Listeners who have seen and heard Dawn Upshaw or the EOS Orchestra in Vanderbilt’s Ingram Hall might think of the venue as a smaller and finer TPAC for world-class musical talent. And they’d be right. But Ingram Hall belongs to the Blair School of Music, the mission of which is to teach musical traditions and performing skills so that students’ lives are enriched and that students are prepared, as amateurs or professionals, to enrich the lives of others.
As part of that mission, for a decade now the Blair School has been hosting composer-in-residence sessions underwritten by Broadcast Music Inc., an organization whose purpose is to ensure that many thousands of professional musicians receive the fees that are due them. The BMI program brings established professional composers to campus to hold master classes and workshops for novices. Each three-day session culminates in a concert of the resident’s music, to which students and the public are invited.
This fall’s composer-in-residence is Paul Basler, a French horn virtuoso who teaches at the University of Florida. Very busy as a horn player, Basler is also acclaimed as a composer in many genres, including works for voices. This year’s concert, taking place 8 p.m. Oct. 11 at Ingram Hall, will highlight his choral selections as performed by Blair’s Symphonic Choir and Chamber Choir, each directed by David Childs and accompanied by pianist Polly Brecht. Some selections will also feature the composer on French horn.
Basler’s compositions captivate for a number of reasons, maybe the most important of which, apart from his rich and versatile musical imagination, is that his work is rooted in traditional tonality rather than filled with revolutionary clangor. Equally important is that Basler, a much-traveled man, absorbs elements derived from non-European traditions into his compositions. This weekend’s program will include Spanish texts with rhythms and sonorities suggestive of jalapeños in the marinade. Basler composed the evening’s featured work, “Missa Kenya,” after spending a year as a Fulbright lecturer at Kenyatta University in Nairobi.
Revised just this year, “Missa Kenya” is typical of Basler’s compositional approach. It takes as its text the Latin mass sung first as plainchant in the European Middle Ages, and set again and again by composers from Mozart and Cherubini to Poulenc and Stravinsky. Basler’s setting belongs to that centuries-old tradition yet also renews it with sonorities and percussive gestures drawn from West Africa. His procedures mirror the African response to European hymnody, in which traditional diatonic hymns and consonant chordal harmonies learned from missionaries are spiced with rhythms and voicings commonly associated with jazz. (Paul Simon achieved something similar with Graceland, his collaboration with the South African mbube group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo.)
Richly and subtly diverse, this weekend’s concert will be of special interest to choristers and choirmasters. Anyone who loves the sound of human voices singing, though, should find the evening delightful and enlightening.
—Marcel Smith
