REVIEWS
Praise for Let That Day Be Darkness
Chanticleer, San Francisco's excellent male vocal ensemble, unveiled a major new work at Herbst Theater Saturday, Jan Gilbert's Let That Day Be Darkness. It's a work that one might first look on as a novelty, but in the end, see as a universal testament of man's search for grace.
Let That Day Be Darkness ... is a sacred piece based on the Old Testament tribulations of Job. But its text is in the West African language of Krio, and its musical structure is based on African microtonal chanting, rhythms, improvisation and tonal drumming.
It is the drumming that gives the work its dramatic glue and mortal fire. At Saturday's premiere, the audience was treated to the drumming of Sowah Mensah, a Ghanian musician, who is a colleague of Gilbert's at Macalester College in Minneapolis.
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Mensah comes by his title of "master" as one who has committed to memory the complex drumming rhythms and languages for festivals and social and family rituals. He will pass this knowledge on to future generations.
Gilbert, whose previous musical works have often dealt with myth and sacred texts, got inspiration during a lengthy visit to Sierra Leone. Krio, a hybrid language absorbing vocabulary and grammar from English and many West African dialects, is the language there for poets and other literary lights. English, often with a Christian twist, came to be there with the return to West Africa of freed slaves in the 19th century. Its tones are heard in such lines as "Leh dah day dae dark," Krio for Let that day be darkness.
The Chanticleer singers ... were grouped behind Mensah, changing position on the dramatic and darkly lit stage as they deliberated Job's fate in solo, small ensemble and group chants. The structure of the piece was determined by the drummer, who begins and ends the piece with a tonal recitation of The Lord's Prayer "Me Poppa."
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There was an eerie and mysterious beauty to the performance of Let That Day Be Darkness. Even though most of the material was new, its subject matter, language, music and fully-involved performance were key factors in a spiritual combination with metaphorical application for all.
-Marilyn Tucker, San Francisco Chronicle
Chanticleer Gives Light to "Darkness"
Let That Day Be Darkness emerges as an astonishingly austere opus, appealing as much to the intellect as to the senses; exoticism for its own shake is shunned. The European composer who comes to mind immediately is Karlheinz Stockhausen ... Chanticleer outshone itself in attempting the score, at once so primitive and sophisticated.
Allan Ulrich, San Francisco Examiner
Let That Day Be Darkness is a giant performing piece, about forty minutes long. It features nearly every form of vocal expression possible ... The choral setting of The Lord's Prayer was magnificent, and the use of the Krio language gave a special beauty ... At the conclusion of the prayer, after a short dramatic pause, Mensah signified the end of the service with a message on his drums. It was an exhilarating experience.
Clark Mtize, KXPR FM91
Praise for NightChants
“NightChants”is an unusual and appealing work by Jan Gilbert that consists of more than a dozen interpretations from a variety of cultures. [The work] is not a cultural anthology; although some of the chants are reproduced more or less accurately, in other sections Gilbert has chosen instead to treat the chants as raw material to be freely adapted or changed as necessary. It is not always easy to tell how “authentic” a passage is, but one soon perceives that authenticity isn’t the point; what Gilbert is aiming for is a powerful aural experience, and to a large extent she achieves just that.
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Roy Close, St Paul Pioneer and Dispatch 1985
“Sound in Spirit: The Healing Power of Music”[Chanticleer concert/San Francisco] was centered around twentieth or twenty-first century pieces which take their inspiration from non-Western culture traditions. The first clue that these were going to showcase an unexpected sonic world came with the opening of Jan Gilbert’s NightChants, in which an unseen solo singer offered a wide-ranging improvisatory, pitch-bending melody to the accompaniment of sounds of the wind. Other movements from NightChants, based on Sanskrit and Navajo poetries, also featured solo voice with a changing drone by the other eleven singers.
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Kaneez Munjee Choral Music 2003
Sunday evening in Trinity Episcopal NightChants became something outside time for me, outside anything, yet touching my heart, soul and funnybone. I was just incredulous at the variety of depths of the pieces and at the stunning talent of Chanticleer. I am not a musician of any sort, but a grateful, awed listener. From this perspective I offer my heartfelt thanks for your astounding work.
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Marilyn Brown (letter from audience member, San Francisco 1993)
Praise for That the Dove May Rest
United Nations Association International Choir President Geneva Siemens writes:
"Thank you" seems so inadequate to fully express to you the feelings of our entire Choir for the amazing and triumphal flight of your and our special dove. The creation of "That the Dove may Rest" was only possible because of your musical knowledge and talent, your expressive gifts and your ability to take Phillip's challenging, amazing concepts and blend them with your deep spirituality into a soaring paean of dark and light, pain and healing, grief and joy: the universal dichotomy of our existence. It was absolutely worth every second we sweated over it in rehearsal and every worry we sustained whether we would actually be ready in time for our performance..."
Preview of Poem of the Innocent
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda lasted from April to mid-July, killing up to 1 million people in a mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu Rwandans by the Hutu majority. In her piece, Gilbert addresses the tragedy but also the better times that lay ahead. “I had been thinking for several years of writing this work,” said Gilbert, who taught music theory and composition for 25 years at Macalester College in St. Paul and has written choral music for the likes of Chanticleer and the Dale Warland Singers. “For me, it was extremely important to spiritualize my thinking about forgiveness. The story of Rwanda isn’t as well-known as perhaps the Jewish Holocaust, but it certainly affects all of us.”
Gilbert’s piece, written for choir and chamber orchestra, includes extracts from the books “Led by Faith” and “Left to Tell” by Immaculée Ilibagiza, a survivor who lost most of her family in the genocide. “When I wanted to come to the part about how do you forgive, I took her personal story and set the words to music. Gilbert also commissioned native-language text from a young women’s group in Kigali. The memories of the women (who were young girls in the genocide), are compiled in a poem called “Umuvugo Utunyange (Poem of the Innocent). They were very joyful to hear that I was doing this piece in the United States and to celebrate the future of Rwanda,” Gilbert said. The composition draws from the Rwandan Genocide-themed poem “Ejo” by American Derick Burleson. Gilbert dedicated her composition to Rwandan peace activist Issa Higiro. It includes dance-like movements accented by drumming as well as traditional choral settings, she said. “There are different texts and different moods. But the trajectory of the piece is to go from the darkness of the story to the light of what the Rwandan students themselves feel- “Let’s share Rwanda, let’s share the joy of this country coming together again.”
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John Gessner, The Sun, 2014
Review of A Psalm of Penitence
Just a note to tell you again how beautiful your “Psalm of Penitence” is. I’m really taken with its sometimes delicate, sometimes lyrical, sometimes deeply resonant sound and the way it builds and then thins out again in texture and effect. I love chanting and your piece seems like a myriad of different sorts of chants. And as always happens when I like a piece of music, I begin to imagine how dancers might move with it. Hope I get to hear it again…
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Letter from audience member, St. Olaf College 1983