Big music and Big Data will work together at this weekend’s concerts by the Vancouver USA Singers. The blend will make a terrible, audible point about the ongoing tragedy of mass shootings in America.
When the choir launches into Minnesota composer Joshua Clausen’s new Requiem, they’ll start by playing back a recording of one rapidly struck piano note that varies between quiet and suddenly loud. The note plays insistently for seven whole minutes while the choir fades in and out again.
That repeated A-note represents every day there was a mass shooting in America, from Sandy Hook, Conn., in 2012 to Sutherland Springs, Texas, in 2017. The volume of each note represents the scale of each day’s body count, with quiet taps standing for fewer casualties and sudden, loud ones representing many casualties.
The seven-minute string of A-notes forms the foundation for “this beautiful choral piece” by Clausen, said Jana Hart, director of the Vancouver USA Singers. “It’s just quiet and gorgeous and sung over that note the whole time. At the end, the repeated notes seem to go on forever. It’s a gut-wrenching piece.”
IF YOU GO
What:“The World Beloved,” spring concerts by the Vancouver USA Singers.
When:7 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday.
Where:First Presbyterian Church, 4300 Main St., Vancouver.
Tickets: $20 in advance or $25 at the door. Free for 12 and younger.
On the web: www.vancouverusasingers.org
Turning dry data into meaningful sound is called data sonification. A well-known example of data sonification is the old-fashioned Geiger counter, which goes from quiet to clicking insistently when it detects radiation.
In this case, journalist Sophie Chou of Public Radio International used data from the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/) to generate a sound picture of mass shootings in America. She considered different ways of using sound to depict data, including longer sounds for bigger numbers, but settled on the single piano note with varying volume “because it sounded the most clear and appropriate and respectful,” Chou said in an interview with Storybench, Northeastern University’s journalism publication.
When composer Clausen heard Chou’s data sonification segment on the air, he was “just amazed by it” and inspired to write a choral work embracing it, he told Public Radio International. “It’s so direct, it’s the sound of real facts, of these terrible stark facts. … But it also struck me how human and vulnerable it sounded … almost like an SOS.
“I hope that it can help people find some healing and peace, but there’s also a part of it that’s unresolved,” Clausen said.
When Clausen’s piece also landed on public radio, Hart heard it and felt similarly amazed by the music and the meaning. “I remember sitting in my office hearing this soft, beautiful music and this underlying piano note,” she said. “I’d never heard anything like it.”
Classical bluegrass
Don’t get the idea that this concert is all sorrow. Right after Clausen’s Requiem, everything lightens up with “Lux Aeterna,” a revered piece by Washington native Morten Lauridsen, whom Hart called “the top choral composer in the world right now.” (Lauridsen was once a firefighter and fire lookout near Mount St. Helens, and he still retreats from Los Angeles to the San Juan Islands to compose).
“It’s all about eternal light. It’s full of light,” Hart said of Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” which was spontaneously adopted by radio stations around the nation in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a way of broadcasting comfort and hope.
The rest of the concert is all about joy and fun — and fond memories for the Vancouver USA Singers. After five years they’re reviving “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass,” which they performed in 2014 at Carnegie Hall in New York City, with composer Carol Barnett in attendance.
“The choir was begging to do it again,” Hart said.”It works in some American hymns and traditional music that’s very simple and affirming. It’s very uplifting and ends with blessings.”
The lively, spirited piece calls for accompaniment by a traditional bluegrass band, but since many great bluegrass players don’t actually read music notation, Hart recruited an ensemble of bluegrass-loving classical players: Jon Newton on fiddle, Tim Connell on mandolin, Neal Grandstaff on guitar, Mitch Limori on banjo and Clark Blanchard on bass.
“This is real American music but it’s also classical music,” Hart said. “You have to find these guys who play with symphonies. And that’s fine. They love to come together and let their hair down.”
After “The World Beloved,” she added, those classical bluegrass players will let loose on their own. “It’s going to be a concert that starts serious and gets more and more joyful,” Hart said. “The bluegrass mass and the band will rock the place.”
