Ola Gjeilo, Walt Whitman, Fearless, swirling Waves

   A minister and a physicist are having coffee with a choral director. The minister, citing scripture and historical evidence (and tossing in thoughtful quotes by everyone from Sitting Bull to Anais Nin) maintains that life is a circle.
   The physicist takes a sip of his Kapuziner mit extra cream, smiles indulgently, and proceeds to deconstruct the minister's argument using the resulting rubble to construct a logic-based edifice formed by waves and particles supported within the space time continuum. With evident satisfaction he states the universe is waves, and that waves have a beginning and an end, as does the universe which will succumb to entropy. We have always been traveling away from our starting point, not circling back to it.
   The choral director, well aware that the minister and the phsyicist do not expect her to have an opinion on the matter (and supressing her impulse to mention that some physicists maintain the universe will implode in on itself rather than explode outward), cannot resist teasing them both with her meta theory on the universe of choral music.
   "In my universe" she begins sotto voce, "Voice is sound waves of various lengths and cycles. Every voice might be made up of many wavelengths, a chorus being innumerable wavelengths times (X) the number of singers. Perfection is when all these waves of various lengths and cycles vibrate together in a harmonic tuning where there is periodic alignment of the waves. When this happens my universe is neither circular nor linear. Rather it is a swirling blend of vocal inputs that smooth and polish each other to create a blending roundness and purity of tone that can vibrate the very foundations of the universe."
   This imaginary conversation might highlight the magic of the work by Ola Gjeilo we will be performing on our spring program, "Song of the Universal" from Walt Whitman's 1874 edition of Leaves of Grass.To say that Leaves of Grass is a foundational work of American literature is most certainly an understatement. Arguably, this work invented free verse and stream of consciousness writing. His unbridled, uninhibited and joyous love of people in all their ways, shapes and forms pours out of his poems like swirling, whirling particle/wave clouds of over-abundant feeling. To read the work is to marvel at the sheer audacity and fearlessness of his vision.
   So how could anyone capture this prodigious poetic energy in a choral work? Well, it turns out that Gjeilo is ideally suited to this challenge because he loves to use multiple voice and instrumental parts to interweave a theme within mulitple vocal lines of different, but sympathetic, wavelengths and cycles. The eight-part divisi in this work is used to dance fast upper voices on eighth note runs while lower voices pulse on rolling qurater, half and whole notes and then to switch them back and forth to create a twisting, swirling multi-stemmed helix of sound, with each strand vibrating and pulsing against the others on different cycles; cycles that align with each other and that tune the way our eyes tune light waves to create a clear vision of our world. Thus the music becomes the very swirling, all-encompassing energy that is Whitman's poetry.
   Whitman, as a poet and a man, was fearless. During his lifetime and since his poetry has been deemed obscene, sacriligous, and dangerously radical because it celebrates the entire universe of the human condition. And the fear and loathing that greeted his work in the 19th century still exists today.
   It is interesting to note that if the Bagaduce Chorale were a touring choir and if we happened to be performing in Florida or Oklahoma we might get in trouble for singing this work because Leaves of Grass, a courageous, swirling, and universal work of American poetry, is banned in those two states. Perhaps, sadly, the  minister was at least partially right.