The Postmodern Camerata Restful Requiem

Artistic Director Dr. Greg Caisely, Alexandra Hill, Camyar Pazandeh & Rei Ikeda

I asked the young man what kind of horn he was carrying in his case that was strapped to his back .  “An alto trombone."

This was Friday October 23 in the afternoon and I was near Nitobi Garden on my way to the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610 at the Chan Centre.

I told the young man, “You must be going to rehearse Mozart’s Requiem."

He did look at me with some reserved amazement as I was right. But if you investigate the circumstances you will find that my correct guessing has a lot to do with that Spanish saying that the devil knows more, not because he is the devil, but because he is an old man.

At my age of 73 with most of the communications between my neurons and synapses not diverging into dead ends it can simply be explained that if you have gone to a few performances of Mozart’s Requiem you will know that somewhere on stage left of an orchestra or stage right (for Sunday’s performance of the Requiem by The Post Modern Camerata at Dunbar Heights United Church you would see three trombone players with one bass, on baritone and one alto trombone. Since I knew about the Camerata’s schedule and indeed attended the Sunday concert it should make sense.

Leanna Wong's Double Bass

Where it does not make sense is why during the very nicely loud (I like to sit up front and be blown away) Requiem (good to have a tympani on board) I could hear one of the three sopranos  with a crystal clear sound that was above all other sounds of a middle sized orchestra with 13 singers.

The soprano in question is Alexandra Hill. Her voice does not pierce. It is a beautiful and pleasant voice. To me it has all to do with some very good diction and whatever can be explained by her ability to project sound.

Some years ago my younger daughter gave me Requiem played by the Chorus and Orchestra of Ancient Music directed by Christopher Hogwood. One of the singers is soprano Emma Kirkby. The first few minutes of the Requiem powerfully pull you in. When it is all over you are at rest in silence. This is appropriate as requiem comes from the Latin root to rest.

After Sunday’s performance, the silence that came after provided me with that restful moment to consider how lucky I am to have the opportunity to witness Mozart’s Requiem in the intimate surroundings of a church in preparation for that Christmas season when I do my best to avoid any of those choirs singing in English that work by a composer whose surname begins with an H.

Brian Mix's cello

There was something else that this amateur of music noticed. This was the voice of Kamyar Pazandeh listed in my program as a bass. My experience with bass singers of the past is that it is easy to sound like burping in melody. This was not the case with Pazandeh. The voice was clear and I could hear him by simply looking at him while blurring with my vision the other singers.

The afternoon's performance began with J.S. Bach's Cantata BWV in which I was able to enjoy that very good local tenor Clinton Stoffberg. Then I heard a marvelous compostion by Vancouver's (tall) Jocelyn Morlock who wrote a Lacrimosa (the very same words of the Latin Mass and in Mozart's Requiem Lacrimosa) in memory of her father. Morlock's "new" music while always different, it always eases you (gently) in to enjoying something that is not in the general repertoire. She is currently the Composer in Residence at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The best part of her Lacrimosa was that it featured only two singers, Alexandra Hill, soprano, and a startlingly good Melissa Howell, Mezzo Soprano.

After the performance I got to meet Pazandeh and Rei Ikeda the alto trombone player.

I have to pleasantly report that Pazandeh is studying to be an actor at Studio 58 and that it seems he has only had a couple of voice lessons.  He obviously is one fast learner (handsome, too) but he will not have to learn how to project his voice from anybody much less that fave soprano of mine, Alexandra Hill.

Alexandra Hill

 Vocal Projection - by Alexandra Hill


The question: why is it that I could be heard to “cut” through the orchestra?

The short answer: A familiarity of melody and the perception that higher is louder.

The longer answer: well it has to do with voice type, fundamental frequency, harmonics, and the human ear. It also has to do with a mix of how the music is orchestrated, what the acoustics of the performance space are like, how many people are in the audience, and where they are seated relative to the performers.

Pitch is like colour. It is perceived. Higher pitches are often perceived to be louder than lower pitches (recall that frequency (pitch), which is measured in Hertz, is not the same thing as amplitude (loudness), which is measured in decibels). Melodies are often the highest line of the woven fabric that is a song, a cantata, or a symphony. When you hear a chord, your ear often picks out the top note. Perhaps this immediate focus to the top note has to do with the way we are taught to listen to the melody rather than the harmonies. It is a cultural thing.

If you have ever sung in a choir, and you’ve been asked by the choir director to sing the bass, tenor or alto line, you’ll recall that it’s often the sopranos that get the “easy” part - the part that everyone recognizes - the part that could have taken you less than 30 seconds to learn if only the choir conductor hadn’t saddled you with the tricky harmony part. We, as listeners, bend our ear for a musical phrase, and the soprano being the highest voice type, is the voice to deliver that line. 

I am a soprano.

Alex asked me to write an essay on vocal projection after attending the Postmodern Camerata concert on Sunday. A thorough essay would have been one that included definitions, equations, theories, models, and perhaps even images of spectrograms and vocal folds; one that would have really provided insight into the physics of sound – air molecules in motion. For this type of answer, I point the reader in the direction of Keith Johnson’s book Acoustic and AuditoryPhonetics.

I will conclude by simply saying this: Bach, Mozart and Jocelyn Morlock are masters. The music they have written is crafted in such a way as to permit the human voice to soar. The harmonics of the soprano voice are much higher than those of the orchestra, and are therefore easily picked-up by the human ear. Alex was also sitting in one of the front rows at Dunbar Heights United on Sunday, just feet away from the soprano section, which may provide further explanation as to why he could hear me very clearly