Reflections on our Lessons & Carols Service

Loyola High School Choir and Orchestra, Lessons & Carols 2012

Thursday, December 13th, I conducted our annual Lessons & Carols service at St. John’s Cathedral, Los Angeles. This year, I used my previous model from when the choir sang school liturgies. I taught my academic music students to sing and included them in the service.

It was very successful in so many ways. After the service, I invited the students to reflect on the experience. I am reprinting some of their quotes in this post. The overwhelmingly positive reaction really reminds me how powerful music can be when it is conscientiously taught and prepared. Sometimes, being in the trenches of music-making can obscure the original reasons for becoming a musician in the first place.

When I started singing I never thought it would be so fun but so serious at the same time. This experience has made me more interested in music and kind of makes me want to join the choir. Kenneth An

This was much more than I had ever expected it to be. It will be one of the most memorable parts of my high school career. Jack Dunn

The Loyola Choir

It took a lot of hard work but it payed off in the end. If I had this opportunity again, I would definitely do it! Kevin Fraher

It was really intense but super fun at the same time. I was happy that my parents were able to watch me be a part of something great. Raphael Mercurio

It was amazing singing with everyone. It gave me a sense of euphoria. Paul Ostrick

I did not expect it to be as powerful as it was. Sam Ostrin

I must say that this was one of the greatest experiences so far…of my life. My parents said that it looked like I was really enjoying myself- and I was! Matthew Gorski

Loyola music appreciation students

The actual performance was unbelievable and overwhelming. This was truly a once-in-a lifetime opportunity and I am so grateful. It was truly a memorable night. Chase Matherly

This concert was a big deal. Everyone should be able to participate and realize anyone can sing.
Before the performance I didn’t expect as much as what I received from this experience. Dominique Royall

This experience was actually really surprising for me. Coming into this concert, I was dreading it, but I actually had a ton of fun.
Lastly, this entire experience and class has made me appreciate music much more. Mostly because I i have realized how difficult it is to sing properly and to play music. I now look at singers and musicians as people who put a ton of work into their careers. Luke Nassif

This performance, at first, was something I was not looking forward to. At first, I thought it would not be fun and I would just go through the motions of practice.
Once I got to the cathedral, I realized this would actually be a really fun experience. Once the concert started, I was nervous, but I actually had a really good time.
Although at first I was not looking forward to the concert, I now know it was actually a really fun experience. Riley Renick

In this concert, I realized how good all the classes could be if we tried hard and set our minds to doing well. I also faced a fear of getting on stage and performing in front of a crowd.
The concert also created unity and a bond between me and the rest of the performers. It felt good to be a part of something big like the concert.
The concert also created a memory that will always last for me and my parents. Owen O’Brien

For the Lessons & Carols, I would honestly say it was an amazing experience. At first I was thinking: “Wow…singing?” But at Loyola, the singing skills I have obtained has probably taught me significantly more than the 8 years at my old school. Just the experience and singing with an orchestra had a life-changing effect on me. Matt Fang

Music space at St. John’s Cathedral

The overall concert was a whole new experience for me. I have never done something so incredibly awesome as that. The energy in there was simply amazing. I hope we do something similar to this second semester. My first time doing something like this was a little scary, but when you’re up there, you just get going and remember your technique and it is just natural.
It is very similar to playing basketball in front of a thousand people. You don’t wanna mess up, but the people around you are there with you ready to help. Spencer Bailey

I really didn’t expect so many people to go and see us perform. It was really awesome that so many people wanted to hear us sing.
Overall, it was a fun night. We played perfectly as planned and doing it with all my friends made it a memorable experience. Thomas Zetino

The whole experience was awesome. I expected it to be a little boring when I first heard about it. As it came closer to the event, I began to get excited for it.
The performance was really cool and a lot of fun. It was also nice to learn a new skill such as singing. I had a blast and will remember this experience the rest of my life. Josef Topete

Streaming Experimental Music on Earmeal

Camera 2 on me playing toy piano music for the video podcast Earmeal on LA Artstream, September, 2012.

Because of my participation in a local Sound Art festival called Soundwalk, I was invited to be part of a video podcast called Earmeal, one of a number of great video podcasts about the Los Angeles Art scene.

The host and producer, Alan Nakagawa, offered me a 30-minute slot to perform anything I wished. His aim is to document the experimental music scene in Los Angeles. I decided to show some of the ways I incorporate experimental music and sound art into my music appreciation class curriculum at Loyola High School of Los Angeles.

After a quick setup and sound check, the cameras went live and I was on for a half-an-hour. Alan was wonderful about setting me at ease, but the two camera shoot still made me kind of nervous. Plus, I was using technology in my performances. Despite the best laid plans, gremlins often make appearances when you least want them.

I was really honored to be able to share and document some of my work with Alan. I am not teaching Electronic Music or Sound Art per se. I use these projects in a constructivist manner for Music Appreciation. I am introducing students, who are not necessarily musicians, to experimental music composition and performance.

Alan’s work on Earmeal inspires me. It is an important service he is providing for current and future artists, scholars, and enthusiasts. I hope to replicate Alan’s sense of community and altruism in the work I do with students at Loyola High.

Singing Bach’s motet “Lobet den Herrn” BWV 230

This Easter, we sang Bach’s Lobet Den Herrn as our offertory anthem. Working on this piece for several months, we found that Bach’s motets encapsulate the essence of his genius as a composer. His command of musical complexity and counterpoint provides an excitement and freshness challenging to both listener and performer. It doesn’t surprise me that Mozart heard the motets and exclaimed “Here is something one can learn from.“

Lobet Den Herrn is the shortest of Bach’s motets. It is unique in several ways: it is in a single movement, it is his only motet composed for four voices, and it does not include a chorale tune. “Lobet den herrn” begins with a fugal rising arpeggio figure and a relentlessly joyful countersubject that continues through the second subject, “un preisit“. After a short reflective middle section “Denn seine Gnade“, “Lobet” culminates with a joyous Alleluia.

We sang this work with colla parte strings and continuo provided by our exceptional organist, Duane Steadman.

St. Andrew’s Sings Rheinberger Stabat Mater in g-minor Op. 138

For the 2012 Palm Sunday Liturgy, we sang the complete Josef Rheinberger Stabat Mater in g-minor Op. 138. I have excerpted some excellent program notes below:

The name of Joseph Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901) is not well known to American concert goers, yet his music is so well loved by influential German and Austrian musicians that there now exists a 50-volume critical edition of his complete works in score. One of the editors of that edition gives us a glimpse of Rheinberger’s style by suggesting that rather than regarding the composer as “a lesser Brahms,” we should think of him as “a South German Fauré.”

A child prodigy who began playing organ publicly at the age of seven, Rheinberger began studies at the Munich Conservatory in 1851, eventually mastering counterpoint and fugue, as well as composing over a hundred works by 1859, when he finally deemed one good enough to be published as his Opus 1.

At the end of his studies, he stayed on at the Conservatory, growing into one of its most legendary teachers. Hans von Bülow said “Rheinberger is a truly ideal teacher of composition, unrivalled in the whole of Germany and beyond in skill, refinement and devotion to his subject; in short, one of the worthiest musicians and human beings in the world.” Among Rheinberger’s students were Humperdinck, Wolf-Ferrari, Furtwängler, and the Americans Horatio Parker and George Chadwick.

As a composer, Rheinberger is best known today by organists and Catholic choirmasters. However, his output of secular songs and ballads for solo voices and/or choir is at least as large as his body of work for the church. And for his texts, Rheinberger turned to some of the same German poets whose verse had been set by Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The poem Die Nacht by Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) attracted Rheinberger’s attention in 1859, when he set it as a simple strophic song for voice and piano. Twelve years later, the composer revisited that setting, transforming it in nearly every respect: harmonically, formally, and in terms of scoring and overall length. The solo voice became a four-part choir, and the accompaniment was rescored for a chamber ensemble of violin, viola, ‘cello, and piano, whose delicate figurations evoke the hushed sounds of the nocturnal forest. The later version of Die Nacht is also harmonically resourceful: though a composition in D-flat major, it modulates to E major just before the fourth stanza’s reference to the dawn (“the stars rise up and descend, when shalt thou come, morning wind”).

As part of his duties at the Court Church of All Saints in Munich, in 1881 Rheinberger composed eleven motets, including the four which were published as Op. 133. Like many of his Catholic colleagues (Anton Bruckner among them), Rheinberger’s instinct in composing for the church called for the harmonic language of his instrumental and secular vocal works. Nevertheless, from his earliest days inunich he was aware of the Cecilian movement, which advocated reformation of Catholic liturgical music after the “excesses” of the Viennese classical composers. The Palestrina style of 16th-century
counterpoint was held up as an ideal; understandably, creative musicians of the 19th century regarded that model as an artistic straitjacket. So Rheinberger sought a middle ground, remaining mindful of liturgical requirements, while subtly manifesting his stylistic individuality. With the six-voice motets of Op. 133, Rheinberger clearly had the Palestrina model in mind (perhaps most notably in the second motet, Meditabor), yet each motet is–as wrote Theodor Kroyer–“a paragon of six-voice composition, nurtured in utmost freedom.”

The Stabat Mater Op. 138 originated in a detail of Rheinberger’s generally poor health throughout most of his adult life. For many years, he suffered a disability of his right hand, making composition increasingly difficult. His hand broke out with an open ulcer in the first half of 1884. Then in the summer he received therapy at the Wildbad Kreuth, greatly easing the pain in his hand. Rheinberger revealed to his wife that he had made a vow to the Mother of God that if his health improved, he would compose a Stabat Mater (his second). Of this setting, Sebastian Hammelsbeck has written that the second setting is essentially a liturgical work, which does not draw undue attention to itself either by excessive length or by highly decorative features. Instead of the virtuosic combination of modern and ancient musical styles it is in a purified sacred idiom which has incorporated elements of all these styles, and which only the harmony of the day kept distantly in touch with the events outside the church….

Perhaps with a glance over his shoulder toward the Cecilians, Rheinberger composed an entirely unsentimental devotional work, which by its very restraint conveys an expression of the utmost reverence.

John Shepard
Head of the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library – University of California, Berkeley

The Graphic Score as Instrument

Because music is ephemeral, invisible, and abstract, it is peculiarly difficult to talk or write about it. These complexities are never more apparent than when trying to compose. Devising a way to efficiently and explicitly communicate sonic intention to another person borders on being a black art! In my music appreciation classes, we examined how scores convey the invisible abstractions of music. We also examined the limitations of traditional notation and studied other composer’s graphic solutions for unique compositional problems.

We spent a week doing some “Deep Listening” exercises as crafted by Pauline Oliveros, reading Michel Chion’s essay on the nature of sound, and examining the notion of soundscape as defined by R. Murray Schafer.

To synthesize these concepts, I had the students make graphic scores of one of their “Deep Listening” experiences. Creating these scores was an opportunity for them to consider compositional issues. They asked themselves questions like “What sounds are demanding my attention and what sounds are in the background?” “How do I notate the Doppler effect of a city bus driving by?” “What sounds are analogs to the musical notion of key?”

As we proceed, the kids blog about their experiences and expressive processes. The projects in this post’s embedded videos represent an important leap: the move from perception to intention. I asked them to score a piece for pencil theremin and electronics where the graphic score is also the instrument.

A small circuit board with a battery and speaker is attached to a regular wooden pencil. Copper tape is attached to one end of the pencil and wrapped around the pencil where it is grasped. More tape connects the tope end of the board to the top of the pencil. A metal pushpin is stuck through the tape and into the pencil lead itself. Therefore, when one draws with the pencil and touches the graphite on the paper, the circuit is completed and a sound is emitted from the speaker. The greater the distance between the contact points, the lower the pitch!

Using the Pure Data patch host provided by the folks at RJDJ, a reactive sound app company, the students composed reactive recorder/distorters to augment the variety of sounds as well as the reality of the live performance.

In spite of the limitations imposed by the pencil Theremin’s limited sonic palette, some students devised interesting modes of interaction with their scores and apps.

One of the interesting challenges this project presented was the video creation. The composers could choose whether they would play their own piece or be one of two cameramen filming the performance. If they played, the nature of the movie was left in someone else’s hands, and vice versa. They had to abandon complete control of their piece one way or another.

My First Android App in the Marketplace: Mostly Noise Blog

I used the service Publish5.com to create an app for my blog and video portfolio on the Android marketplace.

Not being a programmer, I don’t know if there are better ways to do this, but for a simple content app, this was painless and cheap!

The website itself walked me through a series of templates where I could host blogs, twitter feeds, or YouTube in their mobile templates. For $19, the company will create an apk with two screenshots for you to upload to the Android Marketplace.

I paid the one time $25 to Google to become a developer, and within an hour, my app was in the marketplace!

A very simple experiment. It feels kind of cool, even though I didn’t do one bit of programming. However, I now have one more way to distribute my content.