Critical Reviews of the Verdi Requiem

As I once wrote elsewhere, compliments from the critics are rarely the external validation our chorus seeks – the applause of the audience is sufficient reward, and in the end we sing to scratch our own creative itches, to know we had a hand in making the music come alive.  That said, I’ve found it helpful to review the reviews and weigh the comments of the critics against my own experiences.  These days we typically get comments from three publications:

Jeremy Eichler of the Globe was unusually complimentary and keenly accurate in his observations, impressed by Gatti’s fluid, poised conducting, and attention to musical details:

From the hushed opening bars, Gatti drew out long singing lines from the orchestra, while also clearly prizing textural and rhythmic clarity. He showed a knack for organic tempo choices and transitions that captured the full drama and, at times, fury of this remarkable score. The same might be said of his conducting of the Tanglewood Chorus, which sang superbly, its performance in the Dies Irae duly terrifying yet free of stridency, its Sanctus measured with a welcome dignified gait[...]  The BSO as a whole seemed alert and highly responsive to Gatti’s direction.

I agree with him calling out the responsiveness of the orchestra to the “organic tempo choices”–I’d call Gatti’s frequent rubato, dramatic fermata, and fluidity the defining factor of his time on the podium.  I love Eichler’s observations on the Sanctus, because it means we delivered on Gatti’s previous direction to sing it “with respect.”  It’s satisfying to get that independent validation of our ability to communicate something so intangible.

Eichler also correctly noted that the quartet was “capable but uneven,” preferring the mezzo’s voice the most, but complimenting the female Agnus Dei duet.  Amusingly, he professed confusion over our leaping to our feet several times for our big forte interruptions–and the next night, we cut one of those leaps to make things a little less frantic.  He wasn’t the only one who saw it as a problem.

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Brian Jones wrote up our Friday performance in the Boston Music Intelligencer, and almost loved it:  ”In retrospect, this was a performance to admire in so many ways that I wish I could say I was as deeply moved as one hopes to be with this splendid music.”  On top of his praise for the soloists he lobbed fair criticisms about the soprano’s odd vowel modifications and the bass’s lack of power.  And it’s clear he noted the responsiveness in dynamics, tone, and tempo between us and the maestro:

His sensitive reading of the score brought forth many lucid and musical moments, and great credit goes to the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for just the right hushed sound here,  or magnificent triumph there. The utter security of singing from memory makes the chorus’s contribution even more significant. Maestro Gatti also conducted without a score.

[...]The other movements were mostly beautiful, and handled with the appropriate degree of intensity and reflection. Gatti made perfect sense of the famous opening bars, with their legendary, hushed iterations of “Re-qui-em,”, and his use of rubato was appropriate and compelling. (One interesting touch in the second movement was as the chorus actually spoke the words “quantus tremor” (“how great a terror”): I had never heard that effect before, and it worked. The Offertorio, Sanctus and Agnus Dei were given much better tempos, although orchestra, chorus and soloists occasionally threatened to slip off the tracks. Several expressive moments in the Lux Aeterna went by with little recognition, but the final movement (“Libera Me”) was the highlight of the evening, and beautifully conceived.

However, noticing them does not mean approving of them.  Despite his praise above, overall he did not seem to care for Gatti’s frequent tempo shifts:

The famous requiems of Verdi, Mozart, Brahms, Faure and a few others present interesting interpretive challenges: so many musicians and listeners are familiar with them that conductors often feel the need to “leave their mark” in ways which sometimes stretch and even snap the threads of musical line for which these works are justifiably noted. Gatti’s approach was most successful in all the shorter movements, but in the second, long movement his tendency to take extra time with breaks in the music, as well as his tempo in the famous “Dies Irae” music (too slow to achieve the gripping drama of those repeated notes and triplets), made the long second movement seem even longer than should have been the case. Many of the numerous sections of this movement were handsomely dealt with, but the overall architecture and sense of line suffered.

I’ve noticed many reviewers similarly criticize an interpretation of a performance if it didn’t match their own favorite version.  While I understand Jones’s commentary on “activist conductors,” I’m pretty sure Gatti’s extra time was borne not out of an egotistic desire to claim the piece as his own, but rather out of a true love for the music and how he conceives it.  I had never heard the Dies Irae that deliberate myself, but while Jones said it sacrifices the gripping drama, I’d say it’s a welcome trade off that allows the internal lines to sing through–it  creates an overall effect that’s even more terrifying than bulldozing through the whole thing.

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Finally, David Wright spoke of our opening night performance at Boston Classical Review.  I hesitate to even include him, given his inexplicably contrarian review of our Brahms Requiem, but he has occasionally given passable commentary.  He continues with his usual questionable, attack-filled observations again, suggesting that we lacked diction and rhythmic drive in the Sanctus, claiming the chorus “sounded more like a crowd scene than a chamber choir,” and later calling us “a firm, unobtrusive presence in its supporting role.”   I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s referring to passages where we sing under the soloists.  That said, he did praise our “gusto” for the Dies Irae and the Lacrymosa, and I’d say he was spot on in his observations of the soloists’ strengths and weaknesses individually and as a quartet.  He also wrote well of Gatti’s stewardship:

Throughout the evening, Daniele Gatti’s firm hand could be felt shaping every aspect of the performance, from the almost inaudible opening bars to the soft, measureless chanting of Libera me at the close, and all the high drama in between.

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I like the philosophy that “Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth.”  The commonalities in all three reviews confirm that this was truly a marvelous performance, distinguished by Gatti’s fluid direction, a challenged but still enjoyable quartet of soloists, and some of the chorus’s most attentive, dedicated singing.  Bravo all, and let’s do it again for Andris Nelsons in the summer!

Self-Review: Verdi Requiem Opening Night

Our opening night performance was everything we wanted it to be: powerful, emotional, and expressive.  It was a night to be quite proud of.

The chorus achieved everything we set out to do — we stayed locked in on Maestro Gatti’s direction the whole time.  We got that cupa hollowness in the beginning.  We expanded ourselves as instruments to get the Hall-shattering triple-f for the Dies Irae.  We made the soft parts very personal to us.  We delivered and fulfilled the vision in Maestro’s head.

Some moments really gave me chills.  The climactic crescendo of the Tuba mirum, for instance, delivered on its promise of the trumpet-scattering tombs.  The Sanctus double fugue was tidy and, yes, respectful, and the final fugue was forcefully delivered with authority.  And for some reason, the second dona eis requiem verse of the fifth movement really hit home.  It felt like the most intimate, genuine supplication  to the heavens, a prayer begging for acknowledgement.

Maestro Gatti had even more surprises for us in the performance — we had to stay super-focused on him the entire time to watch for the occasional rubato or accelerando so we could stay with him.  He put in yet even more of these for dramatic effect — he was so physically and emotionally invested in communicating to us what he wanted that his every move had meaning.  As such, we were able to respond to a finger raise as much as a ginormous punch into the air.   He was not shy in reminding us of his requests from rehearsals and coaching us further mid-performance.  I hadn’t realized that he had the entire score memorized and could therefore conduct from the podium with the same attention and freedom to react that we had.  What a difference it made.

What, if anything, could be criticized?  Afterwards, a chorister jokingly referred to “the five soloists on stage,” meaning that Maestro Gatti was so demonstrative up there that he may have been stealing the show.  Would you believe he even shushed the soloists at one point, because they weren’t heeding his direction to sing softly fast enough?  He had a lot of grunts and exhales and even faint singing at a few points.  Some might find all that distracting; I found it endearing.

But there’s always room for improvement.  I don’t think we achieved some of the  triple-p moments that we did in rehearsal — we can touch on some of those passages even more gently to create a more sacred space.  I personally had a little mini-solo when I accidentally tried to double a tenor part; a relic of a previous performance with another crew that had twice as many basses as tenors.  I’m sure we’ll get a few minor adjustments and reminders at tonight’s warmup.  Other than that, however, I think we nailed it, and for the remaining performances I would only hope to commit even further to the piece so we can stay focused on creating another winning night.

You can’t go wrong with the Verdi Requiem; it’s a crowd pleaser any night, with any chorus, in any venue.  But the raucous applause and triple-bow standing ovation told me that the audience felt just as strongly that what they had witnessed was something special.

Ready for Verdi Requiem Tonight

Tonight is opening night, and it’s not just the chorus that’s excited. I’ve never heard the orchestra stamp their feet in approval at our choral singing except on rare occasions, and certainly never FOUR TIMES during a rehearsal stretch. But they did yesterday, to show just how much of a difference some of Maestro Gatti’s adjustments had created.

Once again, Gatti was very specific in what he wants, both from the orchestra and from us. He fixes things you didn’t know were broken. Everyone around me was raving about his imagery and musicality and how he brings out lines you didn’t know were there. He is extremely deliberate in many of his tempos, sometimes slower than you might expect, but not uncomfortably so. The result is some magical moments–and not just from the powerful fortes.

A few more tricks I captured:

• He chided all of us (especially tenors, with some of their soaring lines) on occasion for singing “too heroically.” Nothing heroic to see in a requiem mass.
• The Rex Tremandae now starts strong but then he has us pull back and try to be fearful in our decrescendo.
• A few times the chorus had this intimate delicate sound but the orchestra was sawing along. They matched our dynamics and tone but not our character. His direction to them? “Play carefully.” They did, and it made a difference. He often points to an instrument as if to say to us “match THAT” or points to us to say the same to the orchestra.
• For the Lacrymosa, he asked the lower voices to make it very personal with a rubato on the accent. The effect is more profound.
• We couldn’t get quiet enough for him on the Pie Jesu ending to the 2nd movement. So he asked every other person to hum. Weird but it works.
• All tremolos are not created equal. He’s asked the strings for variations in speed and openness depending on whether he wants tension, floating, or the glowing light of the lux aeterna.
• Gatti frequently varies his tempo, almost but not quite melodramatically. Rubato abounds, and we are always looking at him to watch out for sudden accelerations or pauses to heighten the musical moment. It’s never the same tempo; he’s very in the moment. He has pre-inserted some of those, like for the intentionally-not-in-tempo antiphonal trumpets. It’s heavy drama by playing with the listener’s expectations.

The soloists are all good, but the tenor is exceptional. His ingemisco may be my favorite ever. Reviewers may find faults with the others. Maestro is very hands on with their tempo and dynamic balance to keep them unified but expressive. I’ve never heard many of these solo parts sung with such fluid tempi and dynamic range, creating a tenderness where I didn’t know it existed. Likewise the orchestra achieves some great effects–I could just eat up the brass, the bassoon and flute solo moments, and the strings’ consistency.

At the end of today’s rehearsal we were looking at each other saying good lord, that was amazing, can we do it again three times? Some opening nights we will go in a little worried. My worry this time is preserving our voices through all three concerts.

The one thing still missing for me, personally, is that I haven’t invested in the singing emotionally yet. I admit I’ve been keeping that component at a distance to make sure I have the technical down right. I suspect others in the chorus are doing the same. So the moment of truth will be tonight. Can we make every dona eis requiem a pleading prayer? Can we make the king’s majesty fearful and awe inspiring? Can we be terrified? Terrifying? Desperate? Hopeful? At peace? I think the best is yet to come.

The Finer Points of Achieving Gatti’s Verdi Vision

Some of the coaching and techniques that Maestro Gatti suggested were new to me.  Here are the ones that stood out:

• “Sing for yourself.”  That was his direction to achieve the dynamics for some of the triple-p and quadruple-p passages.  I’ve often heard to sing to the back wall of the hall for loud passages, but this was great for singing softly.
• “Dües Ürae.”  To achieve the darker color he wanted, Gatti told us to sing the /i/ in some of our quieter Dies Irae interjections as a /ü/  .It sure surprised me how well this worked.  After all, a darker color is often achieved by moving your lips forward, and to make an /ü/ you basically make an /i/ with your lips pursed like an /o/.  He also had the sopranos modify the /i/ vowel to an /a/ for their descending chromatic passage, because otherwise, “it sounds like a mosquito.”
• “Saleva me.”  How many syllables in “Salva” ?  Apparently the answer is three.  Gatti wants the /l/ in salva so prominent that we’re actually putting a shadow vowel in after it to promote it.  This is quite noticeable on the cascading salva me across the chorus toward the end of the second movement.  Gatti got a laugh telling us to sound like Pavarotti and then imitating him, but I must say, it totally makes you sound like you’re a native Italian with that vowel in there.
• Quantus tremor.  The Quantus tremor passage in the piece occurs right before the antiphonal trumpets and the rest of the brass come crashing in for the climactic Tuba mirum.  In past performances, the chorus I’ve been in has been told to sing it sotto voce, with almost no tone at all, giving it this creepy foreboding sense of wonder and doom.  Great.  Well, Gatti did something amazing with it.  He has the basses quiet but with normal intonation… the tenors with half-intonation… and the altos and sopranos just whisper the words with no intonation.  Then as the passage progresses the tenors bring in more intonation and the ladies step up to half-intonation.  The result is a bottom-heavy, darker, more dramatic effect that had us all looking at each other and nodding our heads to acknowledge how well that worked.
• Respect the Sanctus.  The Sanctus fourth movement is an oddity in the piece.  Double chorus, cascading fugue-like entrances,  trumpets blaring a triumphant C, dancing strings, bouncy passages–it’s all very unlike the somber character of the rest of the piece.  I’ve always just sung it as a hectic madcap race to the ending with some beautiful transitional passages in the middle.  Usually the problem is just being heard above the orchestra.  Well, Maestro Gatti’s spin on that passage is to “sing it with respect.”  I like it — it keeps your enthusiasm in check so you don’t feel like a kid running around in church during a funeral.  I think communicating that respect will come through to the audience.  (We’ll see, once we add the orchestra and the battle for audibility begins.)
• Reining in the sopranos.  At the quiet point of the Sanctus, the first chorus holds beautiful sustained chords while the second chorus interjects with prolonged Hosannas.  The sopranos tend to dominate this chord simply because of the range of their notes.  He hammered them a few time to sneak up on the note and barely articulate it so that their notes wouldn’t dominate the rest of the parts by virtue of their position in their passaggio.
• No misterioso.  We started singing through the piece with that first hushed re-qui-em, and Gatti came back to that immediately after our first minute of sing through.  At the time, I thought we had just the right air of mystery and wonder that I’ve put into those notes in the past.  No, no misterioso, he said.  He wants these parts to be very reflective, very internalized, full of sorrowness and sighing.  He told us to get rid of the big rolled R that would normally go there, calling it out of style.
• Sits and stands.  Maestro Gatti destroyed our sit and stand schedule, which called for us staying up for most of the first two movements, sitting only for the third and sixth movements which are all solo.  No, he wants the more dramatic visual of us leaping up one beat before our big Dies irae reprises and the Rex tremendae majestatis entrance.  We practiced it a few times.  It’s not very natural or conductive for singing dolcissimo, but fortunately none of those passages call for that — they’re all harsh, coarse entrances that favor power over finesse.

Whether you’re coming to hear us this week, or a connoisseur of Verdi, or  performing it yourself in the future, you’ll probably appreciate these touches and how they can shape the chorus for this piece.

Deeper and Deeper into a Colorful Verdi

I’m often amazed at how there’s always something more to get out of a piece, even one that I’m already intimately familiar with like the Verdi Requiem.

First, let’s take the two rehearsals with John Oliver.  In my last post, I talked about how we had focused on the technical aspects of singing the piece under Bill Cutter’s tutelage.  The difference when John stepped up to the podium and began conducting was palpable.  It was immediately clear that we all were doing some lazy singing–or at least lazy interpreting–because John was immediately asking for things just by the way he conducted, and we were able to deliver them.  Even then, though John’s rehearsals were focused on tactical concerns… but it was tactical approaches to getting the emotion into the piece.  Pause here and here…  put a break before this subito piano so that the audience can hear the dynamic jump and the forte passage preceding it doesn’t run over the change.  There’s usually a stentando here, but watch the conductor to find out how he observes it.   That sort of thing.

But when Maestro Gatti took the podium last night, we went a level even deeper, focused a lot on color.  Color is a strange musical term; defined only as the quality of the tone, but it’s so weird to use a visual concept for an audio one–and talking about a “darker” color doesn’t help!  But Gatti made us start several passages over and over again until we got the color just the way he wanted it.  As one bass commented to me on the way back to the rehearsal room, “It’s clear he hears the piece a certain way in his head, and he won’t stop until we match that.”

By the end of Maestro Gatti’s piano rehearsal on Monday night, we had a very specific version of the Verdi Requiem in our heads.  One that is not misterioso (which is how I’m used to singing the Verdi), but instead full of a lingering regret and sorrow.  I think he used the word culpa — as in “sorry” — to describe how we should be singing from the very opening notes.  [Edit: it was, in fact, cupo -- meaning dark, somber.] He modified vowels to achieve a certain darkness, often chiding us for very open /i/ and /e/ sounds which came across as too happy or too childlike.  He migrated the triumphant sounding Sanctus movement away from its celebratory nature into one of respect.  He asked for sharp differences in legato and staccato notes to get combinations of contrasting textures.  At one point he reined in the sopranos because their excellently sung high notes were piercing through the rest of the chorus–I didn’t truly notice it until he fixed it.  He was very clear and insightful in his tempi choices.  He would make the text mean something, asking for the repeated request dona (“give [them]“) to be more prayerful and pleading, for instance.  And he did a few really interesting modifications to how we sang as an ensemble to get some magical effects, which I’ll detail in my next post for people familiar with the piece.

We had heard that Gatti had a reputation for demanding precision.  While we saw some of that last night, it wasn’t so much a demand but a promise.  Each one of the Verdi performances I’ve been involved in with other choruses has had a distinct flavor.  I’m very much looking forward to this one!

Lost: Verdi’s Soul

Someone asked on Quora recently whether a robot could perform music as well as a human. What was the difference?

My answer to that question is here, but I was reminded more specifically about this problem after two Verdi rehearsals with Bill Cutter, both focused on notes, rhythm, and diction. People were worried that those rehearsals would be interminable, as Bill has a reputation for not letting anyone get away with lazy singing, doing passages over and over if they are too sloppy for his liking. But the rehearsals were fairly speedy. Even with an impressive number of singers new to the piece, we know the notes.

We know the notes, but we don’t know the soul.

You see, Verdi composes with stereotypical Italian exaggeration (four f’s? Four p’s? Really?). There are moments of extreme dramatic flourish, stuff that goes beyond what’s on the page. It’s like knowing you have to swing those Pops triplets. There are moments of magnificent terror, or of triumph, or of the caress of a caring mother.  A full gamut of emotions that you have to really inhabit to perform the piece.

What surprised me is how far away our chorus is from that right now.  We just don’t feel this yet. We sang some passages straight, like the Libera me chorus opening, when they desperately needed rubato. I’d say that’s due to Bill’s focus on notes and rhythm except he didn’t conduct it (“senza misura“) and we just don’t have the rhythm in our brains yet. LI-berame DO-mine de morte ae-TER-na in DI-e IL-la tre-MEN-da. Nope. Not there.  When I sang this with John Oliver 20 years ago in college, he told us to sing that part like “The little old ladies muttering as they kneel in the corner by the candles at church, desperately praying to try and still make it to heaven.” Still one of my favorite images from him.

Our first rehearsal with John Oliver (some might say our first real rehearsal) is tonight, Tuesday. I’m anxiously hoping to sing his Verdi Requiem just like I sang his Brahms Requiem. I want us to sound scared. This piece needs us to be pleading and begging to be saved. It must be dark and ominous. It must be melodramatic, but it’s without irony–we believe the melodrama.  Some of it is technical notes, some of it is conducting, some of it is sharing that vision of what we’re trying to communicate with this piece.  We’ll get that tonight, and then Maestro Gatti will reshape it again to his liking come next week at the piano rehearsal.

Staying musically engaged during a hiatus

It’s been ages since I posted here — namely because I had a long spell without any official singing gigs.  There were only three summer concert weekends with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus this year — I had conflicts with two of them, and I ceded the third to my wife (you know, the one whose career is singing… remember, I’m Just Another Bass.)  Fortunately, Holiday Pops is coming up to exercise my vocal chords, and even more fortunately, I’m on the roster for one of my favorite pieces, the Verdi Requiem, this January.

But that meant almost 7 months without being on the stage of Symphony Hall or the Koussevitzky Shed.  When I skip any activity for even a few months, my competency decays.  How can I keep up my singing with no singing goal?  The obvious answer is to take some more lessons, but that’s not sustainable on my pocketbook.  It’s tough, but I’ve found a few activities to help fill the gap.

I had the pleasure of singing with my wife’s church choir for their “music Sunday” in June.  They picked 4 choral pieces and several arias from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, assembled a small (but, it turns out, quite impressive) band together of some strings and woodwinds to cover the orchestral parts, and gathered as many occasional singers from the congregation as possible to put it together in a night of practice.  It’d be false modesty if I told you I wasn’t the strongest bass singer there, especially having sung Elijah before.  But the group was pleasantly balanced and it was a joy to sing.  And I, for one, was happy to get some more classical singing in a formal environment that gave me something to practice.

The other interesting diversion which occupied several months of my time was preparing for Otherworld.  Otherworld is hard to describe succinctly; it’s a non-profit group whose goal is to give ordinary people extraordinary adventures.  I’ve been part of the group for 15 events across some 20 years.  Each event is a massive production held at a 4H camp in Connecticut.  How massive?  Around 80 staff members host about 55 participants in an adventure weekend as they become the heroes of an intricately laid out story.  It’s like walking into a book, or finding yourself an actor in one of those dinner theaters.

In any case, Otherworld has a significant amount of music in it.  There’s a part where singers hidden in the woods gently sing a Taize melody to make a moment feel magical.  There’s a Big Musical Number (think an Elvis movie or Broadway musical, where in the middle of a scene suddenly people break out into song).  This year there was a Barbershop Quartet–I wish I could tell you WHY there was a Barbershop Quartet, but it would involve too many spoilers for the weekend should you ever decide to come (and you should!).  And there was a part where carolers show up and sing, except they’re singing for a holiday that doesn’t exist in our world (a cross between Thanksgiving and Christmas.)

I had the distinct pleasure of being involved in all four of these musical singing endeavors.  While the Taize had been done in past events, the other three were brand new.  I would arrange a medley of Bob Dylan’s Quinn the Eskimo and the 70′s hit Lay a Little Lovin’ On Me, for a group of singers who wouldn’t all be in the same place together until the day of the event.  I worked with three other singers remotely to identify Barbershop songs that we could learn independently and then blend together, again on the day of the event.  And, I had to compose a short holiday carol.  Each of these with a different group of people on staff.

Sound like a nightmare?  Well, the whole experience was quite exhilarating!

While I enjoy arranging music, having done so for past Otherworld events and for a few weddings, it’s by no means my forte–I’ve seen so many others who can arrange music faster and better than I can.  I probably spent about 15-20 hours of time listening to recordings of the music, first casually during commutes, and then more intensely while trying to map out the song and transfer it into Finale the way I was hearing it.  Getting the transitions in the medley was tricky but I was super-excited when I figured out a way to musically handle it.  I did some test recordings of just my voice on all parts to get a sense of whether my arrangement was working.  I switched midway through from all-male back to a mixed chorus.  Then getting the music into the computer and onto paper for the 8 of us I had singing, and making practice recordings where I would delete some of the parts so people could listen to it on their own.  We then got 5 of us who were local into one place to rehearse, and recorded THAT for distribution and practice… overall it was probably a 50 hour labor of love… and it was all for about 3 minutes during the weekend.  The best part?  It came out PERFECTLY.

The Barbershop Quartet was equally challenging.  Having never sung Barbershop before, I received some tutelage from fellow staffer Chris Reichert, whose “Notable Ring” quartet in Austin has won awards in a few regional contests. He recommended some tags, procured some music and learning tracks (which are awesome — left side, just your part; right side, other three parts), and coached all of us about the style: less vibrato, aiming for a ‘ringing’ on sustained chords, emphasizing the ‘sour’ notes whose dissonances drive the music forward, even such logistics as gathering together to find your opening pitch then spreading into a circle and nailing it.  We were worried because when we first got together in person to practice, we discovered that it’s harder to sing your part with three other people who are also trying to learn their part, as opposed to a recording of three solid singers on a learning track.  But with Chris’s coaching, we made it first to barely passable, then quite acceptable, and finally to knock-people’s-socks-off when we performed.  To untrained singers, we were amazing.  But even singers (and at least one participant who sang barbershop), we were top-notch.  Another case where hours put into a labor of love paid off handsomely, even though we were only “on  stage” for a few hours of episodic singing.

The holiday carol required much fewer hours, more of them spent thinking than composing or practicing.  I needed something that sounded Christmas-y but wasn’t a known carol, and that could be learned by a group of about 12 singers with mixed levels of experience singing — just as you might have at a holiday gathering.  For that reason, I quickly ruled out part-singing.  I ended up taking “Joy to the World” and flipping the melody upside down.  That way, the rhythm was known to the singers, the chords (if there were any) would echo other carols, and the tune would sound vaguely familiar to listeners.  I sang it for a group of friends and it had the desired effect.  So we printed up some sheet music and made little caroling books.  I recorded it on the piano and recorded me singing it, and got a copy to everyone in the makeshift chorus.  The only problem?  The singers were too good!  (The scene called for them getting interrupted toward the end of the chorus by a boorish character who thought they weren’t doing a good job, which leads to another character confronting him, and… well, that’s a story for another time.)

All in all, it’s amazing how busy you can make yourself musically if you look for ways to fill the gap.  And now — onto Holiday Pops and the Verdi Requiem!  The Verdi is going to be AWESOME!