by Rod Parke - SGN A&E Writer

Concert by Cappella Romana
November 7
St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church

If Cappella Romana is an acquired taste, then I've got it bad! My interest may be regarded as a perverted one, given my anti-religion sentiments, because the members of Cappella Romana are passionate and utterly involved intellectually in the Greek Orthodox religion. Deep research informs their every performance, and the Greek texts hold great significance for the singers. My interest, on the other hand, is purely a sensual one: their sound gives me chills, and the foreign nature of their music and vocal sound intrigues me more than I can explain.

What is it about their sound that I so crave? It is, first of all, what a revered friend of mine would call scrotular: a super-masculine, assertive, buzzing noise that comes from deep inside. It is mostly loud, very sustained, and flowing in an unbroken stream from note to note. It would seem at first exposure to be almost guttural & a grainy, throaty sound. But, if it were, the throats of these men would be raw, rendering them unable to sing for long. Yet, Cappella Romana in this concert just completed four consecutive evenings of sustaining that noise for hours at a time (singing to sold-out venues at Whitman College, Maryhill Museum, and Portland as well at St. Demetrios here in Seattle).

Vocal training for this kind of chant involves, in addition to the usual elements of breath support and a relaxed throat, a special utilization of the resonance possible in the mask. Not just nasal, but the whole mask. In this emphasis, the training differs from western traditions of vocal placement. But one result is the same, namely that a properly trained singer can go on singing without damage to the throat or vocal chords for a very long time.

On this occasion, Cappella Romana consisted of about 10 singers, robed in black, two of whom took turns directing while standing within the group, facing the audience. (A terrific concert of music of Arvo Pärt a couple years ago in West Seattle involved nearly twice that number and included a few women!) There were very few grey hairs evident. The volume of sound in the superb acoustic of St. Demetrios was impressive indeed.

In order to get at why all this matters to me as a listener, let me describe as best I can my experience of these sounds. It took me quite a while to adjust my listening. Even though the first notes, as the group processed from the back of the church to the altar, gave me goose bumps, it sounded at first messy and rough. My adjusting amounted to two things primarily: First, closing my eyes and attempting to relax every muscle in my face, particularly my eyelids. (Sounds silly? Try this and see if you don't hear differently, detecting things in a familiar recording that you never noticed before.) Second, I invoked Jonathan Dean, who at a Seattle Opera lecture before Schoenberg's Erwartung, suggested that we censor the impulse to hear some atonal dissonance as 'wrong' and leave the ears open to whatever happens! Intervals and ornaments in Byzantine Chant can seem altogether 'wrong' because they sometimes violate what we're used to.

What happened after such adjustments was that I entered a kind of meditative state. (Sounds a little religious, I know.) In this relaxed state, I could concentrate more fully on the voices I was hearing. The result was that they congealed into a whole. It was a warm combination of soothing and stimulating, leading to a pleasing sense of floating - all right, call it a drugged state, if you wish. I get a similar thing from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. And I love it! Occasionally I opened my eyes to see who a soloist was and to reassure myself that this was the real world. Mostly I stayed in this listening mode the whole evening and was never bored for a moment, despite the texts being almost entirely Greek to me, the subject of which I was utterly uninterested in.

I assume someone of the Greek Orthodox persuasion and perhaps understanding Greek could get far more out of such a concert than I. But I recommend a visit to Cappella Romana on their next visit to anyone willing to explore new (ancient!) sounds. See www.cappellaromana.org for information, tickets, and their many CDs.

Reviewer Rod Parke can be reached at rmp62@columbia.edu.

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