One-on-one with Aella - Ellen Badcock (arranger edition!)

by Teri Slade

(Click here to listen to a solo version of Gjendines bådnlåt, a haunting Norwegian lullaby which Ellen has adapted for SSAA voices. Aella will premiere Ellen’s stunning arrangement at their December 7, 2019 show, Carols & Cake.)

This weekend I had the pleasure of chatting with Ellen. She’s an Aella, a music director, and a pianist who has arranged two of the pieces in Aella’s upcoming concert. Ellen is an absolute joy to sing with and one of the most kind and honest people you’ll ever meet. She is also my doppelgänger. (picture below for proof.) 

See? We could be sisters!!

Here’s what she said about the upcoming concert:

Ellen: I think everybody’s pretty excited that we’re doing a Christmas concert this year. We’ve carolled every year but we’ve never actually sung a Christmas concert before, so it’s extremely fun. The music on the program speaks to many of the different themes of Christmas; for example, there’s a set all about Mary, and there are cradle songs and there’s a Scandinavian set too, which is really cool.

And then of course we’re going to have our request set which will have the carol that wins the Carol Cage Match and people will be able to vote at the concert and we’ll sing whatever people vote for. So that’s really exciting because we literally don’t know what we’re going to sing that day.

Sounds thrilling and nerve racking! If you haven’t participated in the Christmas Carol Cage Match, you need to. Aellas have been making sales pitches to encourage votes for their favourite carols on the list.

Ellen: I guess you read [Aella’s manager] Erin’s sales pitch for Past Three O’Clock?

Teri: Yes! It was hilarious! And I love that carol, but the pitch was just so great!

Ellen: Well, it certainly made me think about that carol in a new light, that’s for sure! And even though I’m going to be writing an appeal for another carol, it makes me want to vote for her carol! Then, of course after Jenn’s emotional plea for Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, I wanted to vote for hers! 

Since our interview, [Aella member] Kelly also made a great pitch for Jingle Bell Rock, and I believe Ellen will be making one for Ding Dong Merrily on High, which she arranged!

Teri: Tell me about the arranging process for Ding Dong Merrily on High.

Ellen: Well, I had always wanted to sing in a small treble group like this. One year, long before I found Aella, I ordered a whole bunch of SSA music just so that if maybe I had the music, maybe I would find the people to sing it with. It was a situation where you couldn’t look at the music before you ordered it, so I had just ordered a whole bunch of SSA music sight unseen and I was particularly excited about Ding Dong Merrily on High. As I was waiting for my music to arrive, I found myself wondering, “What is this music going to sound like?” I would be driving in my car and think, “Oh, I wonder if it will do this? I wonder if the alto part will go like this?” and I was doing so much wondering about it that I decided to write down some of my ideas, and then I enjoyed that process so much that I just ended up writing the whole arrangement before my music ever arrived. 

Teri: Did you like the one that came in the mail?

Ellen: You know what, I don’t think I did!  But you know, I think that experience helped me realize how much I enjoyed arranging, because I had written music before that, but I’d never arranged anything and when I wrote this arrangement I really loved it. It’s been just a dream come true that I’ve been able to sing this, which was my first ever choral arrangement with Aella, with these wonderful beautiful talented singers.

And now I want to go vote for Ding Dong Merrily on High! But there’s another arrangement by Ellen that is definitely going to be sung at the concert. It’s called Gjendines bådnlåt. 

Ellen: This was a first for me because it was my first time arranging a piece that I had never heard before. All I got was this beautiful, haunting melody, and there are arrangements in existence, but I purposefully didn’t listen to them before writing mine because I didn’t want to be influenced. I wanted to just listen to this melody and see what I came up with. It was a really cool experience because the style and the language and everything about it was so different from what I’m used to. It’s a cradle song and I got to play with that a little bit and try to make it sound like it was rocking, and I added some interesting rhythms and I put a fugal section in the middle. It was really a lot of fun.

I love fugues. You know what’s even better than fugues? Fugues and cake. 

Teri: What is your favourite type of cake?

Ellen: [laughs] Much like Christmas carols, I can’t pick just one! But I think if I had to, I would probably choose black forest cake. But I’m also looking forward to trying the traditional Norwegian Christmas cake!

Yes, the kransekake! If you didn’t know, this cake is stunning! It has about a million layers and tastes like the regal distant cousin of macarons and seven layer squares. 

Now for a special musical Christmas moment. 

Ellen: A few years ago, I was planning the music for my church’s candlelight service and the final hymn was Silent Night, so I decided to play an arrangement of Silent Night on piano right after the closing hymn. Normally the church can get pretty noisy after a service, especially at Christmastime because people are excited and everything, but that night, I don’t know, just something about the magic of that piece seemed to kind of cast a spell on the entire congregation and the whole church fell totally silent. You could hear a pin drop. Even after I played the last notes, nobody moved. Nobody made a sound. Everybody just got up from their seats in silence. It was a really powerful moment and I still get chills thinking about it, to know that music can do that.

I got chills hearing about it! And I think YOU will get chills at the Aella Carols & Cake concert, particularly during the Biebl Ave Maria. It’s so beautiful, someone will definitely cry (probably me).

One-on-one with Aella: Kara Morris

One-on-one with Aella is an ongoing series in which Aella members interview one another so that you can learn a bit more about us! We are happy to be back and posting after a very full and busy 2018 :)

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A conversation with Kara Morris
By Teri Slade

Through Aella, I have had the great joy of meeting (and now interviewing) Kara. If you ever have the chance to meet her, you will be thoroughly blessed by the experience because she is just the loveliest person, who is also epic at what she does!

Growing up in Nova Scotia, Kara loved acting, and began studying voice so she could do both music and theatre. She ended up really loving the music side of things and going on to do her undergraduate degree in voice. While she only started studying voice later, Kara began singing in choirs in church as a child.

Teri: What are some of your choral highlights?

Kara: One of my favourites was Peter Togni’s consort in Halifax. It was all church music, but because he’s a composer and also the organist the music was always gorgeous and a lot of it was music he composed himself. And it was a small group, maybe 10-12 people.

Teri: Wow, that must have been a really skilled group!

Kara: Yes! And he conducted us from the organ.

Kara sang with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society in Halifax and when she moved here, she immediately auditioned for the Savoy Society because she knew it was a thing she enjoyed (and I imagine also because it’s a thing that she’s fabulous at doing, though she’s perhaps too humble to have said so).

Teri: What was your favourite role?

Kara [with zero hesitation]: Mabel from Pirates of Penzance.

Pirates of Penzance I first saw when I was a kid and I was just in awe of Mabel because she does that aria that goes really high. It’s the first thing you hear when Mabel arrives as a character.

Teri: So that must have been fun to star as her!

Kara: Yes, but even more than getting to do all of the showy vocal stuff, I love being around other people on stage, and in that scene, a lot of the cast is on stage. I don’t like doing arias where you’re all alone on the stage and just singing to the audience. That’s probably the biggest reason that I didn’t try to be a professional singer because I don’t like to just stand by the piano and sing. Although the vocal calisthenics are super fun, it’s not the same as interacting with others on stage. And in that scene, you get to interact with every other character. It’s great!

Isn’t that cool? I’ve always appreciated how much Kara likes to interact and connect with people on stage. So naturally I told her how much I love blending with her (because our voices match quite nicely), and she said:

I love blending with people. That’s something special about choir that you don’t have in operetta. In those roles, you need to sound like a soloist, but there’s something really lovely about everybody’s voices sounding as one. I love it! It’s such a nice way to connect with people.

And then I HAD to ask this question:

Teri: So, in Aella, people know how lovely you are and how easy you are to talk to, but surely you’re aware that you are known particularly for your high notes. How does that make you feel?

Kara: It makes me feel special! That I have something special to contribute. It hasn’t always been the case, at least not in my choir experiences. In university, I was not the one who you looked to for high notes.

In my first year of university, anything above an E at the top of the staff was not comfortable, so they pegged me as a mezzo. I had three different teachers during my music and theatre degree and it was the third one who taught me how to access my upper register. I don’t know how to explain what she taught me, exactly, but she helped me find a whole new register.

Sometimes when we sing things in Aella that is mostly in a mid-high register but pops up to higher notes, I sometimes need to catch myself and change into that higher register so that I don’t strain to make the pitches happen. So, I get it why people, when they are trying to learn to sing high, they stop at that point and say that they can’t go higher. It really does feel like there’s a block there, especially if you don’t know yet how to change into that higher register.

Some other highlights of things Kara does: yoga, spending loads of time outside (she intentionally chose to live in a spot by the transCanada Trail for access to trail walking), raising a most adorable pre-schooler, working as a psychotherapist, and missing Nova Scotia. No wonder she and I get along so well: we both spend lots of time missing our east coast homes. <3

One final quote from our long chat:

I felt that when I joined Aella I immediately had a dozen new friends.

Me too, Kara. Me too.

Artist's Corner: An interview with Jennifer Baker

Today on Aella's blog, we interview local poet Jennifer Baker, with whom we are collaborating in Her Voice.  Hear Jennifer performing her original poetry during Aella's final full-length concert of the season, 7:00 p.m. at First Baptist Church, Ottawa on June 4.

Tell us a bit about your background. How long have you been writing poetry? What sort of themes do you tend to write on?

I hate to sound like a cliché, but I have probably been writing poetry with the goal of publishing or performance since I was around 12. First, I was writing to please adults, the way that over-achieving, anxious children do. Now I write more for myself, which is both the problem and pleasure of poetry.

Broadly speaking, I tend to write on themes of place, trauma, class, nature, dialect and identity, and the ways in which all of those issues are connected. I come from small-town Ontario, and have always been fascinated wih the way people—both people who live and work in rural places and people who don't—talk about place and community and culture, and class. I find the cultural differences between urban and rural places, the barriers and asumptions made between people there, striking. Most of my poems are about exploring the cultural history of Huron County, and our inability to see the culture that surrounds us—and often the pressure of keeping that culture's secrets—until we leave it.

How did you get involved with this project? What drew you to Aella and "Her Voice"?

I've been lucky enough to know Jennifer Berntson, Shawn Potter, and Erin Joyce for a few years, now, and have been living vicariously through their choir stories and listening to performances for quite some time (and lamenting my inability to sing!). And I think our talks eventually influenced my writing practice in that I've started to become really interested in form, and the way that a certain ear for language can bump up against, say, musical composition, or even sculpture. I'm still just getting started on experimenting in that sense. 

But the simple answer is that I was drawn to Aella because these women are ultra-talented and I love listening to beautiful music, of course!

What did you use as inspiration for your "Her Voice" pieces?  

While I'm not sure I would call my poems explicitly feminist, I have seen my overall project as a feminist one. Because I write lyric poetry, which is poetry about the Self, my pieces try to make a space for my version of home, with all of its difficult complications, inelegancies, and embarrassments. There is enormous power in honesty—it's something that sounds so easy to achieve until you realize you need to be honest with yourself, first.

My inspiration, then, is that I think the idea of women making their voices heard is a powerful one, and I have tried to pull together poems that represent my attempts to do that.

Have you ever undertaken a collaboration of this nature?

No, this is my first! I'm so excited to see how this will go. I'm sure I'll learn tons.

Aella was very excited to work with you one-on-one. What was the experience like for you? Was it what you expected? Did hearing the choir change anything about the way you envisioned your pieces?

I was very excited to work with Aella as well! I think the most surprising part of the experience was listening to the recordings (which weren't of Aella's performance), of Magnificat, which is to come before my first reading, and hearing Aella sing it for the first time in the space. The effect is just such an experience. I felt a lot more excited for the performance and a lot more nervous to do justice to that piece in concert. It was so good. 

Final word: in your ideal world, what would you like the audience to take away from this performance?

I'd be happy if people found themselves moved and entertained. But beyond that, I think the title, Her Voice, is particularly fitting for a performance that mixes poetry, instrumental, and choral performance. In so many of the instances that the audience is going to see, they're not just creating a space for women to have their voices heard; they're also witnessing what it takes to build a voice of one's own. I'd like the audience to come away with a sense of the vital and powerful nature of that work.

Artist's Corner: 'A little Snow was here and there', Matthew Lane

A little Snow was here and there
For four-part women’s choir
by Matthew Lane on a poem by Emily Dickinson

When Jennifer Berntson asked me to write this piece in the summer of 2016, I was overjoyed. I had heard Aella’s inaugural concert, and have rarely heard a women’s chamber choir with such a lovely blend alongside such a capacity for musical complexity. It was one of the few concerts where I truly stopped analysing the music, and just entered into it. She asked if I could write something snow-related.

While planning the piece in the fall of 2016, the overt sexism of the US election campaign was on display, so I looked for poetry by women, specifically those from North America. It felt necessary, perhaps only as a consolation to myself with a young daughter, to use poetry showing women had persevered and created in more difficult times than these. Knowing Jennifer for many years, I presumed she would approve of this sentiment. This meant passing over beautiful poems by Robert Burns, Robert Frost, and Christina Rossetti. Lucy Maude Montgomery was a close second choice, but I eventually settled on Emily Dickinson.

A little Snow was here and there
Disseminated in her Hair -
Since she and I had met and played
Decade had gathered to Decade -

But Time had added not obtained
Impregnable the Rose
For summer too indelible
Too obdurate for Snows -

Emily Dickinson

I love the poem for its simplicity, and for its juxtaposition of a sort of cause and effect: time, and who we become. On the surface, it’s about snow, but underneath, I understand it as a reflection on the passing of time between two people. How can we age gracefully, and allow ourselves to be moulded by the beauty and the joyful connections in our lives, and yet not allow ourselves to be deformed by the dark, cold “winters” we all pass through? It testifies to a special kind of endurance that only allows the “summers” of life to change us. This is a quality I always search for in life, a quality I want to be able to pass onto my children, and one I deeply admire in both Jennifer Berntson and Shawn Potter.

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On a musical level, I wanted to contrast the simplicity of the initial image (“A little Snow was here and there”) with the kind of stubbornness and persistence I read into the fourth line of each verse.  For me, stubbornness and persistence begets complexity. I chose to endow those fourth lines with a chance to proliferate, to grow, with obstinate repetitions of short passages, building to the “mystic” chord of Scriabin in the whole choir.

A cascading density is created by layering the voices, one singer at a time, giving each one the freedom to begin their passage when they wish. This is what’s called “controlled aleatory” writing: it’s been a hallmark of contemporary composition, strongly associated with the Polish composer Lutoslawski. Much of the inspiration for this particular passage, however, came from a piece I sang in the fall: Jerome Blais’s Conductus 2. This work contrasts simple chant melodies in the choir, with spaces where each singer takes a portion of the melody and the choir collectively builds towards a dense effusion of sound.

The overarching structure of the piece was a build from the simplicity of youth towards the complexity of a mature individual, with all the turpitudes and contradictions therein. The different lines echo the multiple factions of a personality we develop over time; I sought to encapsulate the layers, internal conversations, and changing priorities of the different streams of our life in the four voice counterpoint.

The piece, like many of mine, took time, but not in ways people often presume. It took a month or so to consider what I wanted the piece to be about, which poetry to use, and how I might allow the poetry to guide the music. Writing the actual notes, the actual “composing”, took a little over two days. This was not so much out of a haste to finish the piece, but out of a necessity to express everything I needed to while the emotional impulse from the poem was still fresh. Through time and rereadings, I tend to reinterpret a poem many different ways, and it’s important for the unity of a piece that the understanding of the poetry does not change halfway through the composition. Thus, speed often creates a better-connected piece.

Come hear the premiere of "A Little Snow Was Here and There" on February 11, 7:30 p.m., at First Baptist Church (140 Laurier Ave W, Ottawa). 

Classical Ottawa interviews Aella members

“Aella is everything modern choir should be – innovative, technically precise, joyous, comforting and representative.”

— Classical Ottawa

Aella members Jennifer Berntson, Erin Joyce, Amy Reckling, and Teri Slade had the opportunity to speak with Andrew Riddles of Classical Ottawa, who put together a fantastic profile on the choir.  Head on over to Classical Ottawa to get the inside scoop on Ottawa's artistic community and be sure to check out our profile. We hope that you have as much fun reading it as we did chatting about Aella's vision and goals with Andrew!