SATB

Um, and it's based on, it's based on a, a real situation where, uh, an aquifer, uh, that had been tested by scientists that's apparently some of the purest water in the world, um, this very old aquifer, and, uh, the community was going to allow development on top of it, would have, which would have compromised the purity of the water.

So we took that story and, uh, created this oratorio with, uh, SATB choir, um, children's choir, and five characters.

Uh, they re- represent the mayor of the town, who has to make the final decision because her vote is the, the final vote on the, the, uh, council, town council.

Her son, who is the tenor, uh, is the, uh, water activist.

mean, it's simple, almost like a hymn.

A square hymn, like a four-part SATB kind of thing.

Yeah, and it didn't come out of nowhere.

Like you said, you're a music historian, by God.

I probably did the soprano and the bass.

Yeah, I probably filled in the dinner.

Yeah, SATB.

Alto.

Okay.

And what can you say about the performance practice of sacred harp? Because I took a class on this, and I think you would think SATB is soprano, alto, tenor, bass, but it's not really arranged that way,

right? It is.

It is.

And we don't practice either.

We just do it.

Second comment is that it is arranged SATB, although the soprano is referred to as the treble part, which is a clue that it's a harmony part, not the melody.

So the top part is a harmony part.

Have you ever thought about when you started composing and you spoke about composing for voice and you've composed for orchestra and you've composed for small groups and church and so on, how did you get... from where you started to arranging and composing for voice, because writing for an instrument or writing for an orchestra is incredibly different in many ways to writing.

I mean, the voice is an instrument, but you've got your traditional SATB scores to think about.

You've got to understand the voice.

You've got to understand their range and how they work.

It is a large choral cycle.

with cello, so SATB chorus with cello on poems by my dear friend Farzana Marie.

She is a poet.

If you don't know her work, I would so highly recommend looking her up.

I remember reading a NIH study where a bunch of people sang together, and as they were singing, their heartbeats actually synchronized.

I don't know if you've ever read that study, but I thought that that was so, uh, it was so telling because when you are singing, and I'm a, I'm a singer and I sing, I love singing in harmony, for example, four-part harmony, SATB is my favorite thing in the world, and when you know you're in the pocket with that, when you know that you're doing it so that everybody's the same, there is a sense of unity that I, that I frankly have never experienced in any other way.

And yet something you said kind of made me go, "Hmm." You said that the empathy that's there, that you're listening to someone else's expression of their pain and, and you can understand and see sort of your own pl- your own pain reflected back to you.

W- music is able to do that.

But the first couple scenes, I would write, you know, a piano score.

So grand staff, bass clef, treble clef with soprano alto, tenor bass, SATB on the top.

I would write some melodies, fill it out with some harmony lines.

And that first one, I essentially just did that.

As we went on, I started adding staffs because I was like, we need to build this somehow.

So I think at one point I had two treble, a grand piano, treble and bass, and then two bass clef parts.

So I wanted six different staffs going with all the ideas composing, and then as well as the SATB.

So it started getting much more complicated as the thing goes on, but always at the piano.

So there are often pieces there that I haven't heard before, and some that I've grown to really like.

It's still a bit limited, after all, we sing in English and the pieces have to be suitable for an SATB choir.

Also, the choir is mostly people over the age of 30, so I'm not expecting anything really outrageous.

Getting a subscription to a concert series is a pretty good way of discovering more pieces.