Masterworks Choir performing work in 7 languages, with ‘captivating music’
OCEAN CITY — The Masterworks Choir will present “Jubilate Deo,” a captivating work with singing in seven different languages and music that grabs the audience right off the bat.
John Bate, music director at St. Peter’s United Methodist Church and conductor of the Masterworks Choir, talked about the “out of the ordinary” work by Dan Forrest that will be performed at the church at 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 24.
“It’s very different from what most community choirs think of as traditional music for concerts,” he explained last week. “There are seven movements to it. The first one is in Latin and English, the second one in Hebrew and Arabic, the third movement is Chinese, the fourth movement is Zulu, the fifth is Spanish and then the last two are English and Latin again.”
The phrase “Jubilate Deo, sing unto the Lord all the Earth,” is the basis for the first movement, he said. Then the text appears in almost every other movement.
“I like doing it because of all the different languages and all the different things it represents in our world and how it brings us together in these different languages and styles of music,” Bate said. “It’s just a great piece of music.”
“The music is captivating. It is fun. It starts out with the choir in this fortissimo, boom! And they grab you right away,” Bate said. “There are several sections of music that is the orchestra and organ, and it’s rhythmic and it’s driving. There’s a driving force to this always. You might have a section where you’re just singing along and, boom! It just changes immediately. I think that is what grabs people the most.
“You can be sitting there thinking this is pretty, this is nice, and boom!” he said, laughing.
Bate said he wants the Masterworks Choir to perform different types of music in its two annual concerts, one just before Thanksgiving and the other in August.
“Last summer we performed Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Chichester Psalms.’ Things that are not Mozart requiems and Brahms requiems, things you might hear a community choir sing. I would like to make it different.”
The choir was founded by the late Esther Weil, who wanted an annual concert featuring “The Messiah.” Bate said the choir performs that on anniversary years. Next fall marks the 55th anniversary of the Masterworks Choir and the concert will feature “The Messiah.”
For now, however, Bate’s task has been working to bring his 40 or so members, with singers ranging from 18 to 80 years old across southern New Jersey, to learn the music and languages in “Jubilate Deo.”
Although that may sound like a tall order to learn for a choir that does not sing year-round, Bate said “Jubilate Deo” is “extremely accessible” to singers.
“First of all, we learned to sing all the music using syllables and not singing the text, teaching everybody the notes,” he said.
Once that was in everyone’s heads, a tenor in the choir who is a music and Spanish major at Rowan University taught everyone the Spanish. A St. Augustine Prep student in St. Peter’s youth group, a young man who is learning Arabic, taught the choir that part. And the choir’s alto soloist knows Hebrew.
“The interesting thing about that second movement is she sings in Hebrew and the choir sings in Arabic,” Bate said. “And you’d be amazed at how close the languages are.”
He explained that everything in the score has a phonetic writing of the language beneath it.
“That’s how we’re doing the Zulu,” Bate said.
He has the choir members watching a YouTube video of a group called The Rivertree performing “Jubilate Deo” to help learn the language and also other YouTube recordings to pick up the other languages, including Chinese.
When some of the choir members mentioned the dialect changes in the same languages they were hearing, they questioned the correct pronunciation. He explained to them dialects don’t just change in other countries. “I said, ‘Have you ever gone between New England and Florida?”
The week before last, the choir spoke the language, and then they sang it, a process they were repeating.
“We’ve been able to put it together that way and it’s worked. I’m very pleased. No one seems frustrated by it yet and there’s three weeks to go,” Bate said.
The concert will feature Ellen Junggren, alto; Erik Wagner, tenor; Ashley Arsenault, soprano; Robert Snodgrass, bass; the Hammonton Middle School Chorus and organist Scott Breiner. St. Peter’s is at Eighth Street and Central Avenue in Ocean City.
A freewill offering will be collected.
– STORY and PHOTO by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
