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Multi-Sensory Choral Music –
Past, Present and Future Paths
Mark B. Doerries
The current state of choral
music is under assault; the aging of choral singers, a lack of
young adult recruits and a waning patronage threaten the long-term
health of the art.
While a 2002 National Endowment for the Arts survey suggested that a
record 23.5
million Americans participated in weekly choral ensembles, a 2004
follow up study
indicates that upwards of 82% of these singers are over the age of 45
and 70% are
women. How then do we as conductors, singers, educators, and
scholars reverse the
tide of choral aging and a perceived dwindling cultural
relevance? In short, we evolve
with changing musical interests, we adapt to developing technologies
and we explore
holistic and interdisciplinary approaches to choral music that consider
incorporating
aural, visual, kinetic and intellectual elements within the concert
environment, all the
while appealing to an energetic and shifting culture that thrives on
multi-sensory
stimulation. While many ways exist to create multi-sensory
performances, I will
attempt here to chart the historical precedent and future paths for one
specific artistic
cooperation, that of music and colored light.
Reinventing classical music’s relevancy for a younger generation seems
to be a vision
that should result in a sustainable and vibrant art form, yet it
requires the creation of
concerts and choirs that reflect the racial, economic and more
importantly age diversity
within our communities. In a culture ‘of the new,’ where emails
prevail over letters,
Ipods outpace compact discs, and TiVo makes network television
increasingly obsolete,
can we expect younger generations to identify with choirs that perform
stoically frozen
and garbed in black-identity effacing garments while performing works
500 years their
senior? Forgetting how technology informed the works of Steve
Reich, Edgard Varèse,
Alan Hovhaness and many others, a common response by critics to the
addition of
extra-musical elements to classical performance is that it detracts
from the musical
experience. However, rather than viewing interdisciplinary
elements as a substitute for
quality, color, lighting, video and motion combined with music can and
must fashion an
altogether new environment where music arouses not only our ears, but
also our eyes.
...
The compositions and artistic statements of Schoenberg, Scriabin and
Wilfred by no means
stand as anomalies. The notion of a unified art form permeated
the realms of literature, visual
art and theater of the late 19th and early 20th century. Arthur
Rimbaud’s poem Vowels
equates colors with specific vowels while paintings of Georgia
O’Keeffe, MacDonald Wright,
Wassily Kandinsky and many others visually explore musical forms in
paint and the connection
between pitches and colors. Just as Schoenberg was an
accomplished artist, Kandinsky was an
artist, musician and adept writer. Kandinsky is often quoted as
stating: “Color is the keyboard,
the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many
strings. The artist is the hand that
plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the
soul.” While Schoenberg depended
upon the intertextuality of music, color and other media, Kandinsky’s
version of a Wagnerian
Gesamtkunstwerk, his theatrical work Der
gelbe Klang [The Yellow Sound
or Chord], led him
to purposefully discourage external and narrative connections between
combined artistic mediums.
Kandinsky rejected Realist and Symbolist drama where Schoenberg
embraced it. The Yellow
Sound stirs the emotions with
a purely synesthetic experience where colors, sounds and movement
equate directly to psychological states and emotions.
A theatrical event in Paris that used aerators to spread scents
throughout the audience while
interpreting the Song of Solomon predates all of these musical
extra-sensory experiences.
P.N. Roinard’s production titled Song of Songs in 1891 retains the
eight sections of the original
biblical narrative. According to the annotated libretto, the
scenes are accompanied with music
that begins in C and cycles diatonically throughout the eight segments
of the text; likewise, colors
of the visible spectrum are associated with each scene and cycle
through ROY-G-BIV. Finally,
scents were linked to each scene; unfortunately the intended effects
were masked due to poor
ventilation in the theater, which turned the air a putrid
odor.
The work of Schoenberg, Scriabin, Wilfred and Kandinsky spurred a
generation of multi-sensory
artists that continue to explore the realms of music, color and
light. During the 1960s an explosion
of film artists began to experiment with abstract shapes and colors in
motion often under a backdrop
of popular music. Artists such as Jordan Belson, USCO, Stan
VanDerBeek, James Whitney, and
Lamonte Young and Marian Zazeela pioneered psychedelic installations
that managed to generate
excitement amongst mainstream audiences. Recently Sonic Visions,
a planetarium film that combines
computer graphics and the music of U2, Moby and the Flaming Lips,
engages young audiences in
ways classical music has yet to achieve. With the exception of
the New York State National Chorale,
which performed in casual clothing and with colored mood lighting in
the 1970s, and more recently
the Honda Sound Effects Choir, the choir responsible for producing the
sounds effects for a Honda
car commercial and for the 2007 Academy Awards, the current of
multi-sensory and extra-musical
explorations in classical music has diminished in modern
performances. The reasons for this could
fill another essay, yet suffice it to say that the resultant standard
concert experience conveys stoicism,
severity, conformity, professionalism and pretentious
intellectualism. While these are not all negative
associations, many of them do prevent new audiences from seeking out
classical music experiences.
Perhaps a needed change awaits us.
...
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