Category: Vocal and Choral Music

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Community Vocal and Choral Music

Why we’re singing sea shanties in 2021

If you’ve spent any time recently on social media—and especially on Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok—you’ve probably found it impossible to escape some haunting, old-fashioned melodies and rhythms. Sometimes sung solo, sometimes in duets, and sometimes in large virtual crowds, these songs have traversed the centuries to become the first earworms of the new year: tunes you just can’t get out of your head.

Welcome to the Great Sea Shanty Craze of 2021: a joyous celebration of tradition, of harmony, and—most of all—of amateur musicianship.

 

This year’s revival began on December 27, 2020, when a 26-year-old Scottish postman and amateur musician, Nathan Evans, uploaded a video to TikTok, the app for sharing short-form videos. In the video, Evans sings “Soon May the Wellerman Come,” a 19th-century whaling song that originated in New Zealand. (A “Wellerman” was an employee of the Sydney, Australia-based Weller brothers’ shipping company, which between 1833 and 1843 supplied provisions—”sugar and tea and rum”—to whaling ships off the New Zealand coast.)

@nathanevanss

The Wellerman. #seashanty #sea #shanty #viral #singing #acoustic #pirate #new #original #fyp #foryou #foryoupage #singer #scottishsinger #scottish

♬ original sound – N A T H A N E V A N S S

From there, #ShantyTok surged and billowed like a great Pacific wave. There was something oddly timely and—ironically, in this age of COVID—infectious about shanties, with their call-and-response structure that invites participation and their evocation of long voyages to exotic ports. After ten months of pandemic isolation, who among us wouldn’t welcome a trip around Cape Horn or to the South Seas, even if it’s only imaginary?

The centuries-old form has turned out to be a good fit for 21st-century technology. TikTok, for example, allows users to create duets, group videos, and reaction shots that add to the fun.

Seas shanties belong to the broad genre known as work songs—songs that either coordinate labor or relieve tedium (or both). Aboard an 18th- or 19th-century merchant-marine ship, a shantyman would lead sailors as they worked; different shanties would accompany different chores. Technically speaking, “Wellerman” is a whaling song, not a shanty, folk musician and music educator David Coffin told the New York Times: “It’s a whaling song with the beat of a shanty, he said, but its purpose is that of a ballad — to tell a story, not to help sailors keep time.” “Leave Her Johnny”—a traditional song first recorded in 1917–is more typical of a true shanty. The Bristol (UK) folk group The Longest Johns recorded it for the 2013 video game “Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag,” which was an early factor in the contemporary shanty revival. In December 2020, The Longest Johns released a new version of the song with hundreds of participants..

“Shanty” is a word with uncertain origins. It’s sometimes spelled “chantey,” which suggests a connection to the French verb chanter, to sing. Spelled “shanty,” it’s unrelated to the “shanty” that refers to a small, rough dwelling; the latter word comes from a French-Canadian source.

If you feel like joining the chorus, the Hyde Street Pier–part of the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park–is hosting a live virtual shanty sing at noon on Saturday, January 16. Join the public Facebook group for updates, and watch the video below, filmed before the pandemic, for inspiration. As folk musician David Coffin told the Times, “It’s not the beauty of the song that gets people. It’s the energy. You don’t have to be a trained singer to sing on it. You’re not supposed to sing pretty.”

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Community Vocal and Choral Music

Meet Ash Walker, choral director and community musician

In November 2019, when Ash Walker applied to become the music director of Pacific Edge Voices, he was full of ideas for taking the acclaimed Berkeley choral group—originally called Pacific Mozart Ensemble—beyond its 40th anniversary and into an exciting and creative future. By the time his appointment was officially announced, in August 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had upended his—and the world’s—plans. Ash has risen to the unprecedented challenge in this new job and in his other roles: as professor of voice at Las Positas Community College in Livermore and as cantor and choir director at St. Mary’s Cathedral of the Assumption in San Francisco. As he told us in a phone interview, “The pandemic has pushed me to be more than I thought possible as a musician and choral director.”

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Community Vocal and Choral Music Workshops

Meet choral singer Abigail Millikan-States

We have a treat in store for amateur choral singers: On six Saturdays beginning November, Amateur Music Network will host Singing Saturdays with Ragnar Bohlin, featuring music by Mozart, Bach, Brahms, and Handel, as well as holiday favorites. One singer who’ll be eagerly participating is soprano Abigail Millikan-States of Corte Madera, California, who told us: “Choral singing is my greatest passion, and it’s truly an honor as an amateur singer to have the opportunity to work with Ragnar.” We asked Abigail to tell us more about singing on- and offline.

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AMN mentors Vocal and Choral Music Workshops

Words and Music: a workshop with tenor Nicholas Phan

We’re delighted to be hosting Nicholas Phan—praised by the Boston Globe as “one of the world’s most remarkable singers”—in an online Words and Music workshop Saturday, September 19. An avid recitalist and proponent of vocal chamber music, Nick founded the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago in 2010 to promote art song and vocal chamber music. He has also performed with many of the leading orchestras in North America and Europe, and has sung the title roles in Bernstein’s Candide, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and many other operas.

We recently chatted with Nick to get a preview of the workshop and a sampling of his professional tips and techniques.

Like most classically trained singers, you sing in a wide range of languages. What was your linguistic training?

My mother is Greek-American, and I went to Greek-language classes at church from first through sixth grade. In middle school my mother arranged for me to audit Greek classes at the University of Michigan. In middle and high school I also studied French, which seemed easy after Greek! Then in college I had two years of Italian and one year of German. I ended up working a lot in Germany, so I had plenty of time to practice my the language.

In addition to those languages, I’ve sung in Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and Russian.

How can amateur singers prepare themselves to sing in languages other than their native language?

The best preparation is a knowledge of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which gives a pronunciation symbol for every sound in every language. It’s a helpful shorthand for when you start digging into the sounds of the words.

Then you have to create a sensible translation of the text you’re singing, so you understand the meaning of every word and phrase—not just how to pronounce it.

And then there’s the music!

I tell my students that as singers we have the unique challenge of working with multiple scripts. Instrumentalists have one script: the notes. Actors have one script: the words. As singers we have both, and those two “languages” are very much in dialogue with each other. The music is always trying to give life to the text. In the workshop, I’m looking forward to exploring how those languages communicate with each other to make songs and vocal music the magical thing it is.

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AMN mentors Vocal and Choral Music Workshops

Learning Medieval singing


Medieval Singing Workshop mentor Phoebe Jevtović Rosquist
Medieval Singing Workshop mentor Phoebe Jevtović Rosquist

AMN’s Lolly Lewis asked mentor Phoebe Jevtović Rosquist about what drew her to Medieval music and how she approaches this repertoire, music that can sound so alien to modern ears. Here is a sample of her thinking.

Amateur Music Network (AMN): I’ve always been really fascinated by the rhythms in medieval music. How is the meter structured, and why does it sound so different from music we’re used to?
Phoebe (PRJ): There is so much variety in how music was organized metrically—in some cases you get very little information and you get to be creative and decide for yourself—for example, the Cantigas de Santa Maria allow for many rhythmic decisions to be made by the performers. Other times you have syncopated music with parts that fit together like puzzle pieces—I think of Dufay in this category. Then in the ars nova period, you have music with rhythms precisely notated, but in such exacting and complex rhythms that they can be prohibitively difficult (we aren’t doing any of these, don’t worry!)


AMN: Where do the texts come from?
PRJ: When discussing about this expansive time period that lasted nearly a thousand years, the answer has to encompass so much material! Medieval poets and composers used everything from the Bible to their own chivalrous or bawdy imaginations. If you have the opportunity, Ben Bagby’s filmed performance of the epic tale Beowulf is a masterpiece of creative yet plausible performance practice.


AMN: How long did it take you to learn to read the medieval notation?
PRJ: Reading earlier stages of notation comes with practice and time, as you would expect. I spent a summer in Italy reading compline every evening, and the daily exposure to the neumes really sank in to my brain. I sometimes like working backwards—teaching a piece by rote, and then introducing the notation—it makes so much sense once you have already audiated it.