concert review: Voices of Silicon Valley

This was the 10th anniversary celebration of a little (17-voice) local acappella choir that I hadn't heard of before. SFCV actually promoted this concert, though they haven't reviewed it, at least the first performance (I went to the second, yesterday). But what inspired me to go was that my old friend K., who's belonged to other local choirs, has joined this one. I think she felt it was more her style.

Its style is an offbeat combination of avant-garde experimental pieces and epically tuneful musical excerpts from video games.* The main work on the program was Bits torn from words by Peter S. Shin, which has lyrics but mostly consists of oohs and ahhs overlaid on each other in complicated ways. It sounds great in the recording by the famed avant-garde choir Roomful of Teeth. But though VoSV sang this challenging piece with fair competence, they lacked the artistic flair needed to put it across effectively. Nice try, though.

I was much more impressed with the premiere of a commission from one of their own tenors, Alexander Frank. Describing the work beforehand in a talk that deserved the title Chatter as much as the composition did, Frank said that, because the work consists entirely of spoken words, he does not classify it as music, but as 'voice.'

Oh, I thought, I wish my old buddy V. were alive to hear that. She and I used to have intense arguments about this. I said that certain types of aural compositions were not music, not to denigrate them but to classify them properly, because they needed to be listened to differently in order to be appreciated. (Imagine listening to the 'music' in, say, a Shakespeare soliloquy as if it actually were a musical composition. It would just be wayward and irritating.) V. insisted it was all music; music is the whole sphere, it's not differentiated. I would say fine, in that case we need another word to describe what the term 'music' used to mean. I suggest 'music,' and for the larger category of organized sound, something like 'organized sound.'

Anyway, it sounds like Frank agrees with me. His composition was a fascinating collage of mostly unintelligible chatter. It began with everybody talking at once, like the sound of a restaurant full of diners, and then reduced to a few voices, then increased again. Sometimes a couple voices would talk in unison. It was not music because there was no melody, no harmony; but there was rhythm and timbre and there was certainly multiplicity of line if not exactly counterpoint, and as with other such works I've heard (Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble) I found myself absorbed by those elements, though I would not wish the piece to go on any longer than it did.

More conventionally, VoSV sang a piece called The House of Belonging by Jeffrey Derus, one of those efforts in which the words are stuffed awkwardly into music which they don't quite fit; and Friede auf Erden by Arnold Schoenberg, in German.

Their pianist, whose role was mostly to serve as a pitch pipe, though she did accompany a couple of pieces, also played a solo piano work, one of the most totally useless pieces of music I have ever heard. Its sole point seemed to be to proceed slowly down the entire keyboard from the top note to the bottom.

After intermission there was a brief interjected set by a local high school choir, who did pretty well for themselves. Their set included a motet by Josef Rheinberger, a 19C figure who's the most renowned composer from Liechtenstein, but their most challenging and effective piece was a setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah by the noted living American choral composer Z. Randall Stroope. Then they joined VoSV at the end for the grand finale, a nice arrangement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."

The first performance had been at the Hammer Theatre in San Jose, but I skipped that both for scheduling reasons and to avoid Hammer's dodgy acoustics, preferring the venue of the small and friendly, if perishingly cold, Tateuchi Hall in Mountain View. I might have been better off at Hammer. The chorus was miked, which in a hall as small as Tateuchi led to an overload of sound, with a couple of the sopranos (not K.) shrieking unpleasantly.

I think the choir strove for more than they could do here, but some of it came off well, and it's the striving that's important, right?

Credits: VoSV artistic director and conductor, Cyril Deaconoff. Pianist, Ting Chang. High school choir, Saratoga. Its director, Beth Nitzan.

*They sang themes from Genshin Impact and Portal 2, not that either of those names means anything to me, but I know that if I don't mention it, someone will ask. They also sang, with boombox-style accompaniment, music from Gladiator, which if it's not a video game, ought to be.