Disappointing Vocal Polyphony from Atlanta

One of my feeds led me to check out the “a cappella+” vocal ensemble Kinnara. The group consists of four vocalists (soprano Chelsea Helm, alto Wanda Yang Temko, tenor Cory Klose, and bass Steven Berlanga) accompanied only by a percussionist, Caleb Herron. The vocalists are all graduates of the Westminster Choir College, and they formed their group in Princeton, New Jersey. They are now based in Atlanta, led by Artistic Director J.D. Burnett, who is Associate Director of Choral Archives at the University of Georgia.

Last night the ensemble performed and live-streamed a concert entitled Passion at the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta. The title reflected the first of the two works on the program, David Lang’s “the little match girl passion.” This was followed by the world premiere performance of Heather Gilligan’s cycle Southern Dissonance: Portraits of a New South.

For the performers this was probably a “first encounter” with video streaming. As a result, there were “speed bumps” with different levels of seriousness. Probably the most damaging was the inability of microphones to pick up the sinister bass drum rumbling that opens Lang’s treatment of a dark tale by Hans Christian Andersen. However, any problems with the percussion were secondary to the problematic nature of the vocal work.

The good news was that those on the streaming end had the opportunity to download the program book, which included the full texts for both compositions. Because Lang composed in a world consisting entirely phonemes, the emergence of words from those phonemes was only possible with the assistance of the libretto. One could appreciate Lang’s attempt to “update” Johann Sebastian Bach’s passion genre, interleaving narrative and reflection on the events of the narrative; but both of those components demand a solid appreciation of the semantic infrastructure. In Lang’s composition, semantics are obscured by that focus on phonemes and the awkward contortions of the individual vocal lines.

Sadly, Gilligan’s approach creating Southern Dissonance seems to have been inspired by Lang’s techniques, but her libretto did not deserve such obscurantist techniques. In place of Holy Writ, there were poems by Langston Hughes, while the underlying narrative unfolded through texts by Stacy Abrams, Jimmy Carter, Alice Walker, Martin Luther King, and John Lewis. These were all vivid texts, none of which deserved to be muddied by phoneme-based rhetoric. For those on the streaming end, insult was added to injury when it turned out that Walker’s text (very much the centerpiece of the libretto) lacked permission for streaming over YouTube.

Burnett needs to come to grips with the fact that it takes more than good intentions to deliver a convincing program of new and recent music for an a cappella quartet.