Composer Shruthi Rajasekar. ReyMash photograph
Unlikely as it seems, Mitch McConnell coined a feminist rallying cry.
“Nevertheless, she persisted,” he said sarcastically of Elizabeth Warren, after she tried to read a letter by Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor.
Boston’s Seraphim Singers took that motto and extended it beyond the political squabbles at issue on that Feb. 2017 day. Conceived by music director Jennifer Lester, the Seraphim Singers adopted “Nevertheless, She Persisted” as a program theme, singing works that addressed the silencing of women’s voices across many fields.
Despite the clenched fist animating promotional posters, this music was less about rebellion than it was about longing.
Longing for safety. For refuge. For rescue—often in eternity. For identity, and recognition. For the love that comes with recognition.
A world embracing fairness and equality would not be silent. Lester, her singers, and many other ensembles that are ignoring slack programming paradigms, and performing more music by women composers, will make certain of that.
A commission from Shruthi Rajasekar, with contemporary compositions from Patricia Van Ness, Mari Esabel Valverde, Margaretha Christina de Jong, Kerry Andrew, Christina Whitten Thomas and Richard Clark, all introduced with a setting from Sulpitia Cesis’s sixteenth-century motets, graced the program in Newton’s Eliot Church Feb. 29.
Lester founded Seraphim Singers, now three dozen strong, in 1997. This was hardly the ensemble’s first program dedicated to women, and certainly not the first that addressed injustice with the timeless arguments found in the choral literature.“Visions of War, Peace, and Paradise,” “Oppression, Exile and Solidarity,” and “Women’s Perspectives” are among recent repertory themes.
The program began theatrically, with the choir processing to the sides of the audience and singing antiphonally. Cesis’s sometimes boisterous double-choir setting of Miriam leading a victory song, after the Israelites had safely crossed the parted Red Sea, sounded a defiant note—beginning with a triumph.
Aleatoric innovation highlighted Rajasekar’s setting, taken from the actual Congressional record, in this world premiere of her “Nevertheless.” Rajasekar (b. 1996), an Indian/American composer now living in London, let the singers enter at their discretion in sections—“bring something from your own past,” were her instructions—to create rippling, chaotic echo.
Andrew (b. 1978) did the same in “O lux beata Trinitas”—a striking sonic effect, in the typically boomy church space.
A reprise of Richard Clarke’s “A Woman of No Distinction”—commissioned last year by Seraphim Singers—also proved a highlight. This program examined women’s voices, not just music by women. Clarke’s re-imagining of the meeting at the well between Jesus and the Samaritan woman—from her perspective—fit appropriately.
A guest soloist, soprano Anna Ward, sang forcefully from the church lectern. Brimming with effortless lyricism, especially while singing above the ensemble, Ward brought the Samaritan woman’s own sense of acknowledgement and respect to life.
Valverde’s expansive “Border Lines”—an extended reflection on identity, and the arbitrary divisions of a map—offered a composer’s guide to setting long narrative with variety. “What is a map but a useless prison?” was one of many insights in the text. Cellist Paul Mattal—stepping out of the tenor ranks—added a fifth voice to the parts, an apt gesture of wordless inclusion.
Organist Louise Mundinger also provided accompaniment, along with two gentle solo interludes from a suite, Embertides, by Hilary Tann, which premiered in 2014.
Ensembles like Seraphim Singers not only sing about inclusion, they embody the spirit of it. Many of the texts emphasized the empowerment that comes from singing together.
Composer Edie Hill’s “There Is No Age,” from a poem by Jabez Van Cleef, closed the program. The librettist—a tenor in New Jersey’s Harmonium Choral Society, which commissioned the work in 2005—interviewed his choir-mates, trying to capture the feelings they had while singing.
“I have a flower in my heart,” the song culminates, “we name it harmony.”
Seraphim Singers performed “Nevertheless, She Persisted” on Feb. 29 at Eliot Church in Newton and on March 1 at First Church, Cambridge.