Category: Vocal and Choral Music

Amateur Music Network mentor Ragnar Bohlin
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AMN mentors Talking about Music Vocal and Choral Music

A Conversation with Ragnar Bohlin: Part 1

Our Singing Saturdays with San Francisco Symphony Chorus Director Ragnar Bohlin have been hugely successful—thank you for joining us! We thought you’d like to know more about Ragnar, so on a recent morning (evening in Stockholm, where Ragnar has lived since the early days of the pandemic), Amateur Music Network founder and director Lolly Lewis chatted with him via Zoom. Their conversation was far-ranging and fascinating. We’re publishing it in three parts, and welcome your further questions in the comments section.

Tell us a little about your early musical life. Did you sing in choirs?

I grew up [in Lund, Sweden] with music all around me. Both of my parents were choir directors. My father was a musicologist who led the Lund Male Choir. My mother was a mathematician who changed careers and started a choral movement in Lund. Her choirs won many international competitions. She had us children sing and pay music all the time. I studied piano from age 5, and cello from age 8. When I was 13, my mother talked me into learning to play the organ. At that point I was more into pop music, but she convinced me that playing the organ would be a good way to earn pocket money.

And was she right?

She was! I started quite early working as a church organist. Meanwhile, I went to a music high school where I tried to do everything—singing, piano, organ, cello. I led my first choir when I was 16.

What kind of pop music did you like? Do you still listen to pop? 

I’m a musical omnivore. I love all styles. I grew up with classical music all around me. When I was tiny, my mother gave me a tape with Mendelssohn, Bach, Mozart, Wagner, Verdi.. I listened to it, mesmerized, from age 3 to 7 or 8. Then I discovered the Beatles, then Supertramp, Queen, Rush, jazz-rock, symphonic rock, eventually Kate Bush, Bjork. All the styles inform one another, not directly, but by being different. The specifics of each genre become more clear because you have a contrasting style. 

Let’s go back to your musical education. What happened after high school? 

I got a scholarship to study piano with Peter Feuchtwanger in London. Then I had second thoughts and came back to Stockholm in 1985—I was 20 at the time—to begin an organist course at the Conservatory of Music. I never regretted my decision, because it enabled me to keep having a broad scope that included conducting, singing, counterpoint, harmony, theory. At the time, conducting was one of my least favorite subjects! I loved singing in choirs, but I hated standing up in front of them. 

What changed your mind?

I got a part-time job in a church while I was a student, and I had my own choir there. At the Conservatory I sang under the grand master Eric Ericson, the conductor of the Conservatory chamber choir. Ericson was my main inspiration, and after I completed the church music degree I spent another four years studying conducting, and received a diploma in choir conducting. I sang in the Ericson Chamber Choir, and I’ve now conducted them, and the Swedish Radio Choir, several times. I’ll conduct them again in December, when they sing the Bach Christmas Oratorio with the Nordic Chamber Orchestra. 

When did you know you would make a career of directing choirs?

My interest in choir directing grew out of my piano playing, leading from the piano. Piano was always my main thing, although for a while I became obsessed with the voice and aimed to become an oratorio singer as a side career. I have sung the Evangelist part of the St. Matthew Passion, Bach’s Magnificat, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, and much more. I studied for five years with the famous tenor Nicolai Gedda, and I accompanied a lot of master classes, both as a singer and as a pianist.

And you lead Singing Saturdays from the piano.

It’s something I’ve done for years. There are certain things you can do better when you lead from the piano. You’re in full control of the flow of the music and the rehearsal process.

Next: Part 2 of our conversation with Ragnar Bohlin, on making music during the pandemic.

Learn more about Singing Saturdays

Pictured: Ragnar leading a rehearsal with his professional chamber choir Cappella SF.

Ragnar Bohlin leading a Singing Saturdays session via Zoom
Categories
Community Vocal and Choral Music

“Virtual Amateur Chorus”

The woman with her mouth

shaped in a perfect “O” 

I imagine she sings opera 

or is in a fine classical chorus. 

I see Ellen in her 

Zoom’s square living room, 

the daughter of an old friend’s friend 

from Berkeley. The conductor is in 

his home country of Sweden. 

It is eleven A.M..in San Francisco. 

It is night in Sweden, 

but I can see through his window pine trees 

and it is still light out. 

From eleven to twelve, 

I do not check virus numbers 

or watch the news. 

In our hundreds of soundless little spaces, 

The harmony, unheard, is perfect. 

Reprinted with kind permission from the upcoming anthology Pandemic Puzzle Poems, to be published by Blue Light Press, San Francisco. You can read more poetry by Alice Rogoff, and more poems about music, in Fog and Light, also from Blue Light Press.

Our April “Singing Saturdays” featuring Verdi Requiem starts April 10.

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AMN mentors Talking about Music Vocal and Choral Music Workshops

Meet Singer and Actress Karen Mason

On April 17 we’re raising the curtain on an online event sure to delight lovers of musical theater and cabaret: a conversation between singer/actress Karen Mason and her longtime friend (and AMN curator) David Landis. To give you a preview, we spoke to Karen at her home in Jackson Heights, Queens—“from our roof we can see the Manhattan skyline”—about her life in music.

What was your early musical life like? Did you always enjoy performing?

I was born in New Orleans, and we kept moving north when my father’s job was transferred—Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago. There was always music in the house: my mother trained as a classical pianist, and my parents took us to musicals and concerts. My all-girls Catholic high school didn’t do musical theater, but the boys’ school did, so I auditioned and was cast as a townsperson in Annie Get Your Gun. And I was hooked! I was a dorky kind of kid, and this was where I felt accepted and at home. I’d had no training at that point other than singing around the house. But I just had to do it. From there, I went on to play bigger roles: Mrs. Paroo in The Music Man, Carrie in Carousel.

And after high school?

I should have jumped in, but at the University of Illinois the musicals were more actor driven, and the music school itself was more classical, which wasn’t where I felt joy. I eventually left college and did a lot of community theater while unhappily working at a regular job. I wanted to be closer to people who were getting paid for doing what I was doing for free, so I auditioned to be a singing waitress at a Chicago restaurant called Lawrence of Oregano. And that’s where I met Brian Lasser, a brilliant musician, actor, songwriter, and pianist. We left the restaurant and started doing nightclubs and concerts, moving up the foodchain. In 1978 or 1979 we moved to New York. We worked one night a week for two or three years at the Duplex in the Village. That didn’t pay the rent, so in between shows we’d fly back to Chicago, do enough work to make three or four grand, and come back to New York. We worked together until Brian’s death in 1992. I still perform quite a few arrangements he did early in our career.

You’ve also had an impressive career in theater.

I’m not just a cabaret person, or just a theater person. I enjoy the diversity, going back and forth.

This is probably an impossible question, but we’ll ask it anyway: Can you single out a highlight of your stage career?

Probably the first time I understudied the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. This was in Los Angeles, and Glenn Close was starring. I got two days’ notice—Glenn’s doctor had told her to take one of the Sunday performances off. She did the matinee and I did the evening show. You don’t get a lot of rehearsal time as an understudy or standby, but this was February and we’d opened in November, so I was ready! I’d watched from the back of the theater and gone through all the choreography. I still had to learn all the costume changes—with three dressers!—and learn the props and set. It was an amazing set—the mansion would lift up with hydraulics, and there’d be an entirely new scene underneath. It was weird the first time I rode up in it, but I learned to love it.

I stayed with the show after it moved to Broadway, and I understudied the next two leads, Betty Buckley and Elaine Paige. Over the course of two years, I did about 250 performances.

There haven’t been many live performances since March 2020. What’s your musical life been like during the pandemic?

My last performance was in November 2019, in Chasing Rainbows: The Road to Oz at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey. I got sick after that and wasn’t able to do any Christmas shows, and then, of course, I had to cancel all of 2020.

I was getting bored, so I decided to learn how to do self-taping and streaming. Every Thursday since April 2020 I’ve done a show, “Mason’s Makin’ Music,” where I sing to tracks. It’s been fascinating. In cabarets you have 60 to 100 people in the audience. Online I’ve had 3,000 people listening! It’s great to connect with them, but I do miss seeing eyes in an audience and feeling that energy. And singing with a piano—oy, I can’t wait for that!

I’m doing a few things this summer, though. On May 15 I’m doing a free indoor concert at the Frank Campbell Funeral Chapel in Manhattan—it’s a beautiful historic building, and it’ll be the first time I’ve sung with a live piano in over a year.

I’ll have a new CD out this fall. My previous CD, It’s About Time, was produced by Paul Rolnick, who also wrote the title song—he wrote it for some friends shortly after marriage equality became legal in New York. I sang it at those friends’ wedding. It’s not just about gay marriage equality; it’s about all marriage equality. If people are in love they should get married!

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AMN mentors Composers Talking about Music Vocal and Choral Music Workshops

Meet composer Jake Heggie

We’re very much looking forward to hosting an online dialogue on February 20 between two people we admire greatly: David Landis and Jake Heggie. David is the president of Landis Communications Inc. in San Francisco and a member of AMN’s advisory board. Jake is one of the premier vocal and opera composers of our era; his compositions include the operas Dead Man Walking (2000) and Moby-Dick (2010). Over email, we asked them to give us a foretaste of their conversation.

Jake Heggie. (Photo: James Niebuhr)

David: We met when I was the public-relations director for the San Francisco Symphony and Jake was doing in-house public relations for the San Francisco Opera.

Jake: I started there as a writer in April 1994. I don’t remember exactly when we met, but it was very shortly after that.

David: The San Francisco Opera’s PR department has brought us some great talent! Besides Jake, there’s Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City.

Not many serious composers have a background in public relations like yours, Jake! What did you learn about music, and musical institutions, from working in PR?

Jake: It actually started for me in Los Angeles in the late 1980s. I had suffered a hand injury, focal dystonia. That forced me to stop playing piano, which was pretty traumatic. While I was reeducating my hand with an entirely new technique—starting with scales!—I had to find a way to make a living. I discovered I could write well about music and the arts. I got a job at the UCLA Center for the Arts as the PR and marketing writer, and then moved to Cal Performances [at UC Berkeley] and finally the San Francisco Opera. It was a great education. I met people from every corner of the arts: administration, donors, artists, stagehands, props, costumes, wigs and makeup, front of house, box office, art managers, writers, press, publicists. That education has served me well through the years because I learned early about the totality of the business—not just one perspective. Also, my job at the San Francisco Opera was to write about every corner of the opera house and what was going on in it, and relate that to the world somehow. It was heaven! I attended everything, met the most amazing people, took them to interviews, spent time with them … and then started writing songs for the great singers coming through. It was the best apprenticeship ever for an aspiring opera composer … except I didn’t even know I was an aspiring opera composer at the time! 

David, you used to sing in the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Have you ever sung any of Jake’s works? Any insights from the singer’s point of view?

David: You give me a lot of credit! I think I only got into the Symphony Chorus because they knew I did PR for the symphony and thought I could help promote the chorus! Sad to say, but I have never sung any of Jake’s works. Let’s put that on my bucket list, please! What I will say as an observer and an audience member is that I’m always impressed with the lyricism of Jake’s music. I think that would be so gratifying as a performer.

Jake, can you tell us a little about what it’s like to receive a commission for a new work?

Jake: A commission is a gift of possibility and a vote of confidence to an artist. It’s the opportunity to find and create something meaningful: to collaborate with great colleagues and go on a wonderful adventure together. I don’t think I’ve ever been told what to write; I’m usually asked what inspires me in the moment. Because if I’m not inspired, it’s not going to be good! It has to be something that gives me musical shivers—where I don’t necessarily know what the music is, but I know the music is there. So I’m asked to create something for a specific occasion, singer, ensemble, company—whatever—and we explore what inspires me that also inspires the company. From there, I suggest the writer, director, conductor, and singers that I want to work with—again, people who inspire me and the team. It’s all about having the right people on the team. One weak link can bring the whole thing down.

Singers like Nick Phan, who has also led an AMN workshop, are huge fans of your work, Jake. Do you write for particular singers’ vocal ranges or abilities?

Jake: I always write for specific singers. Their personalities, idiosyncrasies, and voices are what help me write something specific, clear, and strong. Imagine you’re a screenwriter and you’re asked to write a script for a movie about [former US Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright. You think, hmm, OK, Madeleine Albright. And then they say, “Oh, and we have Meryl Streep as Madeleine Albright.” Well, HELLO! Now, just about anything is possible, right?

David, you’ll be moderating the online conversation on February 20. Want to give us any hints about what you’re planning to ask Jake?

David: I’m always curious not just about the past but about the future. So maybe we can persuade Jake to look into his crystal ball and give us some juicy tidbits that point to the future.

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AMN mentors Vocal and Choral Music

Meet Hope Briggs, operatic soprano

How does a musical-theater teen and aspiring Contemporary Christian singer find her way to the grand opera stage? In our January 30 online conversation, soprano Hope Briggs will talk about her musical education, her musical mentors, and how she became an acclaimed interpreter of Verdi roles. As an overture, Hope chatted with us from her home in San Bruno, California, about “how opera found me.”

Hope Briggs

What was your introduction to music? Did you listen to opera when you were growing up?

I grew up in a musical household in San Francisco and later on the San Francisco Peninsula, but my interest in opera came later. My mother, my father, my sister, and my brother all sang, and we often sang together—my mother would play the piano. I was so shy as a child that I would stand in the closet and sing from there!

My father was a minister, and I sang in the church choir, and occasionally I sang a solo. My mother involved me in various children’s groups: tap, ballet, theater. As for opera, my mother had a few classical albums, and I enjoyed listening to Leontyne Price’s Christmas album, but I wasm’t very interested in her operatic work. I was more interested in Broadway musicals. And I liked Contemporary Christian music, which suits my voice better than gospel.

For some reason, I was asked to join my high school’s jazz band, even though I didn’t know a lot about jazz. We went to the Reno International Jazz Festival and did quite well.

Did you know from an early age that you’d make a career of music?

At Skyline College [in San Bruno, California], which I attended after high school, I didn’t focus on music, although I did take a vocal workshop, which is where I developed a real love for jazz. My teacher saw something in me and told me I could get a full scholarship to USC if I studied opera. I said, “No, thank you.” I didn’t want to do that. I had a sense that it would be hard to make a living in music. So I was thinking about pursuing law or writing or maybe psychology.

Then, out of the blue, a high school friend dropped by my house unannounced and said, “I want to talk to you. You’re not doing what you do best, which is singing.” It was out of character for her—she wasn’t an especially bold person. She just cared enough to come over and tell me that. It got me thinking. I began looking into schools with good music programs. Cal State Fullerton, which had an excellent jazz band, was on my list.

I called the music chair, Jane Paul Hummel, and told her I was thinking about applying. She said, “Are you good?” That was a surprise! I said, “Yeah, I’m good!” She invited me down for an audition. What’s amazing to me is that she picked me up at the airport and hosted me—I stayed at her house. She had me sit in on a vocal workshop. She had a student take me out to dinner. She took me under her wing.

She sounds like the perfect mentor.

She started from square one with me. I’d never had a formal music lesson at that point.

What was your audition like?

For my audition, I sang “Cry Me a River” and a Contemporary Christian song, “We Shall Behold Him.” They asked me if I knew any opera. The only thing I knew was the “Habanera” from Carmen, so I sang that.

They offered me a full scholarship, and Jane offered to teach me. By my third year I was entering competitions and doing apprenticeship programs. And I was singing opera—I didn’t have a choice, studying with her. I fell in love with it. Although I did sing a few times with the jazz band.

We did a little research and found a review in the Los Angeles Times of a Cole Porter revue at Cal State Fullerton. The reviewer singled you out for praise: “Of the better singers, Hope Briggs stands out with a voice that is strong and mellowed and put to good use on the torchy ‘Hothouse Rose.’”

I still love musical theater! Last April, I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th-birthday concert—I love Sondheim’s lyrics—and since then I’ve been watching a lot of musicals on YouTube and looking again at my musical theater pieces. In many ways the pandemic has removed the barriers between classical and popular music.

Are there any operatic roles you haven’t yet sung but would like to?

I’d like to sing Elvira in Ernani. One of the things I like about Verdi is its agility, which suits my voice. I have a dark-colored voice, and people don’t expect it to move as fast as it does.

I’d also like to get into some Handel. When I was working with Sheri Greenawald, and she told me, “You have to do Handel—your voice loves it!” [Read about our July 2020 conversation with singer and mentor Sheri Greenawald.]

What are some things you’ve been doing since performances and touring were put on pause?

I’ve been rediscovering my love of writing—poetry, short stories, personal essays. I’ve also had the opportunity to do some online singing. Nicole Heaston, who sang Countess Almaviva in San Francisco Opera’s Figaro in 2019, put together a collaboration of 65 African American opera singers singing the Negro National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

And I also started my own YouTube channel, “Bringing Hope 2U.” I felt the need to bring hope and peace and encouragement to people during this difficult time. I’m giving myself permission to be me, to not be put in a corner. I’m saying, This is Hope, and Hope loves music.