's American premiere.

Though I'm sure that most choruses took no greater risks than they do today, we remember those ensembles that showed some spunk, that pushed the envelope of the acceptable to include newer, more challenging works.

And in planning our programs, I think we should do the same. When an artistic director and executive director make plans for their coming season, I assume the existence of a shared agenda of ideals: that every piece programmed will be a work of unquestioned excellence; that each piece on the program illuminates every other piece; that the programs offered over the course of a season make a cogent statement that reflects artistic mission. What I look for is programming that is purposeful, not arbitrary, and never complacent.

Yet certain constraints—reality, if you will—are likely to inhibit imagination. Money, above all. Does a work demand too large an ensemble? Does it require an impractical amount of rehearsal time? Does it fit within one's usual program parameters?

And what about our audience? Their loyalty to our organizations is based and built on trust, on the expectation that they will come to a performance and be at least entertained and possibly enlightened, that their imagination will be kindled by some artistic sparks. And this trust, I believe, suggests an obligation on our part to craft programs that are engaging and absorbing from first note to last.

To do this is not always easy, but infinitely worthwhile for everyone engaged in the artistic enterprise. And doing so proceeds from a simple premise: Never program down to your audience, and never assume that your audience isn't ready to be challenged—by fresh interpretations of familiar pieces, by works from the canon that unjustly have been ignored, by the music of today and tomorrow.

And there is still another consideration we should have in mind as we make a season's programs, and that is the history of music itself. Each of us is privileged to have access to an artistic heritage of endless pleasures. We are custodians of, and have access to, the music of more than six centuries, the whole thrilling sweep from Machaut to now. As members of the musical community we're trustees of a living history, and a central part of our job is to keep the repertoire alive, which can only be done through performance. (Scholarship, while essential, provides the blueprint from which we proceed.) As program planners and as performers, it is our responsibility to mine the riches of the past, both known and unknown. And when you commit yourself and your ensemble to programming that is of more than passing interesting, when you present exceptional pieces in exceptional performances, the funding is more likely to follow.

Everyone in this field has a personal wish-list of composers whose choral works they would love to encounter in concert, and not just encounter but meet face to face in vivid and vital performances. There's something for everyone, for the whole panoply of choruses—for the professional chamber choir, the children's chorus, the choir in a church or synagogue, the symphonic choir, or for any other ensemble whose members join in song. My list includes Josquin, Schuetz, and Buxtehude; Byrd and Purcell; Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms; Barber and Rorem, Bernstein and Fine. How about yours?

Our aim should always be the same: to make a performance an endless source of wonder and enchantment. Virgil Thomson, in The State of Music, perhaps said it best: "A concert is not, after all, even in its most recondite and tendentious examples, a display of musical specimens... a concert is a meal. It is a feast, a ham sandwich, a chocolate sundae, nourishment to be absorbed with pleasure and digested by unconscious processes..."

To prepare this feast with the greatest panache is the job—the enviable job—we all share.