Ann Kearns, composer, conductor and longtime friend who was passionate about making the world a better, healthier place, died March 2. She was formally remembered on consecutive days, first in a funeral in Grace Episcopal Church and then at Smith College in a community singing of Brahms’ German Requiem.
Both were stirring events, but it was the Brahms performance that spoke most strongly to me.
I knew Ann best through music, since she was the founding conductor of the Da Camera Singers and I was one of its original members. She did not suffer fools nor undisciplined singers gladly, so back then, in the 1970s, I had to work hard to pull up my musical socks. She set an admirable example that combined high seriousness with quick wit. It was not always easy to live up to.
As we agreed after the event at Smith, she would have approved of the Brahms run-through — a community event conducted by five local conductors, and a fund-raiser for her favorite local environmental group, the Kestrel Trust. One of the conductors, Wayne Abercrombie, emeritus professor of music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said a few words about the piece we were singing, music he had written about for his doctoral degree.
Johannes Brahms was not, Abercrombie noted, a “card-carrying Christian,” but he knew his Bible and claimed that he could “find it by his bed in the dark.” This Requiem makes no mention of Christ, nor does it follow the traditional words of the Catholic Mass for the dead, as do the Requiems of Mozart or Verdi.
Rather, Brahms chose passages from both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and instead of the traditional Latin, the piece is sung in the vernacular — German.
In its first performance, in order to make up for what was perceived as being too out of the ordinary, the sections of Brahms’ music were interleaved with more traditional Christian pieces, including parts of Handel’s “Messiah.”
The memorial sing at Smith was all Brahms, and it was a wonderful experience, a lovely way to remember a departed friend. But for me, it was also a chance to rehearse a piece I will be singing again soon, with the Hampshire Choral Society, on May 22 at 3 p.m. in the UMass Fine Arts Center.
Our conductor, Allan Taylor, describes performing this complex piece of music as a “life-changing experience.” The work is more about the living than the dead, he points out, “offering both comfort and hope to those who mourn.”
One of the sections is well-known in its English translation as “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place.”
The composer began his version when he was young, completing it more than a decade later, after the deaths of both his mother and his great friend, the composer Robert Schumann. Perhaps for that reason, Brahms sidestepped, among other things, the traditional “Dies Irae” (day of wrath), a description of the last judgment at the end of the world.
This Requiem depicts no such terror. Rather, Taylor says, it “manages to describe, in music and in words, the full range of emotions we feel at the loss of a loved one, from deepest grief to the comfort of friends and faith.”
The piece is quite a challenge to sing, Taylor says. “A performance with full orchestra is a major event in the cultural life of our area. And what an orchestra it is, too, from the low growl of the contrabassoon to the highest reaches of the piccolo. Add a choir of 150 and soprano and baritone soloists, and a live performance becomes a spectacular journey, with close to 200 people onstage, engaged in a single, common purpose.”
Many of the singers in the Hampshire Choral Society have sung this piece before, some of them, including me, several times. It is a musical experience that keeps giving, with new riches to be found on every repetition. I will be thinking of Ann Kearns at our next performance.
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net.