A recent photo of the core Nova Singers.
It's easy to sing the praises of Nova Singers, a professional choir that has presented awe-inspiring, heartfelt concerts in the region since 1986.
Under the direction of its enthusiastic, tireless founder Dr. Laura Lane, the largest-ever version of Nova will ascend two towering peaks in the choral music mountain range with A Cappella Masterworks on Saturday, October 12, at 7:30 p.m. at First Lutheran Church in Galesburg, and on Sunday, October 13, at 4 p.m. at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport.
This ambitious concert will see the Nova Singers expand to 35 voices to perform two of the greatest works ever written for a cappella double choir. Ralph Vaughan Williams’ exquisite Mass in G Minor is full of folk-like melodies and features a solo quartet in addition to two SATB choirs. Frank Martin’s powerful Mass for Double Choir is the second half of the program.
“I have long wanted to do Martin’s Mass for Double Choir a second time,” Lane said recently, noting that her ensemble first performed the piece in 2017. “It is packed with gorgeous melodies and harmonies. There are soft spots that are delicate and deeply expressive, but moments of tremendous drama, too. Each of the eight choral sections is featured with solo lines.
“But when all the parts come together, it is spine-tingling and utterly thrilling. I’m really proud of the singers, especially those who are singing with us for the first time, both for their hard work on this challenging piece, and also for their passion and enthusiasm. Each rehearsal so far has been an absolute joy for me because we are making such incredible sounds. This is going to be one of our best programs in our 39 years of existence!”
This project (with 35 singers, compared to Nova’s typical 20) started because Lane wanted to do the Martin Mass again, after its first time with 31 singers in 2010. For this largest-ever expansion of the group, she handpicked, auditioned, and recruited more people, including current and past Knox College students.
“This is gonna take a lot of people, but I had more time last year,” Lane said of her retiring in 2023, after a 40-year career heading Knox’s choral program.
One young man recently moved to the area, for a choral music teaching job, and found Nova in May and wanted to audition. Over the summer, former member Michael Wahlmann asked to sing for the double choir. And Noel Jean Huntley, a librarian with the East Moline Public Library, is in her first year as a soprano in the choir.
“I love to sing, and I love to sing with other people more than I love singing alone,” she said recently. “And I especially love to sing with some of the finest musicians northwestern Illinois has to offer! Being a choral singer is offering up what you have, however much or little that may be, to help create something more powerful and beautiful than any one person could ever imagine on their own.”
Nova has often featured a cappella singing, but it’s rare for the group to devote a whole program of it.
“It’s beautiful and our audiences love it,” Lane said. “What’s special about this – the group is so much larger.”
2017 was the first time Lane expanded Nova to do something fully a cappella, for the Martin piece. “It was so beautiful, I was really just motivated to try,” she said. “In the last few years, I’ve been thinking, what have I done before that I feel I have to do one more time?”
When Swiss composer Frank Martin (1890-1974) wrote his Mass for Double Choir in 1922, he didn't intend it to be performed. Martin put the score in a drawer, where it remained until 1962, when a friend persuaded him to share it with the public. When asked later why he had not published it, Martin described his Mass as one of inward reflection, as a way of communing with God, according to the Nova Singers program notes.
He said he did not wish to publish his most intimate feelings. There are some indications that a young Martin may also have been working out his own spirituality. In his Mass, he did not conform to one style, but blended together modalities of medieval chant with Renaissance-like flowing lines and imitative polyphony. However, in terms of harmonies and compositional techniques, the Mass is solidly of the 20th century.
There is another influence. Deeply inspired as a young man by Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and B Minor Mass, Martin used word painting similar to Bach’s.
For example, in the Credo the word “crucifixus” is set apart in a dramatic and almost painful way. Then, all the voices sing in their lowest ranges for the passage “et sepultus est” (and was buried), something Bach did in the B Minor Mass. Free of external opinion, Martin was able to blend musical styles past and present into a work that transcends time and leads the listener on a reflective, spiritual journey.
Singing without accompaniment, especially with eight-plus vocal parts, is “ridiculously difficult,” Lane noted. “That’s one of the reasons I hadn’t done it until 2017, and I wanted to do it again.” There are about eight singers now who also performed the Martin Mass seven years ago.
“You can wander pitch-wise; that’s a hard thing,” Lane said. “Stamina and ears, the intonation has to be spot on. Another thing about this piece that’s very challenging is just how it’s written. It’s very contrapuntal.”
“It’s because of his friend that we have it,” Lane said. The composer said, “This was between me and God, extremely intimate, of me talking to God.”
The work didn’t premiere until Martin was in his 70s, and he passed away 12 years later. Lane also thought he didn’t want anyone criticizing it after he wrote it.
“This is unusual in that it was a cappella,” she said. “Most of his music was for orchestra, chamber music, choir, and piano. He didn’t write very much for a cappella choir. It’s also unusual in its scope and breadth, and the demands it places on the singers.”
Martin set the standard text of the Mass, and he loved Bach. What’s personal about it is how he chose to set each section of the text, Lane said. “He’s actually feeling the feelings of the words. He does all kinds of things that Bach did in the B Minor Mass. It’s dissonant, but it’s tonal.
“It’s so beautiful that everyone who listens to it or sings it, falls in love with it,” Lane said. “Yet it’s rarely performed because it’s so difficult to pull off. This is why I wanted to do it.”
Homage to Renaissance Music
Both Vaughan Williams and Martin loved Renaissance music and the a cappella, sacred tradition of the 16th century, Lane said. They evoke them in completely different ways.
The Martin harmonies are very difficult, with many dissonances, while the two works were written just one year apart – Vaughan Williams in 1921, and Martin mainly in 1922.
Williams was a significant British composer in the first half of the 20th century, famous for operas, orchestral works, and choral works.
“He liked a more traditional sound and language,” Lane said. “When he wrote this piece, he wanted to evoke the music of Byrd, Tallis, of 16th-century England.”
Williams also went around villages in England recording people singing folk songs, and he based his music on those melodies.
“In this piece,” said Lane, “he’s putting together melodies that are folk-like in their beauty and simplicity, and writing in the style of the 16th-century counterpoint, and it’s beautiful. You have to be a brilliant composer to even begin to do that. And he was.”
In the early 1900s, the Nova program states, he was among the first to collect folk songs and carols from singers around the countryside. His studies of English folk song and of English Tudor music enabled him to incorporate modal elements and rhythmic freedom into a style that was both highly personal and deeply English.
Williams mastered the doublechoir technique, where one choir answers the other, like a call and response, and combines them in a thrilling way.
“It’s fun to have a group that’s so fun, that I have no fear,” Lane said of the expanded choir. “I’m totally confident that they’re going to be fantastic in this performance.”
It’s rare to do a whole program that’s a cappella and this difficult, Lane said. The singers come in talented, enthusiastic, and well-prepared – all of which are crucial. “Every single person in this group belongs in this group. The main reason they’re so enthusiastic is the music itself.”
With their a cappella performances, the choir only gets to hear one starting pitch and everyone has to find their first notes based on that. Sometimes, Lane said, another pitch or two will be given in between movements.
“It’s something we have to practice,” Lane said. “We do it a lot. Most of our Christmas music is a cappella. You have to practice finding the pitches.”
Tickets for the October 12 and 13 concerts will be available at the doors. Admission is $20 for adults and $17 for seniors, with students admitted free of charge. Season tickets – additional Nova Singers programs will be held in December and April – are available at NovaSingers.com, with pricing $50 for adults and $40 for ages 62 and older. Those who subscribe now to Nova's 2024-25 season will receive a substantial discount. Plus, tickets never lose their value, as season tickets are accepted at any Nova Singers 2024-25 concert regardless of the concert printed on the ticket.
