Touring begins for the 2009-10 season!

Welcome, Cantus fans, to the 2009-10 season!

After singing a very successful show last week at the Minnesota State Fair, as guests of Minnesota Public Radio, we're kicking off a three-week tour of the midwest tomorrow--Please check out our concert page to see when we'll be near you this season. This first tour is for Allied Concerts Series, and takes us to smaller communities, performing a bit lighter fare, before we begin touring our full, more classical-oriented Elemental program.

We get asked often about the touring lifestyle, and how it affects our relationships. It affects each member differently, but I have a special case, because my wife is also a professional singer, who also travels from time to time for performing. The quick and dirty answer to "is that difficult?", is "YES! It's difficult". Sometimes we have to contend with international calling rates, time zone issues, and even daily schedules can be problematic. But thank goodness for the web and Skype!

Here's an example of the kind of thing that goes on:

So, my wife was recently in Germany singing for a month. I went with her for a week (had a great time, btw), while Cantus still had a little vacation, but had to rush home for the start of rehearsals.

We only just got ourselves webcams for our last-generation PowerPC macs, so we were able to connect some mornings for free with video chat--fantastic. Except that she was 7 hours ahead, making her afternoon break my 7 am. I actually managed to stay up till 2 a.m. a few times to catch her at her 9 a.m.!

As it turned out, she needed some sheet music for an audition that she didn't bring, so I needed to scan in some scores and post them for her to download. All pretty simple, if a little tedious, but we accomplished it without spending a fortune in postage and time. Gotta love scanning technology!

Now, the crummy part of this is compounded because when she arrives home, a few days later Cantus goes out on tour. (acute failure on so many levels!) At least we'll both be in the same country, so we'll be able to talk every day.

All this aside, we all hope to see you on our travels this year, and we'll have numerous updates throughout the season to connect with you, which is one of our favorite things to do!

Take care, everybody: we'll see you on the road.

Irony

So most folks know by now that a Tornado hit the south side of Downtown Minneapolis on Tuesday. Cantus was rehearsing at Westminster only a few blocks away from "the action." We rehearse in a children's choir room with no windows and a very dry acoustic. This helps us hear all of the mistakes and doesn't allow for much distraction. Unfortunately it also didn't allow us to hear the Tornado sirens. Lucky for us, one of the Westminster folks came to get us. We went down to the basement, sat on the floor in the hallway and continued rehearsing. Not until one of the Westminster staff joked that this event was "our fault" did we even acknowledge that we were rehearsing They Call the Wind Maria from Lerner and Loewe's Paint Your Wagon. Pretty hilarious. Thankfully Westminster and the surrounding buildings were not harmed by the extreme weather.

Nonetheless, it's great to be back in rehearsal making music again. We'll be on stage before we know it--and I, for one, can't wait!

Back to Work!!

Cantus jumps back to work with the start of rehearsals tomorrow, Aug. 17th. After a very eventful summer, and a little break, we are working on putting together 3 different programs in the next 3-4 weeks: our normal Touring Program (this year it is called 'Elemental'), a special program for a tour with Allied Productions in September, and some early work on our Christmas shows: All is Calm: the Christmas Truce of 1914; and 'Away in a Manger', our annual holiday show at Harriet Island in St. Paul, MN.

'Elemental' is a program about the four Aristotelean elements: Fire, Wind, Water, and Earth. When these four elements are in perfect balance, Aristotle writes that a Fifth Element emerges: the Spirit. That is what Cantus hopes to achieve with this program. Some highlights from the 'Elemental' touring program include: music from 20th Century masters Zoltan Kodaly and Veljo Tormis; a wonderful part song by Franz Schubert that uniquely interprets a poem by Goethe about a sea-going apparition; a feisty setting of Greek palindrome by Twin Cities composer Abbie Betinis called 'Yhinx' that actually puts a hex on a former lover; and a host of other pieces from Japan, Sweden, Scotland, the Republic of Georgia, Venezuela, and the U.S.

We are in rehearsal weekdays from 1-6pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis, MN. Rehearsals are open: if you want to see how the music is made, schedule a drop-in to rehearsal by emailing reinwald@cantusonline.org! Happy Singing!

A Rain Song

So I'm not one for much surfing the internet anymore. For some reason I've just gotten out of the habit and tend to get stuff done and head out, but today was certainly an exception. I've been working on painting my future apartment with my future roommates all weekend, and needed to just relax and not do much of anything this afternoon (not to mention the long programming meeting with Cantus)!

Not to steer people in other directions or anything, but there are plenty of music blogs that one could get lost in if one has an afternoon to waste. Blogs like Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise or Jeremy Denk's think denk are great places to start, but there are plenty more, ranging from marketing within the performing arts to just plain funny or interesting music.

What's funny about this particular post is that its title, "A Rain Song", stems from a video that I want to share which I found NOT on some other music blog. A friend of mine just happened to keep me on a listserve for an old men's group in which I used to sing (The Sons of Orpheus, in case you're wondering), and passed along this really interesting video while I was reading about the new Hamburg Philharmonic Hall, which will be finished in 2012 and is located in the middle of Sandtor harbour!

The video sort of cuts the song short, and the effects sound ALMOST perfect, but my favorite is the heavy downpour section...and the imitation of cracking thunder. Very cool, very interesting, and above all, I'm a little sad that Cantus is just 9 men. How cool would it be to prepare some sort of soundscape design like this in our regular "Surprise" slot for a touring program?

Anyways, enjoy this video. Will be writing again soon!

Rain

Cantus Season Wrapup

Hello gang,

Cantus finished its home concert season with two exciting weekends at The Ritz Theater performing "Covers II". Got two great reviews of the show. Star Tribune and Twin Cities.com. The boys are all on hiatus now, but we'll be back in the Fall to bring you more music. Here's a video clip from one of the shows:




We also have two bits of very exciting news for Cantus, with a prestigious award and a new musician-led structure! Cantus this month received Chorus America's Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, and is the first collaborative ensemble to do so! It includes a $5000 cash prize.

Cantus' Board of Directors recently voted unanimously to move the group to an artist-led artistic structure, more in line with our chamber music process. This very important decision shows a great commitment to the method that Cantus uses to make its music, and the performers who have always been making the musical decisions. Now, the performers will be leading the company's artistic vision in a much more collaborative way. The recent pop shows were executed under the new structure, and every future show will be programmed by the singers you see on stage.

We hope everyone has a great summer. Its been a very eventful season, and we will be preparing for the next one all summer. We'll have a preview of next season coming up very soon. Until then, we have just two more cities, Chautauqua, NY and New London, NH. See you on the road!

John Luther Adams

Adam Reinwald and I were working in the Cantus office yesterday, sorting through and filing music while geeking out to some music from his infamous iPhone. We came across some interesting scores, including a small art song entitled "up into the silence" by John Luther Adams (the poem is by e.e. cummings...a GREAT poem that you should google!). I brought this art song home to sift through. At first I couldn't figure out if I liked it or not... It was repetitive, with the same sorts of figures in the accompaniment, and the right hand of the piano almost always played what the solo line was singing (which wasn't much other than arpeggios already used in the piano part). But by the end of the bleak-sounding piece, I was completely entranced. It wasn't boring like I'd thought: It was very, very slow progress, with a lot of measured silences.

So I looked up this John Luther Adams, and it turns out he's pretty famous. He's got a discography of around 10 CDs, a quote from Lou Harrison mentioning that he's "one of the few important young American composers", and it seems like he's a semi-continuation of Morton Feldman's ideas about slow moving processes. But these slow moving processes and possible minimalist gestures are a direct result of his love for Alaska, where he's lived since the late 1970s, which he mentions in almost every interview I could find.

I then searched for him elsewhere, and came upon this article in the New Yorker about a sound and light installation that Adams placed in the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. It's called "The Place Where You Go to Listen", and it's based on natural events that occur in real time. By that I mean it's completely controlled by input data collected from its surroundings: seismic waves, overcast/clear skies, etc. I know...I freaked out a little too.

So check the New Yorker article out...it's quite interesting. And who knows. Maybe John Luther Adams might sit in on one of our concerts in October, when we're scheduled to have our very first Alaska tour!

This is what we do

Hello, folks. Since it's my first post on this here blog, I thought I'd introduce myself. My name is Tim Takach, and I've been singing in Cantus forever. Seriously. This is the end of my 13th year singing bass, and I love it. I'm also the graphic designer for the group, and I'm a professional composer on the side. Here's a bit more about me.

When we go on the road, there' a lot of work to be done. First of all, there are the concerts, which on an average concert day keep us scheduled from about 3:00pm until 10:00pm. We also do educational outreach programs, which happen about 4-5 times per tour, and those usually keep us busy for 2-3 hours per day. And then there's the driving. Oh yes, the driving. Sometimes we fly, but usually, we pile into sweet, sweet minivans and "roam around the world" (yes, it's a lyric from the b52s. We're in the middle of our Covers concerts...).

So that begs the question, what do we do when we don't have to be around each other all the time? The answer, surprisingly, is that we spend even more time with each other. Movies (either on the theater or on DVD), board games, frisbee games, work outs, hotel swimming pools, dinner outings, and many other things beckon to us as we travel. Once, eight of us went bargain hunting at Kohl's. I know. Please don't tell anyone.

However, having fun and playing games rule our off hours, and we take any chance we get to try a new game. Paul introduced us to a game he had played called Telephone Pictionary. He bugged us for months to try it, and we finally got around to playing during our March tour.

Here's the scoop:

Everyone sits in a circle, with a stack of paper in front of them.

Everyone write a phrase or on their page, and then passes it to the left.

That person reads the phrase, and then tries to capture it in a drawing on another sheet, and then passes their drawing to the left.

The next person looks at the drawing, and writes down what they think the original phrase was, then passes that to their left.

The next person looks at the new interpreted phrase and tries to capture it in a drawing.

See where this is going?

By the time you get your own original back, it is supported by slowly degrading versions of what you wrote down. Then you so a bit of show and tell, so everyone can see how the original answer got skewed. So, I'm posting a couple of examples from our recent game. See what you think they are. Comment if you like.

Example #1:

You know, I think I might even need a refresher as to what this was. Hey Cactus guys, want to weigh in?

Example #2:

This had something to do with shoefly pie, and ended up with Tom Selleck, apparantly.

Example #3:

Anyone want to guess?

Thanks for your time, and as always, thanks for your support of Cantus. See you next time!

Tim