BCE, a “Voice of Reconciliation”

The Fall 2010 issues of Chorus America’s journal The Voice profile BCE along with other groups in a recent article titled “Voices of Reconciliation”.

The opening and section about BCE are printed below. To see the whole article or learn more about The Voice, click here.

Voices of Reconciliation

There is perhaps no more fitting metaphor for bridging discord than voices joined in harmony—here’s how a number of choruses have become effective ambassadors of peace

by Kelsey Menehan

Ever since there has been war and conflict—which is to say, since the beginning of human existence—there has been singing. We sing to protest, to mourn, to place a salve on deep wounds, to rally for peace, to hope for a better future.

Choruses have a long history of singing for peace. The documentary film, The Singing Revolution, shown at the recent Chorus America Conference in Atlanta, provides one potent example. Between 1987 and 1991, Estonians sought to free themselves from decades of Soviet occupation by gathering in public to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to rally for independence. Hundreds of thousands turned out to sing, and this played a role in the country eventually—and peacefully—regaining its freedom.

There remain countless cataclysms and conflicts about which to raise one’s voice, and today, a number of choral ensembles exist solely to promote peace and reconciliation. Many other choruses, while their missions do not focus explicitly on “peacemaking,” have nonetheless been moved to perform for peace.

For this article, we asked choruses to tell us about a time when they felt an urgency to stage a concert centered on the themes of peace and reconciliation. Some choruses said they were prompted by specific historical events, others by violence in their own backyards, still others by the conditions of poverty and oppression that are the soil in which conflict and war take root. Their stories reveal how a simple idea can galvanize unexpected bursts of programming creativity, singer enthusiasm, and community engagement.

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Searching for a Peaceable Kingdom

Two years ago, the war in Iraq was the issue on which presidential candidates were staking their political future. “Politics and war were on TV every day and death counts were as commonplace as poll numbers,” recalled Miguel Felipe, music director of the Boston Choral Ensemble. “Peace didn’t seem to be a word we heard often.”

Hoping to add a thoughtful response to the discussion, Felipe and the Ensemble programmed a concert that had at its core Randall Thompson’s work The Peaceable Kingdom on texts from the Bible. Interspersed between the movements of Thompson’s piece were a range of other works that commented on themes of war, death, reconciliation, and peace — Josquin des Prez’s “Absalon fili mi,” Thomas Tomkins’ “When David Heard that Absalom was Slain,” Salamone Rossi’s  “Kaddish,” Edward Elgar’s “Peace, Gentle Peace” from Coronation Ode, Op. 44, and “Look down, fair moon” by Zachary Wadsworth, winner of the Ensemble’s first commission competition.

The arc of the program tracked musical style/era, emotional content, and tempo/key relationships. “Ultimately, the audience member was taken down into the darkest emotions of the program with Thompson’s ‘The paper reeds by the brooks’ at the bottom,” Felipe said, “and lifted back through reconciliation to peace and hope with our major commission as the turning point.”

“We succeeded in stirring our audiences in ways the popular media isn’t always able to,” Felipe said. “We also blended repertoire across ages so as to illustrate timeless connections in human response to war, death, and hope.” The concert program can be downloaded at www.BostonChoral.org.