This Saturday, the Amherst College Symphony Orchestra and Choral Society will perform Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” in Buckley Recital Hall. The performance represents a colossal effort, a collaboration of all three Amherst choirs in conjunction with the orchestra, as well as the Smith College Glee Club and three professional soloists. In preparing the work, the choir had to do without the guidance of choral director Mallorie Chernin, who was absent on medical leave. In her stead were three veterans of the Five Colleges: Wayne Abercrombie (former choral director of UMass), Cathy Melhorn (Mt. Holyoke College) and Ryan Brandau (Smith).
The requiem itself consists of the Latin missa pro defunctis, the mass for the dead, interspersed with nine of Owen’s poems. Like Owen, Britten broke with his contemporaries in his sobering portrait of war; the “War Requiem” stands in stark contrast to the heroic themes of Elgar’s “The Spirit of England.” Director of Instrumental Music Mark Swanson described the work as a “pacifist” requiem, one which both memorializes soldiers and laments the futility of their death.
Melhorn, who coached the women’s choir, compared the requiem to Picasso’s “Guernica” in its unsettling and distinctly modern depiction. “This is a very restless piece,” she said. “It’s built on the interval of a tri-tone of F-sharp and C which has been, throughout music history, the Devil’s interval. It’s tortured—this piece is tortured.”
Britten was himself a conscientious objector to World War II, and his music may well turn our thoughts to the present Iraq War. In fact, the upcoming performance is part of an overarching effort by Amherst’s music department to explore musical responses to war. The specter of Nazism lent gravitas to this year’s interterm musical, “Cabaret”; and two courses offered this semester—Professor of Music Jeffers Engelhardt’s “Music, Human Rights and Cultural Rights” and Professor of Music Jenny Kallick’s “Music and War”—give an academic treatment of the subject.
In an election year, some might regard emphasis of the Requiem’s anti-war message distastefully—a rude intrusion of politics into art. Yet Swanson insists that his goal is not to take a partisan stance, but simply to encourage discussion. Before becoming a conductor, Swanson worked as a lawyer and aspired to one day run for public office. A few years ago, he began to question whether his work here is really impactful. “I was going through sort of a mid-life reexamination of why I was doing music,” he said. “One of the reasons I wanted to do this piece is because it has a direct communicative value; it puts out all those issues of war and peace.”
One challenge presented by the “War Requiem” is to draw an audience to a piece which they have likely never heard of. In the recent past, Amherst’s orchestra and choral society have performed Verdi’s Requiem, Mozart’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, highly popular works which almost anyone would recognize. Compared to the catchy theme of the “Ode to Joy,” parts of the “War Requiem” may strike casual listeners as dissonant and abstruse—“modern” music in the pejorative sense. In fact, the choir has suffered significant attrition this semester for lack of a more mainstream offering.
Yet there is something to be said for exposing an audience (and students in particular) to new, vital music. And while a program of Verdi and Beethoven will fill the seats, a conductor must also avoid selecting merely crowd-pleasers. “It’s akin to if I was teaching music and I was only choosing the songs that everyone knew and liked,” said Swanson. “There’s some sort of pandering that’s involved in that.”
A piece of the scale and difficulty of Britten’s is rarely attempted by schools like Amherst. The “War Requiem” is ordinarily the centerpiece of a conservatory’s concert season, one that requires several months of preparation, hours of rehearsal daily and the participation of over 300 musicians and singers. This kind of intensity is simply not feasible at Amherst, where students rarely find time to practice outside of biweekly rehearsals. A conductor at a small liberal arts college must appreciate that, for many of her musicians, orchestra or choir is just one of several extracurricular activities.
As an illustrative example, Swanson mentioned one student who missed Sunday rehearsal to compete in an equestrian competition which had been rescheduled on account of snow. Swanson has taught and conducted at such schools as Indiana University and the San Francisco Conservatory, places where music is a student’s first priority. “At music schools, they’re required to be in orchestra,” said Swanson. “They’re marked down if they’re two minutes late. They’re there two minutes ahead of time and tuned. But that’s not Amherst, and that can be very frustrating.”
Though an orchestra of premeds and frisbee enthusiasts may lack the polish of a conservatory ensemble, however, liberal arts students bring their own talents to bear. Swanson observed that Amherst students are often more sensitive to nuanced aspects of the music. “Because Amherst kids are so smart and so inquisitive, they pick up things up on things more quickly in an intellectual way,” he said. “They respond to things like imagery and biography more than music school students who want to hear technical things like ‘loud—soft—fast—slow.’”
Though the requiem is formidable, Amherst’s singers and musicians have risen to the challenge. “As I’ve learned the piece, I’ve picked up on the electricity of performing something majestic,” said Glee Club president Jeff Gang ’09.
With the performance just days away, Melhorn echoed this sentiment. “When I got into this project, I thought that Amherst didn’t have the horses to do a piece like this,” she said. “But I’ve been proved wrong.”