After playing horns and woodwinds and arranging scores for the likes of Arcade Fire, Coldplay, David Byrne and Father John Misty, multi-instrumentalist and composer Kelly Pratt set his sights on another stellar collaborator: the Camas High School Choir.
It’s not the first time the choir has worked with a rock star. Two years ago, director Ethan Chessin — a teaching-award winner for exactly this kind of energetic innovation — launched a grant-funded musical partnership with Young Audiences of Oregon & Southwest Washington, which helped hook him up with experimental pop band AU. Band and choir wound up staging a grand performance featuring a challenging blend of musical styles, sung by 200 young voices and backed up by powerful rock ‘n’ roll instrumentation and video projection.
Now, Chessin and the Camas choir are back with a similar endeavor, featuring new music created for this project by Pratt under his solo name, Bright Moments. Once again, the sound is a mash-up, from traditional choral through Afrobeat to heavy metal to fusion jazz, that’ll keep listeners’ ears constantly surprised.
“It moves through all the genres and gets to this place of true weirdness. By the end it feels like the future,” Chessin said. The subject matter is topical and newsy sometimes, he said, with a focus on the always doubled-edged sword of modern technology — from guns to nuclear power, from the internet to social media.
“It’s like building a city. We’re pointing out the grandeur of the building but also the cracks in the foundation,” he said. “We’re looking at the ways forward. The piece is a question mark. A lot is very dark but it ends with joy.”
“The combination of wistful, haunting and energetic songs takes the audience on a rollercoaster of emotion,” said Camas junior Laura Teames.
Or, as Camas senior Tyler Vaughan put it: “It’s the youth of the world teaching you a lesson that will stick with you forever.”
The music business
As you can hear, students are selling the concert as well as singing it. Young Audiences has facilitated a holistic educational approach to the concert by involving students in its Business of Music program, which aims to teach everything you need to know about music creation and distribution in the internet age. This year, Young Audiences brought Camas students together with Portland industry professionals like recording engineer Jason Powers, artist manager Gina Altamura and film director Alicia J. Rose (best known lately for web series “The Benefits of Gusbandry”), who has worked with students on music videos to further enrich the entire sensory experience. Each singer contributed a few seconds of video, and all are working with Rose on integrating that vast amount of material.
“When students sign up for my choir class, I know they’re there to sing,” Chessin said. But they never say no to learning other aspects of the music business, he said, like making videos or producing and marketing an eventual recording of the final concert, which is set for tonight at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art.
Chessin likes a sports analogy: Most student-athletes don’t actually expect to take the field as pro players, but if sports is deep in their blood, there are plenty of other opportunities to work in the industry.
The same goes for music, he said. “I’m not preparing 200 opera singers. That would be irresponsible,” Chessin said. What’s more practical, he said, is exposing his students to “the economic world of music” and having them learn those skills and opportunities, too.
“Throughout this experience, these students have surpassed my expectations,” Chessin said. “This show is proof that youth voices should be taken seriously. Their wisdom, talent and passion radiates from every aspect of the performance.”
