As a high school choir teacher, I'm always pulled in two directions while programming for my choir: I feel like I'm either teaching students about culture through music or teaching students about music through culture. I usually try to pick a focus for my school year (for example: Latin America, or the Jewish Diaspora) and hope that by exposure over ten months my students will come away with a deeper appreciation for each culture than if each song in a concert is the sole representative of the artist/religion/region from which it comes. This approach has mixed results - I find that I still need to be purposeful about both teaching my students to sightread and sing in tune in Western choral style and also about making sure that we learn from culture bearers and experts who can help my predominantly white students understand cultures they're unfamiliar with.
I teach at a large comprehensive public high school with strong middle school feeder programs, though a significant portion of my students are new to singing each year. I have four choir classes, and each one meets for about 53 minutes everyday. We have about seven weeks to prepare for each concert. I typically plan three pieces per choir per concert, plus a few student-led small ensemble. At the end of each concert I program a piece for all choirs to sing together.
This year, in order to draw in the burgeoning South Asian population in my school community, I focsed on the music of the Subcontinent. I researched choral repertoire and compiled a list of all of the choral music influenced by Indian/Pakistani/Nepali/Bengali music or poetry (feel free to write me and suggest more to add to the list!) We spent the first half of the unit preparing for a choral-fusion concert: Western choral music by composers, who happened to have significant experience in South Asian musical traditions.
Here was our program:
TB Choir:
Last Kind Words - John Paul Rudoi (lyrics by Rabindranath Tagore)
Shar Ki Ri (single line version) – Andrea Clearfield (Mustangi Tibetan music from Nepal)
Zikr – A.R. Rahmna, arr. Ethan Sperry (Bollywood/Sufi)
SA Choir:
TaReKiTa – Reena Esmail (Hindustani-influenced choral music)
Ram Tori Maya – Reena Esmail (Hindustani-influenced choral music)
Tse Go La (SSA version) – Andrea Clearfield (Mustangi Tibetan music from Nepal)
SSAA Choir:
Tha Thin Tha – Lisa Young (konnakol-laced vocal jazz)
Bishnau - Lua Hightower (Afghan folk music)
Pallaanda – Ethan Sperry (Carnatic sacred music arranged for choir)
SATB Choir:
Dhire-Dhire – Reena Esmail (Hindustani-influenced choral music)
Misra-Chappu – Lisa Young (konnakol-laced vocal jazz)
Balleilakka – A.R. Rahman, arr. Ethan Sperry (Bollywood)
Combined Choirs:
Bedu Pako Baramasa – Meghan Quinlan (minimally arranged folk song)
Throughout preparations for this concert, we continued learning Western choral/singing technique and learned the music by sightreading Western notation. However, each piece offered us the opportunity to learn from the composer or an expert who had information to share with us about the cultural background of the piece. Andrea Clearfield, the composer of Shar Ki Ri and Tse Go La, gave my choirs a fantastic presentation via Zoom about Tibetan folk music and her research in Nepal. Lisa Young gave us an introduction to konnakol, the Carnatic vocal percussion tradition that underpins much of her writing. Local Sufi and Persian musicians gave guest lectures about their traditions, Hindi and Tamil speakers shared pronunciation and grammar with us, and more. At the concert, we were joined by our school’s Bollywood dance troupe, our region’s youth Tibetan dancers, Carnatic instrumentalists, Bharatanatyam dancers, and more.
A few of these pieces gave us an opportunity to collaborate with these guest artists and bring added richness to the music as well as our understanding of the context. For Pallaanda, we sang only some of Sperry’s rhythmic and harmonic ostinatos, leaving the Carnatic violin and percussion to fill those roles. In working with these musicians, we learned to count the taal (rhythmic cycle) and about drones instruments in Indian classical music. Our dancers taught us Bollywood dance moves to incorporate into our performance of Balleilakka. We learned mudras (hand gestures) for TaReKiTa which we applied later in the year to our dance unit. Finally, for Bedu Pako Baramasa, we invited all our guest musicians to join us and turn a simple children’s choir piece into a massive collaboration with a native Hindi speaker soloist, improvisations on violin and percussion, and elements of multi voice choral harmony.
This concert was not the end of our unit. While choral music does not have a long history in India, Hindustani and Carnatic classical music are cherished cultural traditions and sources of great pride. For our next concert, I decided to let local practitioners of Carnatic music guide our journey into a deeper understanding of this Southern Indian tradition. We learned Bharatanatyam dance, recited konnakol compositions, and sang traditional songs in swaras (Carnatic solfege) and in Sanskrit, with some students attempting improvisations at the concert. Here was our repertoire for this concert:
SA:
Vande Meenakshi – Muthuswami Dikshithar
TB:
Shyamale Meenakshi – Muthuswami Dikshithar
SSAA:
Sara Sara Samarai – Thyagaraja
SATB:
Raminchuvaa – Thyagaraja
Combined choirs: Raga Iman Kalyan – Matthew Grasso
This last piece was the centerpiece of the concert, a 20-minute performance of a full-length raga, arranged for choir and Hindustani or Carnatic instruments. This piece was a joy – the choral parts were challenging enough for my students but were mostly unison or call-and-response in two parts, and included multiple opportunities for our veena and mridangam players to improvise. The choirs (and the audience!) were skeptical about a 20-minute piece of music, but this raga is so perfectly crafted, and our collaborating musicians were so expertly skilled, that the raga had its intended effect for many: transporting us to an elevated state.
A student’s experience in a choir class always has choir at its core – that is, genres and cultures other than Western choral music require additional effort, planning, or resources to explore. In the case of this project, the exploration that composers like Andrea Clearfield and Lisa Young guided us through dovetailed with the practice of our local Bharatanatyam and konnakol teachers to help my students go broad and deep in their learning – and created a pair of joyous concerts for our audiences!
-Ethan Chessin
