Passionate, precise
Tenebrae choir in A2
By COSMO PAPPAS
Daily Arts Writer
During Holy Week before
Easter Sunday, Tenebrae is a
ceremony in Catholic and sev-
eral
Protes-
tant
liturgies
in which cer-
emonial candles
are
gradually
extinguished on
Good Friday to
symbolize
the
death of Christ.
For Nigel Short,
English
choir
singer
and
director, the memories of church
ritual and music as a young choir
boy inspire a singing career that
has
spanned
decades.
Short
retired from singing in 2001 to
found the world-renowned choir,
Tenebrae, who will appear at St.
Francis of Assisi Church in Ann
Arbor through University Musi-
cal Society.
“I started the choir in 2001,
mainly because I have adored
choral singing and choral music
since the age of seven,” Short
said in a phone interview with
The Michigan Daily. “I started
singing in my local church choir.
I was completely mesmerized by
everything about it. I just turned
up at the medieval church, and I
heard these boys singing and it
went into my soul.”
Tenebrae is a virtuoso choir
of about 20 singers whose reper-
toire spans five centuries. From
the 16th to the 21st century, from
sacred music to secular, Tene-
brae’s mission is to bring music of
universally beautiful and acces-
sible music to audiences under
the watchwords: “Passion & Pre-
cision.”
Joining their musical rigor
with movement and light, Tene-
brae thoughtfully elaborates on
their music with a kind of theatri-
Tenebrae
St. Francis of
Assisi Church
Friday Oct.
30 at 8 p.m.
$30 GA
$40 Reserved
cality that alerts audience mem-
bers to the concert space and its
acoustics, and discourages a stat-
ic divide between performance
and audience. This decision pro-
vides audiences with a “fresh
perspective” on liturgical music
and early music.
“As a choir boy, my favorite
services were the ones where we
would sing by candlelight and we
would move around,” Short said.
But where movement or light
could detract from the group’s
precision, Short opts against it.
“It has to be pretty sensitive
and very effective,” he said.
Short explained his inspiration
to incorporate light and move-
ment comes from his apprecia-
tion of those elements in his choir
activity as a young person in a
“medieval church.” In Tenebrae,
you have an evocation of a likely
old, monastic practice of inte-
grating movement and light that
disrupts conventions and expec-
tations. Through their secular-
ized appeal to Christian ritual,
Tenebrae’s “fresh perspective”
crafts an image of monastic rigor
and intimacy for audiences who
might not necessarily have any
religious experience.
For Short, the “passion” is
inseparable from the “precision”
even at the level of program cura-
tion. While some programs will
be organized around a theme,
Short mainly arranges them
according to the degree of focus
necessary, with concerts cul-
minating in the most virtuosic
pieces.
“We kind of try to get our-
selves into a zone, if you like, in
terms of concentration and focus.
And we try to take the audience
with us,” Short said. “Within that
sequence, there can be anything.
There can be secular music, it
can be very fast, energetic or
it can just be beautifully soft,
smooth, serene, ethereal, heav-
enly sounds that people can just
lose themselves in and be trans-
ported by. The themes can vary
hugely.”
Tenebrae is a group that
believes wholly in music as a
transformative force. Presenting
their selections with enthusiasm
and technical perfection, Tene-
brae celebrates music as a univer-
sal communion which Ann Arbor
audiences will have the opportu-
nity to see later this week.
“I don’t think that the aspect
of making music accessible to
an audience or choosing music
that is accessible, or what can be
described as accessible,” Short
said, “has ever really appeared on
my horizon.”
Tenebrae’s
music spans the
sacred and the
secular.
EVENT PREVIEW
4B — Thursday, October 29, 2015
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com