December 22, 2009: Goofing off with Handel

In the field of music performance, "goofing off" is a technical term introduced by Pete Seeger.  It was intended to refer to the (hopefully) creative things a musician does when (s)he has better things to do (such as, for pianists, going through all sixty exercises in Hanon's Virtuoso Pianist before getting down to anything else).  According to his Web site, Paul Ayres is a busy man, actively involved in composition, performance, and education;  so any given day probably confronts him with no end of "better things to do."  However, the spirit of goofing off seems to have led him in the direction of "re-composing" familiar classical music.  His first effort involved music that Henry Purcell had composed for the funeral of Queen Mary II, set for a four-voice a capella choir.  Ayres re-composed the work for double choir, describing the result, entitled "Purcell's Funeral Sentence," as follows:

One SATB group sings (nearly exactly) Henry Purcell's setting of the Funeral Sentences, the other group sing newly-written material, commenting, reflecting, accompanying and interfering...

He then progressed from this ten-minute anthem to a half-hour reworking of the requiem setting by Gabriel Fauré, giving the result a title fit for the texting generation, "4A Wreck."

Ayres has now taken on the entirety of George Frideric Handel's Messiah, which, in its performance last night by the Sanford Dole Ensemble filled a two-and-a-half-hour evening.  This time the title is Messyah;  and the spirit of goofing off certainly thrives in the "messy" stem of that word.  (Indeed, "messing around" is often used as a synonym for "goofing off.")  There is nothing pejorative about that spirit;  but, in his pre-concert conversation with Dole, Ayres at least hinted that he may have come to a point where enough is enough.

Messyah may have smashed one of the most popular icons of the Christmas season, but it is hard to accuse Ayres of malice.  He picked up all the pieces and reassembled them, always lovingly, often imaginatively, and occasionally hysterically comically.  In a preview piece in the Sunday Datebook section of this past Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman quoted Ayres posing the critical thought behind this effort:

Why did Handel do it this way instead of that?  What if we took a right turn down that street and see where it goes?

Messyah is very much a composition for those who know Messiah well, and ultimately it provides food for thought over the question of why it turned out the way it did.  However, while Messiah has the coherence of an oratorio setting of a complete narrative of the life of Jesus, Messyah is more a collection of case-by-case studies of the individual sections, each taking its own "alternative turn" with little apparent thought to the overall structure beyond Handel's initial framework.

Sadly, the result is often more tedious than stimulating, particularly when it gets predictable.  By the time one gets as far as "All we like sheep," one just knows that Ayres is going to do something with "gone astray;"  so it is no surprise when the members of the chorus leave their risers and start wandering about the stage "every one to his own way."  On the other hand, when Ayres cuts loose with his few pop settings with jazz combo accompaniment, the joyousness of the result is as true to the religious spirit as was the original setting.

From the performers' point of view, this composition is far more than the lark of a choral conductor having prepared too many Messiah performances.  It abounds with complex counterpoint, much of which is polytonal;  and the entire choir must face several improvisatory challenges.  Dole's choir was definitely up to the entire task.  Whether it involved being true to the source material or following Ayres down his alternative turns, the seventeen voices were most impressive in handling both solo and group material.  Unfortunately, the same could not be said of their instrumental accompaniment.  This consisted of a string quartet, bass, trumpet, two percussionists, and two keyboardists responsible for piano, harpsichord, and organ parts.  The strings were, sadly, the weakest part of the mix.  If the voices could negotiate the twists and turns of Ayres polytonality with a sureness of pitch, the same could not be said of the string section, most notably the two violins.  On the other hand the jazz backup work by percussion, bass, and trumpet was absolutely solid, which had much to do with why these particular departures from Handel's tradition were so effective.

Will Messyah become an "alternative Christmas tradition?"  My own guess is that it will not.  It is more like a series of experiments that Ayres developed to pursue the question he had posed.  The opportunity for an audience to review those experiments is definitely an interesting one, but once is enough.  By way of comparison, one might consider Donald Swann's contribution to the first Hoffnung Festival, where he chose to add a series of extra surprises to the second movement of Joseph Haydn's 94th G major symphony.  Even when Swann's surprises no longer surprise, they are still funny, even on the old recording of the Festival performance.  I am not sure that Ayres' surprises will have such an enduring quality, but it was still a pleasure to be exposed to them.