Skylark Vocal Ensemble. Sasha Greenhalgh photograph
Choose some fairy tales. Find music to accompany the fairy tales. Then write more music to synchronize it all.
Wait, what? Write more music?
“At first people were really skeptical,” says Matthew Guard. “It was kind of off the wall.”
He’s talking about his Skylark Vocal Ensemble, and their new program and recording “Once Upon a Time.” To accompany a libretto by storyteller Sarah Walker, Guard chose existing choral works by Poulenc, Rautavaara, Lauridsen, Vaughan Williams, and Bernstein and others.
Going a step further, he then asked composer Benedict Sheehan to write segue music, linking everything together.
“It’s a tough ask for a composer, to let your own voice play a secondary role,” Guard says of Sheehan’s work. “He did an amazing job of looking at the existing music, and finding a way to pick out material and weave it together.”
The resulting program has just been recorded on (available at skylarkensemble.org), and Skylark will sing the complete settings during a short tour. A series of concerts stretching from Georgia to New York to Boston will culminate in Newburyport on Feb. 16, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Following two Grammy nominations, and six years of audience-building on Cape Cod, in MetroWest and on the North Shore—not to mention run-outs to New York, Washington and internationally—Guard “was looking for different concepts” for his a cappella ensemble.
“I thought of Sarah Walker immediately,” he says. “We had made a program three or four years ago, and I thought this storytelling idea was a good one.” So “Once Upon a Time” came to be.
Walker and Guard worked on two fairy tales from original versions—Snow White (the Brothers Grimm), and the Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen). Each takes up half the program.
“Then I met Benedict at a conducting workshop,” Guard says. “He loved the whole idea, and asked if he could try to write some music to stitch it all together.”
So the complete program emerged. Walker reads her libretto, over Sheehan’s wordless “story score,” as Guard puts it. Skylark sings the chosen musical selections in between.
Sheehan’s links—taking one setting and transforming that material, while Walker reads her libretto—ranges from austere to hair-raising.
“It accompanies the dialogue—kind of like a movie score would,” Guard says. “Benedict had to work with what was given. Things like ‘We’re here in F minor, and we have to get to E minor.’ It’s really so hard, to get an audience to stay with it, and give the piece an emotional context as well.”
It works brilliantly though, the stories presenting a seamless arc, while the music deepens the emotional drama.
“The audience doesn’t really need to follow the libretto the whole time,” Guard says. “Just listen, and allow the music to tell the story.”
This is indeed your grandparent’s Snow White and Little Mermaid. “It’s definitely not the Disney version of these stories,” Guard says. “At the end of ‘Snow White’ the queen gets red hot shoes and dances till she dies. In the ‘Little Mermaid’ she has to kill the prince or sacrifice herself. They’re bizarre and more graphic, and a lot more complicated.”
The New York program takes place at the Morgan Library and Museum—“where they have actual original manuscripts of these stories,” Guard says. At the Chestnut Hill program, popular arts critic Joyce Kulhawik serves as host, and interviews the artists during intermission.
Skylark Vocal Ensemble performs music from their latest release, “Once Upon a Time,” on Sunday, Feb. 16 at 4:00 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Newburyport. There are additional performances in New York (13th) and in Chestnut Hill ((15th). Visit skylarkensemble.org.