Over the course of the last six weeks, Cappella SF, the a cappella chamber choir based here in San Francisco (as its name implies), conducted by Ragnar Bohlin, uploaded three short videos to YouTube. These accounted for three of the six-movements of a tone poem by Mason Bates entitled Sirens. While the entire composition was framed by excerpts from Homer’s Odyssey, each of the movements selected for video capture represented three “completely different” sources.
The first of these was a setting in German of Heinrich Heine’s poem about the Lorelei, who sings from a high perch above the Rhine river luring sailors to steer their boats into rocky reefs along the bank, where they drown in the wreckage. The second, the fourth song in the cycle, sets a Quechua ecstatic text about an encounter with a siren. This is followed by the fifth song, setting an English account of the New Testament episode in which Jesus invites Simon and Andrew to serve him as “fishers of men.”
The greatest disappointment of these videos is the lack of subtitles. Bates clearly put a lot of thought into selecting his texts and then finding polyphonic textures appropriate for each of them. Given that the entire tone poem was scored for twelve-part a cappella chorus, the opportunities for rich polyphony were legion. However, in the absence of titles, even those providing an English account of Heine’s German text, the listener is unlikely to appreciate the subtleties behind Bates’ polyphonic inventions.
Screen shot of the opening image for Bates’ setting of Heine’s Lorelei poem
To be fair, all three of these videos are probably products of good intentions. They were all shot from the same angle showing Bohlin leading the entire ensemble in very low light. Those shots are all fragments, which are interleaved with still photographs, many of which are panned across the array of individual vocalists. There are also “establishing photographs,” such as the fisherman casting his net for the fifth song and a photograph of the Lorelei statue overlooking the Rhine for the opening selection.
Whatever the shortcomings, each of these videos provides a visual interpretation to supplement an auditory experience. Nevertheless, viewers will probably benefit from a copy of the Delos album Mass Transmission: Choral Works by Mason Bates, which includes a recording of Cappella SF singing Sirens in its entirety. That album includes a booklet with useful background material and all of the song texts in their original languages, with English translations where necessary. Since Bates tends to be best known for his imaginative work with real-time electronica, Sirens presents his approaches to composition in an entirely different light; and the results are highly satisfying.
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