I found this particularly interesting. A variation on the traditional Noel, this is "African Noel" by Brad Holmes performed by the 2009 Michigan State Honors Choir. The song is from the Congo. It incorporates the "messengers" at the beginning of the piece that would shout or sing messages to the next village. The piece also involves movement with the music in a more obvious way than perhaps a traditional hymn. The group tone is extremely full and round, without overdoing it. It stays true what I believe is stylistically appropriate. Sometimes one can hear individual voices that have a bit of a nasal quality, but the sheer number of singers makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where in the group they are coming from. This also probably has to with the fact that the hall where they are performing (in Ann Arbor) is quite forgiving. My only other qualm is the fact that there is a tenor sing "Pie Jesu!" right after the "Noel!" of the group that can't always be heard with great clarity. This is a great piece to do with a large group. If it were a smaller group, I don't quite think the amount of power would have quite been enough. Listen until the end of the video. The director, Andre Thomas, has a great explanation of the dialect and the origin.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
African Noel - Brad Holmes
I found this particularly interesting. A variation on the traditional Noel, this is "African Noel" by Brad Holmes performed by the 2009 Michigan State Honors Choir. The song is from the Congo. It incorporates the "messengers" at the beginning of the piece that would shout or sing messages to the next village. The piece also involves movement with the music in a more obvious way than perhaps a traditional hymn. The group tone is extremely full and round, without overdoing it. It stays true what I believe is stylistically appropriate. Sometimes one can hear individual voices that have a bit of a nasal quality, but the sheer number of singers makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly where in the group they are coming from. This also probably has to with the fact that the hall where they are performing (in Ann Arbor) is quite forgiving. My only other qualm is the fact that there is a tenor sing "Pie Jesu!" right after the "Noel!" of the group that can't always be heard with great clarity. This is a great piece to do with a large group. If it were a smaller group, I don't quite think the amount of power would have quite been enough. Listen until the end of the video. The director, Andre Thomas, has a great explanation of the dialect and the origin.
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I enjoyed seeing a choir of non-African singers attempt to perform a song that challenged the singers in many different ways. This was encouraging to see that choir directors are making efforts to incorporate world music into their curriculum. That being said, the performance did not seem as authentic as it could have been. Granted, these were college students from Michigan that were studying singing from the Western European tradition, but the style of their singing, as a group, was not close what I would think an African group would sound like. The soloists, I think, did a good job emulating that sound, but the choir sounded like a college choir that studied Western European music and could have done more to the style of their sound than what they did. It is cool to see a college choir do that, though.
ReplyDeleteThis was definitely interesting and engaging to watch and listen to. I don't have personal experience with authentic African choir music, but I assume that an authentic experience would not have been choreographed as this was, and I wish the performance had been more organic in that way! The vocal quality used was pretty nice, and was at least full in a way that attempted to imitate an African choir sound.
ReplyDeleteI am glad that this video captured Dr. Thomas' discussion of context of the piece - without it, I would assume the arranger/composer would have done little to pull this work toward the end of the spectrum of authenticity. The points folks are making about tone are interesting and remind me that we need to do some more listening/watching in class to get appropriate sounds in our ears...
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