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The St. Louis Chamber Chorus is performing hits by Nine Inch Nails and Ed Sheeran
Elaine Cha of St. Louis on the Air [from St. Louis Public Radio]
November 9, 2024
St. Louis on the Air [from St. Louis Public Radio]
The St. Louis Chamber Chorus is performing hits by Nine Inch Nails and Ed Sheeran
The St. Louis Chamber Chorus may be most well known for its repertoire that features classical and religious songs from centuries ago. But the chorus has also featured new compositions and for its 69th season, the nearly 50 singers will add 21st century pop to its choral selections. St. Louis Chamber Chorus artistic director Philip Barnes talks about this Sunday's "Classic Pop" performance at the Sun Theatre in Grand Center.
Transcript
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Elaine Cha: This is St. Louis on the Air from St. Louis Public Radio. I'm Elaine Cha. As a kid, I wore out my mom's mixtape from her time as a teen in early 70s Brazil, its eclectic mix of pop music included Harry Belafonte's Matilda, The Beatles' Hey Jude, and the Simon and Garfunkel classic, The Sound of Silence. I've sung all those songs in my head and out loud many times since childhood, but I never imagined any of them performed as chamber chorus songs until now. Philip Barnes is the artistic director of the St. Louis Chamber Chorus, and he joins us now to talk about this Sunday's St. Louis Chamber Chorus performance. Welcome back to the show, Philip.
Philip Barnes: Thank you, Elaine, thank you.
Cha: So this upcoming concert will not include Simon and Garfunkel, but it does include a host of other pop music ballads, some of which have never been performed or recorded. What was the thinking behind this Sunday's program, Philip?
Barnes: I blame my wife. She, loyal spouse, has been to many of our performances over the years. And we like to say that we perform music by composers that you may well have heard of, like Brahms or Tchaikovsky or Mendelssohn, but we perform their a cappella music which is not commonly heard, obviously, at the symphony or the opera. So we're that sort of third string, if you will. And she has always been a great supporter. But she said to me, you know, you go to chamber chorus concerts, and you often hear composers whose names you know, but music you don't recognize. How about putting together a program where everybody knows the pieces before they come in, but they don't know the arrangements? So we twisted it around, and it's been really fascinating, because indeed, I'm one of the most ignorant people in the room. I didn't know several of these songs that we're going to do. Everybody went, "oh yes, yes, I grew up with that," just like you were saying. And I didn't know them. So I'm meeting them for the first time, but in these rather brilliant arrangements.
Cha: So something that I want to make sure we address right at the top has to do with the choral music that the St. Louis Chamber Chorus typically sings. And as I understand it, choral music, it does fall under the umbrella of classical music, and that's what the [St. Louis] Chamber Chorus is known for performing. Is that right?
Barnes: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, we perform everything from about 1400 to yesterday, but in our type of music, specifically for unaccompanied voices, it is what I think the general public would describe a classical idiom. I mean, I don't know whether you'd call folk songs a classical idiom, and we certainly do those as well. But other things, yes, you could say that.
Cha: So when we think about, you know, pop music, maybe we don't think of some of the parallels to the kind of music that typically the St. Louis Chamber Chorus sings. But are there some similarities that people might not be thinking about right off the top of their heads?
Barnes: I think that the thing they have in common certainly is melody. Most contemporary music, pop music, rock music, country, it always depends on a very strong melody. Now, of course, the exception to that is rap, but we'll put that to one side for now. And so what we're looking at particularly is strong tunes, and when you hear them arranged by the original artist, sometimes people say, "Oh, I love that guitar riff," or "I love it when the drums come in here," that sort of thing. But if you have a top class choir to work with, you can work on more levels, if you will. So if you watch the Beatles, there are four of them. So there are only really four levels, plus some vocals, right? But if you've got a voice, if you've got a choir where you can sing in 12 or 16 parts, you're really approaching a sort of vocal orchestra. And I know that we all do it. We all love to go to hear the symphony do the music of Sting or something likeBilly Joel, you know. So we're perfectly okay with going to that, we love going to that, but we very rarely get the opportunity—in fact, I would say you never get the opportunity in the 30 plus years I've been here—you never get the opportunity to go and hear these songs that you've grown up with or you've loved, and you never get to hear them in this sort of rich, sonorous sound, which I think brings out some elements of the songs that you might not have immediately heard. And so I think that's really quite fascinating.
Cha: Now, one of the brand new arrangements that you will be debuting this Sunday at the Sun Theatre is a song that people probably would not associate with anything close to classical or choral music of any kind, and that's the 1994 song "Hurt" by industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails. Now the arrangement comes from [Australian]-born composer Melissa Dunphy [...] And she told our producer Danny Wicentowski, that this song, with its dissonant and intricate melodies, has a special place in her life.
Melissa Dunphy: The first version of "Hurt" that I heard and which I listened to, I think, so many times on my Discman—remember those?—so many times on my Discman that I wore out a couple of Downward Spiral CDs and had to buy them again. Hearing it at the cusp of becoming an adult, I think is such, such a formative time for any musician, for any person, really, that's the music that lives with you for the rest of your life. So it required a little bit of chutzpah, a little bit of bravery on my part to think that I could put my own choral spin on this and interpret this through the lens of a choir, which, you know, in my career, my bread and butter is choral music, so I think of a choir as sort of my primary medium that I work in. But I'm really happy with the results, and I cannot wait to hear it live for the first time at the concert.
Cha: And that's Melissa Dunphy, the composer whose arrangement of Nine Inch Nails's song "Hurt" will premiere when the St. Louis Chamber [...] Chorus performs it this Sunday at the Sun Theatre in Grand Center. Listening to what Melissa said there Philip, is there anything in it that resonates with you particularly?
Barnes: It's a really amazing arrangement for double choir, not just for one choir, but for two, so they almost treat the song as a dialog, an internal dialog. And she is a brilliant writer, particularly for the voice. She really understands the voice. I guess the only thing I'd say is that I'm the one guy in the room, I'd never heard this song. It's not part of my childhood at all. I know it's very popular with Johnny Cash lovers, you know, but I'd never heard it. So I was blown away by the arrangement. And Melissa jokingly said, "I think you'll be blown away by the arrangement," and she was right. I mean, it really is, it's an incredibly powerful song. What I really like about it, I would say, is that if anyone's listening, thinking, "oh this is just going to be an afternoon of sort of love songs and angst," you know what I mean, it takes the human experience to a completely different level of drug addiction, despair, depression. And several of the songs are not fluffy. You know the song that we are, the other world premiere we're doing by Taylor Swift, absolutely not remotely fluffy at all. And so it's possible to sort of look at contemporary music in the way you would look at any art form. There's a spectrum of emotions that that are expressed through music, whatever the style. And on Sunday afternoon, you're going to hear the whole range.
Cha: And is that part of a challenge you wanted to meet?
Barnes: Yes, definitely, good question. It is. Because this isn't my normal sort of genre to work in, I listened to heaven knows how many arrangements, and I read heaven knows how many arrangements. I mean just more than ever, because I was determined to put together a program that would be like a good meal with different elements, you know, we had to have the brussels sprouts as well as the chocolate syllabub. So we had to have all of those things in it. So that was the first thing. And the other thing was, it is remarkable how many really bad arrangements there are out there. I mean, there are so many. These are songs of people's, you know, youth, and they all want to sing it. So they all arrange it. And so there are just innumerable arrangements from schools, college campuses, around the world, and so many of them are terrible. But if you work your way through it and you really, really do your homework, there are amazing artistic triumphs of this. As I think of particularly an Ed Sheeran song, again, never heard of it, but this song is coming out of South Africa, from University of Stellenbosch. I mean, if you cast your net wide enough, you will find really amazing examples of complicated but approachable choral writing. None of this repertoire, is going to be performed in such a way that you go, "Where's the song? I can't hear the song I loved." You'll still hear the song, but you know, with a different, if you like, orchestration.
Cha: One of the things that sort of stood out to me was the way that you described not only the music, but the space in which it's performed. So this coming Sunday, Classic Pop, the concert will be performed at the Sun Theatre here in Grand Center.
Barnes: Yeah, around the corner from where we are now.
Cha: What is it about that space and what you would be doing in there that that makes for just a really distinctive combination?
Barnes: Well, this area is blessed with amazing spaces in which to make music, and we like to explore as many of them as possible. We're unlike any other group, we deliberately don't have a home. And one of the advantages of that is that different spaces can inspire me to create different programs. This is not a religious program. We're not a religious choir, but we often perform a lot of sacred music. Those are appropriate in some of the great churches and synagogues and temples that we have around town. But this is a totally secular concert, and it needed to be in a venue that people would be comfortable in. I would be comfortable doing it, not sort of saying to Monsignor or somebody, "Oh, by the way, there's a song by Nine Inch Nails that you might not want to listen to." Oh, maybe he does, but I had to find the right space. It's a combination of the acoustic [and] the visuals. There are none of those church pillars in your way, you know. It's very important now, when you go to a concert, you want to have good visibility. It's raked seating. It's a theater. It's a very historic theater. It was founded, I think, in 1913 as a German theater, and it's gone through countless different sort of [...] incarnations, if you will, some good, not some not so good. And a few years ago it was fully restored. So it's a really wonderful place to sit and listen, and B, for us to perform.
Cha: In the last 30 seconds, what makes doing this... the St. Louis Chamber Chorus, has been around 69 years. What makes it worth it to take potentially a risk with this kind of concert?
Barnes: Well, I think if you don't take risks, you might as well hang up your boots and go home. This is an amazing group of local artists. It's not an entity where we bring people in from outside. St. Louis has the talent. So to be able to work with local talent and make something that's greater than the individual parts, that's the continuing challenge, and so you have to be open to all different types of challenges, artistically.
Cha: Philip Barnes is the Artistic Director of the St. Louis Chamber Chorus. Thank you for joining us today, Philip, and best wishes for the concert.
Barnes: Thank you, Elaine.
Cha: The St. Louis Chamber Chorus's Classic Pop concert is this Sunday, at 3 at the Sun Theatre. More information is at chamberchorus.org
This episode was produced by Danny Wicentowski. Audio engineering and podcast design by Aaron Doerr. Our Executive Producer is Alex Heuer. St. Louis on the Air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio.