The Flowers and Their Sun
One of the greatest aspects of being part of a choir is the familial connection established between members. People of many different backgrounds, life experiences, and worldviews come together with one goal in mind: to create beautiful music together. However, just as flowers require sunlight to survive, so does the choir need a choir conductor to guide them towards this goal. With their encyclopedic knowledge of composers and musical styles, conductors are the key to understanding how to perform these songs and bring them to life. I had the chance to speak with Shohei Kobayashi (my current choir conductor), about his time as a songwriter and how it has influenced his teaching style. In addition, I talked with some of my choir friends about the beauty of the multi-faceted and one of a kind choir experience.
Caroline Yardley: What was your process like when you were a songwriter? How did you get your inspiration?
Shohei Kobayashi: When I was songwriting a lot, I had a notebook that I carried around all the time. Usually it was some sort of combination of words with a certain rhythm or two that would come to mind. At the time, I wasn’t thinking very technically about it, so I would just write down the words while slow motion singing it in my head. That’s how I would remember things. Then I would take it to the guitar and try to flesh it out. I was inspired by my life, current events, wordplay, and the environment around me. I gradually wrote less and less as I got more into classical music, but I was still helping my friends, particularly one friend who arranged songs for his band and stuff like that. That was always fun, way more fun than trying to figure out my own thing (laughs).
CY: How has your experience as a songwriter influenced your current role as a choral conductor?
SK: I spent a lot of time thinking about this when I first started grad school. Because I think in terms of the solo singer-songwriter as a performer, and how one person can call the attention of a room without necessarily doing a whole lot. I think being able to feel the energy of a room, ride with the energy of the room and shift it: that’s a very related thing between solo performing and conducting. I always liked covering songs. I mean, I had fun performing my own, but I had more fun figuring out how to highlight new things in existing songs. I think that’s very much related to what we do in classical music, generally: in terms of trying to relate ourselves to this already existing piece of music. My best, most memorable musical moments are still the ones where I allows myself to let go emotionally as much as I did when I was a singer-songwriter. It’s still hard for me, being in school and focusing on technical things for so long, to be able to tap back into the more emotional things I focused on before then.
CY: How did you decide on the Then vs. Now theme for our concert?
SK: I mean, definitely a sort of “something old, something new” idea is tried and true; people love doing that. I feel like people also don’t necessarily always thread the influences through different composers or see a certain genre through or whatever. So I just tried to put together as many interesting little sets of interesting comparisons and stuff. I was excited for that last set, too, because we could get some instruments on stage with us. I was also really excited about the spiritual set that would have opened the concert; that was a really strong one with your voices. "Every Time", "Hear my Prayer", and "Word was God"; those were going to be great. Definitely a tried and true programming method, but not exactly the way I did it.
CY: How does your personal interpretation of these pieces influence the way you teach? You can think of this in terms of individual pieces or more holistically.
SK: Hmm, let’s see. It might be better to start with an example and then I can try to zoom out a little bit. It’s just generally more efficient if a leader steps into a room and has a plan of what it’s going to be like, so that we can most quickly get to that goal. There can be other pedagogical reasons for leaving interpretation open and allowing something to manifest itself in the process of rehearsing. I think I was more interested in getting you all acquainted and experienced with as many different styles as possible, with as much specificity of style as possible, instead of just being like, “Oh what do you think we should do here?”.
So like, "Ver Leigh uns Frieden", for example. So beautiful! One of the really important things about that is that even though the text is German, we can’t get too caught up in stopping the sound with pronunciation, like it has to be a beautiful line just evoking a trail of peace. The final sound is super important to work on legato for that. A lot of the things that we worked on after he worked out notes – I wanted that to be more of a sight-reading thing, so we would do it on solfege or a single syllable. After that we did a lot of work on neutral syllables or only singing on a vvv sound or breath exercises so that we have that foundation of breath underneath it. And then getting the text in there in such a way that it builds upon that foundation, that legato sound and everything.
“When individual members interpret a piece of music, they are putting a part of themselves in it. When you unite multiple individuals into a choir, you are able to get one cohesive voice because we strive for balance, which lets everyone's interpretations be heard at once without sacrificing cohesiveness” -Jimmer Maki
I think the biggest way that it influences the rehearsal process is that it sets up the pedagogy from the beginning to the end so that I’m not giving too much of any specific time or order, but rather making sure that it’s successful every step of the way. Interpretation is kind of a tricky word. I like to think that everything I’m after is already on the page, and then after that we start to highlight the space between the information on the page.
CY: Something I was thinking about with this was that I performed "Word Was God" when I was in high school, but even if it’s the same exact song, two different directors are going to perform it in completely different ways. It’s the small things like where to put breath marks, when to crescendo, when not to crescendo; it’s going to be different for every conductor no matter who they are.
SK: I think that’s the fun of classical music in general. Each piece is like a mini play where we’re all involved as different actors playing different roles, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to come out the same every time.
CY: One thing that particularly stuck out to me was when we were working with Katie in sectionals one day on Bach’s "Sicut Lo Cutus Est". She mentioned that choir members, for that song in particular, had to really make an effort to cut through the orchestra because it’s a piece where it’s composed moreso with the orchestra in mind than the choir. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that and whether that changes how you view the piece as a whole?
SK: I think, in general, a composer usually has both in mind. There is a way that Bach’s music is more instrumental than vocal, it’s not particularly melodic like Mendelssohn. There’s always considerations when you are combining instruments and choir. We’re always working on balancing and everything, and there are certain tricks and ways of focusing the sound from the choir to make sure they are more prominent or vice versa. Every piece is a little different, and I think that the biggest thing is that every choir, every orchestra, every space, and every day is different. You have to do what you can in the moment with the people you have in front of you. If we were in Hill working on "Sicut" and I was finding that the orchestra was overbalancing the choir somehow, I would probably first focus on the orchestra to get a more transparent sound out of them before I asked you all to sing more. We’ve already worked on our sound, and of course we’re adjusting to a new space and everything, but I would want to focus first on the group of people who are reading the music for the first time. So I think I understand where she’s coming from with the statement in a more general way; there’s always going to be certain considerations when you are combining forces like that.
“I think that my role as a singer in a song like Sicut Lo Cutus Est is important because there are many things a singer can do to help an audience connect with a song that instruments may not be able to do. When we sing, we are able to convey the emotion we want the audience to feel with our faces and body language” -Julia Devine
CY: I want to go back to an idea you mentioned about how every choir is different and every day is different. The way my choir director explained this to me in high school was that you can get a band together and you can pretty much expect how everyone is going to sound. When you have a choir, though, you can’t necessarily do that because everyone has different voices, ranges, and things like that. They all have their personal experiences which allow them to connect with songs in different ways. In what ways do you think that idea of multiple personalities in one choir enhances the original composer’s intentions for the song?
SK: That’s probably the biggest thing that draws me to it. All the connections we get to make with existing stuff, and things that exist came from other people. We get to all tap in with our own backgrounds and everything. I think it’s important as a conductor, as a director in a play, as a leader in any situation. The director may have something in mind – some sort of intention or an exact replica of something else – but it’s more interesting if we are able to think about intention within a certain confine.
Like, here’s this box, and let’s just write this intention inside of it. Now everyone can fill that box with that intention from yourself. There can be a greater sense of improvisation that way, a greater feeling of personal investment. If the focus is on just going after the composer’s intent, sometimes it can feel like we’re not opening ourselves up, in a way. Once we make up situations where we put our intentions into it, we invest ourselves and there’s more energy and more human in the performance.
I have this metaphor of the score itself being this skeleton, and we get to give it flesh and everything. It can look like a human, but in order for it to be re-animated in a convincing way, we have to put ourselves into it. Otherwise it’s like a zombie.
CY: Moving away from the personal aspect of it all, the different sets of our concert have a consistent theme. However, in the Tears set for example, "Io Piango" is performed and understood in a way that is very stylistically different from "Weep O Mine Eyes". How are you able to fit them into a broader narrative despite those differences in execution?
SK: There’s a lot to unpack there. Short answer: if you have two very different things, what’s really important is space and time, and ending in such a way that colors the room and clears the air to set up the next thing. The middle section of "Io Piango" is pretty gnarly, but the outer bits are a little bit less so. They’re still dissonant and that sort of thing, but there’s a little bit more of an old-school approach to text painting. For that one in particular, I wanted to make sure that you all had some experience with Renaissance music, and that’s where "Sicut Cervus" and "Weep O Mine Eyes" come in. And then Laurelson, with "Io Piango", was imitating old Renaissance madrigals. That was the connection there between the painting of Weep with the cascading of dissonance leading into the Laurelson. I’m curious, were you noticing a larger narrative throughout the whole thing ?
“Music shared between people and then shared with an audience allows for a lot of experiences to come together. Addressing the variety of experience that exists within each theme gives the singers and audience members insight into the range of human experience through song.” -Lilly Heitman
CY: I sort of did, like in the spiritual set. It goes from a very energetic vibe in "Every Time I Feel the Spirit" to a more intense feeling in "Word Was God". I think the ways the pieces worked together in general was really seamless, especially for our choir in particular.
SK: I think in the whole programming and setting-up-the-concert experience, the sense of flow throughout the entire concert is super important. Connecting the entire thing in a broader narrative wasn’t necessarily a goal of mine initially. But the flow between the pieces of each set, the flow between sets, our vocal stamina, when it made logistical sense to bring instrumentalists on stage – there’s practical and artistic reasons for organizing things in a certain way. You’re certainly right though, I do tend to juxtapose some sort of impetus energy, something contemplative, and then something to bring the energy up. Or it can be a muted version of that, like sometimes the first two can be one long set of contemplative music, and the last one is more of an exhale.
The transition from "Weep O Mine Eyes" to "Io Piango" to "Sure on this Shining Night" was like that. To be honest programming is still a mystery to me and I’m still learning a lot about it. It’s one thing that for whatever reason my program didn’t focus a lot on; we focused more on technique and rehearsing and all that. My experience as a songwriter and putting together setlists totally carry over into the classical music situation too. It’s so boring to sing a song, then sing another song. Let’s combine things and let things flow a little more.
CY: That’s all the questions I have. Thank you so much for talking with me!
SK: Thanks for having me!