Volti's Moving MLK Tribute

So much music, so little time. With the truth of that oft-coined phrase comes the reality that even the most avid concertgoer can hope to hear, at best, only a small fraction of the wonderful music that receives world premieres each year.

So we owe special thanks to Volti, the fearless San Francisco–based chamber choir founded and led by Robert Geary, for revisiting two recent premiere commissions by Bay Area composers at its March 2–4 concerts. Included in the program, titled Songs With(out) Words, are David Conte’s work The Homecoming (2008), which Chanticleer commissioned to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robin Estrada’s Paghahandog # (2010), which Volti itself commissioned. Of special note is the fact that Estrada, currently a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, studied with Conte when he pursued his master’s at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

The immense beauty of Conte’s work, which comes through in diminished MP3 sound in this archival Chanticleer performance from Atlanta, deserves an article by itself. The six-minute setting of a haunting poem by the late John Stirling Walker, who died last May at the age of 49, is one of 11 collaborations between the two men. The last of their three operas, Stonewall, receives its first hearing at the University of North Colorado this fall.

“John was a most unusual person,” says Conte. “A true clairvoyant, he was particularly versed in the writings of Rudolf Steiner, in whose work he immersed himself in the last 10 years of his life. He read all of Steiner’s works in the original German, and was helping give developmentally disabled adults an experience of being human in a normal way, as it were, in a Camphill Steiner initiative community in Norway, when this poem came to him in a flash.” (On October 21, 2001, Frederica von Stade, Anna Netrebko, and Jake Heggie were among the artists who participated in a Herbst Theatre fund-raising gala to celebrate the establishment of the first West Coast Camphill Community in Soquel.)

Once Conte had read the poem, he immediately wished to set it. As the King anniversary approached, he showed it to Joseph Jennings, Chanticleer’s former long-time music director, who signed on to the commission. The ensemble performed it throughout the country over the course of 2008.

The Homecoming calls for a well-trained choir capable of negotiating frequently changing tonalities that are sometimes expressed in eight parts or more. Although the range between bass and soprano is wide, harmonies are intentionally spaced very close on top, to flatter the sounds of overtoneless male soprano and alto falsettoists. Listeners can expect to hear very different colors, and to feel a considerably different emotional impact, from a chamber choir such as Volti that comprises both men and women.

Walker’s poem, whose multilayered nuance becomes far more accessible in Conte’s setting, was inspired, in part, by King’s memorable Letter From a Birmingham Jail. Written from the point of view of someone speaking to Dr. King, its first lines read: “Color where in jail you’re on fire / With the heart of thousands / With the heart of millions.”

Conte chose his tonalities to bring home a unique understanding of the unfinished odyssey of King’s soul. “My spiritual perception,” he says, “which comes partly through John’s sharing of his own spiritual perceptions, is that the justice that King was preaching for has not yet come to pass. His soul is in a sense in jail, and won’t be freed until certain freedoms are realized. The poem and King’s life are about giving a vision of what that is. The speaker in the poem is addressing a soul that is restless and angry because Dr. King’s dream has not yet come to pass. The poem is meant to console him, and assure him that he will be home when people stop ignoring what he said.”