Brooklyn Youth Chorus:
Silent Voices
New Amsterdam Records
Don't mistake Brooklyn Youth Chorus for a grade-school choir belting out gleeful tunes for the school assembly. Though the group's singers range in age from twelve to eighteen, they're a preternaturally mature bunch unafraid of tackling topically relevant issues and injustice in all its forms. A natural tension emerges in the contrast between the youthful sonorities of their voices and the dramatic political content presented in the group's sophomore album, but if anything that contrast accentuates how central such issues already are for a generation on the cusp of adulthood. It's not hard to understand how the singers come to be so enlightened: members of the Grammy Award-winning outfit (for its involvement in the premiere recording of John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls) are drawn from five boroughs and thus represent a socio-economically diverse portrait of NYC youth.
Founded in 1992 by Artistic Director Dianne Berkun Menaker, Brooklyn Youth Chorus follows its 2017 debut, Black Mountain Songs, with an even more provocative collection featuring works by Jeff Beal, Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Mary Kouyoumdjian, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Nico Muhly, Shara Nova, Toshi Reagon, Kamala Sankaram, and Caroline Shaw. Though no indication of its participation appears on the outer packaging (credit does appear in the booklet accompanying the release), the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) in a ten-member iteration performs with the Chorus on much of the eighty-minute recording; their contributions aren't incidental either, as pianist Jacob Greenberg, violinist Erica Dicker, guitarist Dan Lippel, flutist Brandon George, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, cellist Mariel Roberts, percussionist Clara Warnaar, et al. add greatly to the performances. Consider, for example, how much the vibraphone and drums (Zac Brunell is credited with additional percussion on the piece) add to the vocalizing in Blind to the Illness, which Nova wrote in 2016 in response to the many recent killings of blacks in America, and how enhancing the piano, woodwind, and glockenspiel accents are to Muhly's Advice to a Young Woman. There are a cappella settings, too, by Sankaram and Shaw that aren't diminished by being vocals-only, even if the former embellishes the soundworld of Keeping the Look Loose with body percussion.
As the project's title implies, Silent Voices is designed to give a platform to voices that have been silenced or marginalized, and in keeping with that theme the Chorus commissioned composers to create works that explore race, identity, gender, and inequality. Needless to say, such a project has taken on a greater resonance in the time since the 2016 US election now that issues relating to racism, sexism, immigration, and minorities have moved even more to the forefront. As Menaker notes, “All young people are in some way also silent voices in society, because they're so undervalued.” Yet while that might be so, the Chorus's voices are anything but silent on this somewhat ironically titled release, and it's through them that others without a forum to speak can find expression. Sometimes they sing in unison or split into parts for polyphonic counterpoint, and in a few pieces speaking voices, male and female, extricate themselves from the whole to deliver solo pronouncements.
An interesting arc in the album's sequencing forms that reflects a gradual growth in assertiveness from the tentative, disempowered voices in Shaw's so quietly to the outspokenness conveyed by Michelle Alexander's text in Miller's Go Tell It. On a recording featuring a plenitude of voices, texts, and styles, Beal's four-part The Firebrand and the First Lady (its text derived from Patricia Bell-Scott's same-titled book) stands out for a text that draws from letters exchanged between civil rights activist Pauli Murray and Eleanor Roosevelt. Go Tell It (with text by Michelle Alexander from the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) is also memorable, as Miller fashions a hybrid, Gospel-themed work that combines song materials associated with African-American folk culture and styles emblematic of contemporary African-American experience (hip-hop, trap, etc.). In the more outspoken and politically charged pieces, care is taken to ensure they're forceful but don't cross the line into stridency and shrillness.
For Silent Voices to be fully appreciated, familiarizing oneself with the background for each piece is necessary, as the experience of listening to the recording is enhanced considerably as a result. Without doing so, for example, one wouldn't know that the words for Kouyoumdjian's I Can Barely Look originated from members of the Chorus. As an exercise in exploring how we sympathize with the Syrian refugee crisis, they were asked to respond to a series of questions about photos of refugees, their words then assembled by Kouyoumdjian into the libretto for this powerfully affecting work. In general, though, no text perhaps speaks more directly on behalf of the project and its themes than words sung in the first part of Beal's work: “Give me a song of hope / And a world where I can sing it.”December 2018