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Ramon Tasat - News & Reviews

Preaching to the choir

Preaching to the choir Looking for a choral riff? At the church of your choice, you'll find a pew good men -- and women -- making a joyful noise, gratis.
by Chris Slattery
Staff Writer

Dec. 20, 2001

Henrik G. de Gyor/The Gazette
Good conduct: Dr. Myra Tate, music director of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, leads choir rehearsal.
Montgomery County has more than a thousand churches, if the Yellow Pages are any indication. On any given Sunday, it therefore would follow, there are a thousand choirs, big and small, singing glory and leading their congregations in prayer. What motivates hundreds of talented amateurs, not to mention professional musicians on a busman's holiday, to offer up hours and hours a week, learning words and melodies, rehearsing on their own and with their fellow choristers, and performing in a house of hallows where they don't even expect applause?
"I do this because I love God," says Michael Gayle.
His father was a professional musician, his mother a church musician. Gayle, the music director at Germantown's United Church of Christ of Seneca Valley, is both.
"God has some message to share with people," he adds. "I become his messenger with my music."
As messengers go, Gayle, who lives with his wife and two daughters in Montgomery Village, covers an awful lot of miles in a short amount of time. There's rehearsal, an hour and a half every Thursday, year in and year out -- every Tuesday, too, in the run up to the holidays. Services on Sunday, which are preceded by a half-hour warm-up. And all the planning, procuring and encouraging that the leader of the band needs to do.
"It's a tremendous amount of work," he admits, "but when I wake up in the morning, I don't say 'oh, I have to go to work!'
"It's consuming, but it's great consuming. It's the best work there is to do."
Gayle's position at the church, like most musical directors, is a paid, part-time job. He spends most of his time at St. Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac where he is the orchestra director, and he plays piano -- a lot of jazz music -- and teaches. His educational background is ideally suited to conducting a choir; he studied both religion and music at Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist school. He has been around the world, even lived in Korea for awhile, teaching English and performing, but ultimately came back to the Gaithersburg area to raise his family and put down roots in the community.
That those roots extend out to the church is a given. He has been in charge of the choir for four years now.
"It's a small choir, but growing," he says. "I know that we all love doing what we do."
He laughs. "I'd encourage anyone to join us, anyone that likes to sing in the shower."
They will need to take pretty long showers, though, to do enough singing for Gayle. He says members of his choir ideally spend about a half-hour a day working on their music -- potentially five hours a week plus rehearsals, the service and the warm-up. A big commitment, yet Gayle is quick to point out the rewards of such dedication.
"It gives a sense of belonging, a meaningful way of contributing to something bigger than ourselves," he explains. "Choir is something different, a chance to socialize and share our lives.
"And hopefully to bring joy to [other] people's lives, and inspire them to live joyfully."
Choral tradition
This kind of sentiment has been around for thousands of years. Religious gatherings have always sought to incorporate joy -- or thanksgiving, or petition, or praise -- into the services they offer congregations. Ancient civilizations have handed down many of the innovations choirs use today: the effusive psalms of the Hebrew kings, the omniscient chant of the Greek chorus, the emotional keening of the Celts. Perhaps the most well-known choral church music is the Gregorian Chant, church music with text in Latin that came into its own around the time of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth centuries. Before that, no modern Western system of music writing had been invented, and worship music, like music of any other kind, had to be passed on orally. Charlemagne, in his quest to be the head of a Holy Roman Empire, decided that the church music in his Frankish kingdom (now France, Switzerland and Germany) should be sung just as it was sung in Rome itself. So he had the liturgical texts set to a Roman chant repertoire and named for a popular pope of the era.
Church music has evolved, though, with influences from around the world mixing in. The classical era contributed heavily to what choirs sing now, whether they are harmonizing in the nave or on the stage. During the start of his career in the early 1700s, Johann Sebastian Bach was primarily a composer of church music, including four or five cantata cycles, the Magnificat and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions. Handel premiered his "Messiah" in 1741, drawing on themes from the Old and New Testaments to create one of the most well-known pieces of classical praise music. Brahms' "German Requiem" is a deeply felt statement of faith created for instruments and the human voice at the end of the 19th century, and Mozart, generally a composer of secular work, left a mysterious piece of church music, "Requiem," behind him when he died in 1791.
Jim Buras is aware of all this.
After all, he has been a music teacher in the Montgomery County Public Schools system for 21 years.
It's just that at his church, St. Luke's Lutheran in Derwood, the music tends toward the contemporary, and it has been moving in that direction for his 14 years there.
"When I came it was very traditional," he says, explaining that Lutherans generally follow a set format, but they permit choirs to take certain liberties with the church year cycle.
"We took these basic ideas but adapted them to our own contemporary style," says Buras. "Instead of an organ, we have a band playing. That was a gradual process."
When he came to St. Luke's, Buras says there was a two-guitar folk group and a choir of about 15 to 20 people singing basic choral anthems. Gradually, the keyboard and piano lost their stranglehold on the musical menu, the guitar and then other more contemporary instruments started to balance things out. Buras says that the more traditional choirs stay with piano, the more contemporary use guitar -- but a tempered, mellow guitar as a rule.
"Your basic rock solo is a little self-expressive," Buras chuckles, showing the sense of humor that makes him a favorite among his students at Laytonsville Elementary School. "There's not a lot of space for flashy instruments. Basically the combo is a guitar, an electronic keyboard to imitate strings and cover a lot of ground, a bass player and maybe drums or a synthesizer.
"Usually with the combo, you'd have some kind of lead instrument -- a flute, followed by a sax -- a Kenny G sax, not a wailing Clarence Clemons!"
Despite his easy references to popular culture, Buras was raised in the church, attending Calvary Lutheran School in Silver Spring until sixth grade.
"I can't remember not singing in the kids' choir," he says. He was a music major at Catholic University and earned his master's degree plus 30 credits through the Montgomery County planned in-service program.
Through it all, Buras says, he has taught choir. And at St. Luke's, he and Dr. Gary Hill are the two paid musicians on staff, responsible for leading the volunteers through a service that lasts between 45 and 60 minutes, and has half a dozen to eight or nine pieces of music. A good rule of thumb, he says, is four times as much practice time as music time. They practice every Wednesday for an 90 minutes, then another hour before services "to get all the arrangements tight." Instrumentalists need to practice more than singers, he says, and 15-minute warm-ups need to cover just the start of the song.
"People are most susceptible to hearing mistakes at the beginnings of songs," he confides.
As music director, Buras looks at several things, starting with the season, the message and the sermon. He points out that there's no such thing as a 'praise music Napster.' Composers and lyricists must get their due, so to perform music legally in public, a church has to purchase the books of music and use the copyrighted songs in those books. He loves his church and is proud of his choir, but is quick to explain that a church is its people, not what he calls "the bells and whistles."
"We don't stand up there to perform," he exclaims. "We exhort, we invite the congregation to sing with us. It's not like going to see a band in a club. We've adapted the music with the average singer in mind; we don't want something that only Charlotte Church can pull off."
Transcending walls
That sense of exhorting others to exultation is something that Buras has in common with Dr. Ramon Tasat. Which is kind of interesting, seeing as Buras is Christian and Tasat is Jewish.
"Choir music within Judaism represents not so much a performance, but rather an interaction between the choir and the congregation," says Tasat, the cantor and musical director at Temple Shalom in Bethesda.
"Personally, I like to see the choir seated with the congregation. The choir is praying with everybody else; they just enhance the mood and the impulse."
According to Tasat, a choir should play should play a dual role: to involve the congregation and to create a mood conducive to prayer and contemplation. And he points out that while other religions revel in the sound of the music, the use of prayers in another language -- Hebrew -- means the music in a Jewish service must be subservient to the text.
"In some traditions, the music is queen, not the words," he says, citing the glorious sound of Bach as an example. "In the Jewish community, the use of Hebrew text all around the world contains emotional and historical value one should not discard. It transcends walls."
Originally from Argentina, Tasat is a lecturer, an author ("Sephardic Songs for All"), a performing artist and a recording artist, too. He has just finished a CD of liturgical music for Jewish congregations called "Your Bountiful Light." His music runs the gamut, from lively Sephardic and Ladino tunes, traditional Israeli songs, classical Italian pieces and songs for Jewish holidays and festivals. His experience brings a world music perspective to his work at Temple Shalom.
"Emotions are international," he says. "That's why music is so powerful; it doesn't have any boundaries."
Some denominations don't have boundaries, and the Unitarian Universalist Church is one of them, incorporating traditions from every religion into their own.
"Unitarian Universalist is a nondenominational church that welcomes people of all religious backgrounds," Amy Anderson explains. The Germantown mom is at practice with a dozen other choir members on a Monday morning, her preschooler Zac playing happily and running about while the adults run through their harmonies, preparing for a holiday concert.
"It opens things up: we can sing classical, pop, religious songs. We're not held to 'Silent Night' on Christmas Eve; we can sing Jewish music, too."
They will sing "Silent Night" on Christmas Eve, another choir member pipes up.
"We do a great 'Silent Night.'"
Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville has 35 choir members, who sing under the watchful eye -- and sharp ear -- of music director Dr. Myra Tate. Tate is a gray-haired lady of graceful mien and quiet confidence, the quintessential iron fist in a velvet glove when it comes to keeping her choir on task. And they love her for it.
"I'm here because Myra is the conductor she is," says pianist Mary Gotlieb. "She makes it exciting for everybody."
No small feat, seeing as this particular 'everybody' includes a retired administrator, a retired NIST physicist, an aerospace engineer, a pediatrician, a writer, a homemaker, a stay-at-home mom and more.
"We've got physicists, doctors, statisticians," says Tate. "We have a two-hour rehearsal and a half-hour voice lesson. More and more people are coming to that, which pleases me to no end."
It's not completely an open-door policy here, but the choir -- and its director -- will go out of its way to accommodate anyone with the slightest interest in singing. Often that includes bringing those with the vocation but not the vocal range up to par.
"I have a class called 'Sing Your Best,' " says Tate, a professional music teacher who gives lessons in her Kensington home-studio. "Several people have come [here] out of that. If people are willing to work with me, I'll bring them up to that point."
Stephanie Kreps of Gaithersburg was already 'to that point' when she joined. Kreps says she grew up Lutheran, singing in choirs.
"I really wanted to join this choir," she says. "They sounded great, and everyone looked like they were having fun."
"When Myra allows us, we have some fun," teases Rita Fleisher of Rockville. The entire group laughs.
"Our rehearsals can be as inspiring sometimes as any performance," Fleisher adds on a more serious note. But the general consensus is that they laugh a lot. And learn a lot. It is, they say, a very musical church, with this choir plus a children's choir and a men's quartet.
Betty Prestemon of Rockville, a founding member of the church, has been singing at UUCR for 42 years.
"I'm the oldest living choir member," she says. "I always know where I'll be on a Thursday night."
Every Thursday night for 42 years -- and every Sunday morning, too.
Every week in this simple white room, with art on the walls and a shiny black grand piano. Or in the choir loft at a Catholic church, or the first five pews of a Baptist Church or up onstage in the main auditorium of a big interdenominational church. In a thousand churches across Montgomery County, and in the temples, too, their voices are floating in harmony towards heaven. They are singing and laughing, sharing goodwill and good times. They are the voices of the choir, sung and yet unsung at the same time. And when you see them on Sunday. you might want to say, "Well done. Thanks."

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