For fans of new(er) choral music, there’s much here to enjoy, and much to puzzle over. On one hand we get tightly organized, sonorous, idiomatic, well-crafted, vocally complementary works–the sonnets for men’s voices and several of the a cappella settings for mixed choir–and on the other we get what appears to be composer William McClelland’s signature pop/jazz, piano-driven conceptualizations of some very lengthy texts whose structure, language, and style make for troublesome musical scoring. The sheer wordiness of the two works in question–The Ballad of Don and Dan (a story of an abduction and near-murder in Montana in 1984, cobbled from various news accounts) and Sidney Lanier’s ballad The Revenge of Hamish–demands reams of notes, which McClelland certainly supplies, but that’s about all he does.
Don and Dan sounds more like a kind of patter chorus from a Broadway musical, designed to quickly cover a lot of ground plot-wise but where the music is simply a vehicle to carry the words and keep things moving. In this it succeeds, but the music itself seems forced, not logical or artful; the headlong style offers no compelling melodies or unifying developmental or structural features (except repetition). The driving rhythms are led by a piano that’s too often just loud and overly agressive. Likewise, in the Revenge of Hamish, the music seems superfluous–again the pounding piano, hard-sung rhythms, and narrowly-drawn melodies detract from Lanier’s beautifully written language, doing nothing to capture the poem’s scenes, evoke its moods, or enhance the dialogue. Ultimately, McClelland fails to give us a good reason to have set these texts to music–in fact, the Lanier sounds much better spoken, or just silently read.
And yet, works such as In That Part of the Young Year and the abovementioned male-voice pieces show substantially more melodic/thematic and harmonic/textural interest than the longer compositions. The hymn-like Good Speaking–A Benediction Song that closes the disc contains attractive harmonies and skillful voice-leading–but again, nothing melodically memorable. And the choir, good as it is, in this piece falls a bit short in ensemble precision and balance. Part of the reason for this is the too-close recording perspective–although the venue, New York’s American Academy of Arts and Letters, is one of the world’s finest–and the pop-studio quality to some tracks (The Ballad of Don and Dan, for instance) makes us wonder if this repertoire is really compatible or shown to best advantage grouped on one program.
There is no question as to the sincerity of the performances or the commitment of the artists, proven by way of the sustained energy and vitality of expression they show in each work. But the music just isn’t that substantive or memorable in the essential aspects of mood or harmony or melody or atmosphere. As always, there will be listeners who will disagree–and if you’re inclined toward jazz-flavored theatrical vocal styles or may be interested in unique settings of texts by writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conrad Aiken, e.e. cummings, Richard Wilbur, and John Bunyan, I urge you to hear for yourself.
