On Friday April 6th, the North Penn Chamber Singers left the crowded hallways of the high school and traveled up the Jersey Turnpike to take part in a once in a lifetime opportunity. The small select ensemble had been invited up to New York City by famous composer Christopher Tin to be apart of the premier performance of his two time Grammy Award winning album Calling All Dawns in one of the most famous concert halls in the world, Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center.
In their spring concert two years ago, the North Penn Chorus performed the most famous piece off of Tin’s Calling All Dawns, “Baba Yetu”. “Baba Yetu” was originally written by Tin back in 2005 to be the main theme for the video game Civilization IV. However once being released on the internet, the song received so much appraise and attention from fans and music critics around the world Tin was inspired to write an entire album based on the four minute tune he had composed for the video game trailer.
Calling All Dawns is a twelve piece work based on the cycle of life. Overall, the album is split into three different movements; representing day, night and then dawn, or as Tin put it, a metaphor for birth, death, and the rebirth. Each song is written in a different language; which range from French, to Swahili, to Sanskrit, to Portuguese. Tin’s album was a crossover work combining the basic elements of classical music with a little bit of a twist to appeal to a broader audience. His superior composition earned him two Grammys; one for the Best Classical Crossover Album and the other for the Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s).
The great success of the album merited some type of recognition, which is when DCINY (Distinguished Concert International New York), a New York based organization dedicated to the promotion and showcasing of music, approached Tin about premiering the entire work live with full choir and orchestra in world renowned Avery Fisher Hall.
As the concert began to materialize, North Penn choral director Mr. Matthew Klenk received an email from the publishing company and Christopher Tin asking him if the Chamber Singers would be interested in partaking in the concert premier. The video of the North Penn chorus singing Baba Yetu two years ago had been found by the publishing company on YouTube and they were so impressed they wanted a small group from the high school to travel up to New York for the event.
“We were invited on pretty short notice, I only heard about this at the end of January and we could really only confirm that this was something we could do in the middle of February, which only gave us a month and a half to prepare a twelve movement piece,” said North Penn Choral Director Matthew Klenk.”Really, the ensemble had to learn the chorus parts of all twelve movements in twelve different languages in a very short time period.”
After a month and a half of hard, focused work, the Chamber Singers left for New York on Friday to rehearse with the entire orchestra and other chorus members involved in Sunday’s festivities. The musicians that took part in the concert had come from all over the world. The chorus alone was comprised of singers from California, Indiana, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Australia and Vermont.
There were two rehearsals held as well as a full ensemble, one on Friday and one on Saturday. The cool thing about these practices was that the musicians had the opportunity to learn the music directly from the man who had written it, as Christopher Tin sat in on both of the five hour days.
“It’s not a typical thing to work on a piece of music with the composer there with you. As a director I’m constantly trying to play the game of interpreting what a composer had intended for his music based on what notes they leave on the page and try to perform based on that information,” said Klenk of the presence of Tin. “So to have the composer sitting right next to the conductor and saying ‘hey is this what I should be doing or is this what you meant’ was very cool because we were a part of the creative process of making music rather than just trying to reproduce it.”
Calling All Dawns features a wide range of solos from tribal chants to Portuguese melodies. Many of the featured soloists on the recorded album participated in the premier of the work, including the “Anonymous Four”, a woman’s quartet featured in the middle of the piece that had been flown in from Ireland specifically for the concert. North Penn was well represented in the premier where two of the students were awarded solos after sending in videos of them singing prior to the New York trip. Senior Kelly Kratz received a solo in the second song “Mado Kara Mieru” and junior Kuhoo Verma lead the chorus throughout the entire tenth piece “Hamsafar”.
“During rehearsal I was consistently told by a number of people how well prepared they thought our singers were and how helpful they were,” said Klenk of his students in New York. “For a performing such a large work on short notice I was extremely proud of the singers for doing this well especially when the majority of the musicians there had performed this piece before or had known about this and had been preparing it months.”
The concert took place in Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center, located right across the street from the renowned Juilliard School of Music. The hall is home to the world famous New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
“Avery Fisher Hall is one of the most famous music performance centers worldwide, and that comes from the fact New York is the cultural center of the entire world,” said Klenk. “That hall is meant and saved for larger performances like that one. To be able to perform there on that stage and look out at the hugeness of it was something very special.”
The 3,000 seat hall was filled on Sunday when the musicians took the stage. The concert lasted for about fifty minutes and was immediately received by a standing ovation and ten minute applause from the audience.
“The performance was pretty extraordinary because its unfortunately rare that people don’t get excited about what would be considered classical music. It’s remarkable how full that hall was for that performance,” said Klenk. “Christopher Tin has created something that has bought a lot of people together to be a part of something that has become highly regarded and appreciated. To be able to share the stage with that orchestra and those other choral singers was something I’m very proud of and won’t ever forget.”