THE AEGEAN CENTER FOR THE FINE ARTS PRESENTS ITS WINTER VOCAL CONCERTS

The singing of classical music is not for everyone. The first important requirement is a good voice and equally good ears.  The voice can be trained; with perseverance a young singer can learn the breathing techniques which support the sound in the body, the articulation of vowels and consonants which give a sparkle to the pronunciation, and the development of

the resonance which makes the voice rich and warm. But even that does not suffice if one wants to sing solo songs. There must be a musicality with which the singer turns each phrase into an emotional gesture all his/her own. One must have a feeling for literature, a sense of the drama of the important words in the text, a sensitivity to the atmosphere of the music. And still we have not finished the list of important requirements; a singer must develop discipline. It demands much self-control to repeat exercises time and again, aspiring to a mastery of ones instrument so that the voice is used in service of the message, the implication of  the words, the ambience of the emotions.

And yet there are singers at the Aegean Center who are capable of this extreme discipline in order to express themselves in that most ephemeral of art forms, music.

THE VOCAL ENSEMBLE

The Vocal Ensemble will perform this week with a program of music inspired by spiritual and philosophical texts. Maestro Orfeas John Munsey has chosen a program of music from Greece, Russia, Estonia, Hungary, Belgium, Germany, England and the United States. There will be some absolute masterpieces like the Bach fugue Psallite Deo Nostro from the Magnificat and the Hymn to the Virgin by Rachmaninoff as well as a surprising arrangement of Arvo Paert’s piano composition Fuer Alina for a cappella voices.

The singers of the Vocal Ensemble this season are Nicola Pasterfield, Caroline Goddard, Apollonia Ikonomou, Petra Kampman, Brigitte Karavia, Lily Turmelle, Jane Morris Pack, Julia Robinson, Konstantina Andreakou, Jun Pierre Shiozawa, Terrence Mortimer and Benjamin Voisine-Addis

The Vocal Ensemble will perform Wednesday 5 December at the Agios Giorgios Catholic Church in Naousa and Saturday and Sunday 8 and 9 December at the Agios Antonios Catholic Church in Paroikia. All concerts are at 20:30 hours and admission is free of charge.

-Orfeas John Munsey

Student Post: Maggie Bell

Maggie Bell and Emily Ogelsby

I am from outside of Cleveland, Ohio and I am a junior from Dartmouth College majoring in Classical Studies and European History. After spending the past calendar year with a full academic load, I chose to take the fall quarter off from school and try something completely new. The Aegean Center Italy & Greece program gives me the opportunity to combine my current academic interests with the fine arts, which I have not studied since high school. I am taking courses in digital photography, basic camera usage, photo history, Greek art history, Greek literature, Greek language, and Greek dancing.

Throughout high school and college I have been involved in vocal performance in school choruses, church choirs, and an all female a cappella group. I am particularly lucky here and get to continue singing this fall with the Aegean Center Vocal Ensemble. The Vocal Ensemble is comprised of five students and nine Paros residents. While we were in Italy, Orfeas, the Ensemble’s director, worked with the new students on some of the basic technique we would need once we joined the rest of the ensemble in Greece. These lessons included work on vowel pronunciation, breathing technique, and blending our sound.

The Ensemble practices twice a week, for two and a half hours at a time, preparing our repertoire for the winter concert. During the second week of December, we will perform our concert for the public once in Naoussa and twice in Paroikia. The program includes four Medieval church songs, seven French Renaissance court songs, and three contemporary pieces. We are expected to learn the basics of our music on our own so that we do not waste rehearsal time reviewing basic intervals and parts.

Each rehearsal begins with a 30-minute warm up of physical and vocal exercises. These often focus on more than just our pitch, such as our ability to blend as a group and make one, uniform sound. We then fine tune our songs, focusing on dynamics (when to sing louder vs more softly) and on memorizing. Our Wednesday rehearsals are spent doing run-thrus of the entire concert. It has been great to hear not just the group pieces, but the many solos, duets and trios that are part of the repertoire. Another student, Emily Oglesby, and I are performing a French Renaissance court song as a duet, and singing it in front of the group each week will hopefully help me get all the nervousness out of my system before December.

The Vocal Ensemble is definitely a lot of work, but the atmosphere of rehearsals is also a lot of fun, and not simply intense. It is a great opportunity to meet and interact with more Paros residents then we might otherwise, and there is always some time during rehearsal to laugh at something ridiculous that someone says or does. The Ensemble is a great way to work toward a final product that is very different from what we are producing with our studio work, and I can not wait to see, or rather hear, how all of our hard work pays off at the concerts.