|
The Treble Maker
Author: Susanna Rodell; Staff
Writer
The News & Observer
May 26, 2002 Chapel Hill -- It's Monday night in the basement choir room
at University United Methodist Church, and Mary Lycan has stopped
her choir for perhaps the 40th time.
"That went so well at the top of page 6 that we got smug at
the bottom of page 7," she says. "Don't sing 'abuuuve.' That
pulls your jaw forward and creates so much tension. Sing 'above.'
Drop your jaw."
Lycan is preparing the Women's Voices Chorus for its annual
concert on Friday. The program is divided into seasons, and
winter is represented by a somber and eerie musical setting
of the Edna St. Vincent Millay poem "The Ballad of the Harp
Weaver," about a woman freezing to death as she weaves a blanket
for her son. The rhythms are tricky, and Lycan has had to stop
many times and get the singers to chant the words in the proper
timing, to set the shifting pattern in their memory. One singer
off, and the whole thing will sound messy.
But now they've progressed to spring, with another poem set
to music, e. e. cummings' "i thank You God."
"We're still sounding terribly determined," she says, standing
on a wooden step stool among the singers. "We need to get across
that things are going to get better after that poor woman freezes
to death." Some of the singers start whispering to each other.
Lycan shushes them.
She wants more life, a bigger sound. She quotes the next line
in the piece: "I who have died am alive again today."
"That's very good news," she points out. "Especially after
that poor woman froze to death." Giggles. "This is where we
thaw her out."
Fifty heads turn her way. She raises her hands, cues Deborah
Coclanis, her accompanist at the piano, and the voices burst
forth, filling the low-ceilinged room. The sound is utterly
glorious. This is what Lycan lives for: that sound, of adult
women in full throat. And even sweeter, both these pieces were
composed by women -- the Millay by Elinor Remick Warren and
the cummings by Gwyneth Walker.
Mary Lycan lives one of those charmed lives. Her passion for
women's choral music, a lifelong avocation, has also become
her livelihood. When she is not directing Women's Voices, the
chorus she founded nine years ago, she is tracking down and
publishing music for women's voices, much of it by women composers.
She serves a growing, and appreciative, clientele of choir directors
across the country. It is a niche market in the vast music business,
but one that Lycan fills nicely.
'The wonderful sound'
Lycan, who is 55, started singing early. A former Episcopal
choir girl and third-generation church musician who grew up
in New London, Conn., she studied music at Brown University,
then married a philosophy professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and followed his career to various places.
During a year in Palo Alto, Calif., she discovered the Peninsula
Women's Chorus and was "mesmerized by the wonderful sound."
She liked the all-female organization, she says, and "the fun
of a girls' night out."
Though she loved the group experience, she also had a disturbing
realization: "Here I am in this splendid women's community ...
and we're singing music that's all by guys." Maybe, she thought,
there just wasn't any good choral music written by women. But
she thought it was worth a look. She spent time in the music
library at Stanford University and made what would be a fateful
discovery.
"I found three Shakespeare songs for SSAA [first and second
soprano, first and second alto] by Amy Beach." Beach, a Bostonian
who lived from 1867 to 1944, is one of the best known of the
recently rediscovered American women composers. "I thought,
'Ooooh, this is cool.' " But the songs were not listed in any
of the published lists of music for women's voices, so Lycan
questioned her own judgment. Surely if the songs were that good,
she thought, they would already be acknowledged. "They were
crumbling old glee club copies published around 1895. I took
them out of the library and played them over and over on the
piano, and thought I'd lost my mind -- they seemed so good to
me," she says.
Still, she brought them back to Chapel Hill. And when she couldn't
find a choral group to continue the kind of singing she had
loved in California, she says, "I had to start my own." Lycan
founded Women's Voices in 1993, and it gave its first concert
in June 1994. For its first spring concert, Women's Voices performed
the Shakespeare songs. They have become one of the group's staples.
"They just love those Amy Beach songs," Lycan says.
With her own group to nourish, Lycan decided to get serious
about finding more music. Her search took her to the Library
of Congress, where she found a number of composers dating from
1890 to 1970. Back in Chapel Hill, Lycan told her old friend
Ida Reed about her research. Reed, whom she describes as "one
of my good witches," was a music librarian at UNC and told Lycan
she didn't need to keep making trips to Washington for her research.
UNC's music library, in fact, is the fifth-largest in the United
States. She also found she could get much of what she needed
via the Chapel Hill Public Library through interlibrary loans. So Lycan dived in. Among other things, she says, "I uncovered
this whole culture of women's clubs." In the middle of the 20th
century, they often had their own choirs. She found literature
about a national convention in Atlantic City in 1942 with a
massed women's choir of 1,000 voices. And there were women composing
for those voices. Lycan found their work and brought it to her
group to sing. Before long, word got around the choral community
grapevine that Lycan had found some great music. People started
calling her, asking for copies. They offered to pay. So in 1995,
a business called Treble Clef Music Press was born.
Lycan started with works that were in the public domain, eliminating
the hassle and expense of permissions and royalties. But "then
I started finding things that were still protected, and then
living composers started submitting things to me."
Now, seven years later, Lycan is riding a resurgence of interest
in women's music generally. One of the names in her catalog
is a 12th-century Benedictine abbess, Hildegard of Bingen, who
was an authority on medicine and botany as well as a musician
and composer. Ten years ago, only medieval scholars had heard
of her. Now a quick search on Amazon.com yields 81 recordings
of Hildegard's music.
Lycan's list contains about 100 titles; she adds about 20 to
it each year, "writing royalty checks to happy composers and
arrangers." And 38 of her titles have been recorded.
None of this is making Lycan -- or the composers -- rich. Sheet
music typically sells for a dollar or two per copy, and it may
be the most pirated form of literature through photocopy machines
in churches and schools. But modestly, Lycan's efforts have
paid off. Although she accounts for a very small niche in a
huge sheet-music publishing industry, Lycan's work is valued
and recognized. One of her best wholesale customers is the Musical
Source Inc., a supplier based in Washington.
"There's definitely a need," says its choral buyer, Nancy
Caporaso. "There are women's choruses all over the country.
A lot of the big publishers offer music written for two or three
different voicings. All of her stuff is originally written for
treble voices."
Children's choirs are also good customers. "Mary's catalog
is unique," says Jean Ashworth Bartle, the artistic director
of the Toronto Children's Chorus, a 300-voice group that includes
singers 8 to 16 and performs all over the world. "Everything
they put out is an A-plus."
Sara Lynn Baird, who directs the women's choir at Louisiana
State University, says of Lycan's efforts, "Mary has made available
things that are interesting and much higher quality than what
has been available in the past."
By and for women
As Lycan finds and distributes the music she loves, she's hoping
for a ripple effect: more respect for all-female ensembles.
Prejudice against women's music starts early, she says. It's
double-edged: Girls' choirs are often viewed as second-best
in schools, and neither mixed nor girls' choirs sing music composed
by women. As a veteran of girls' choirs, Lycan experienced this
strange double standard.
Traditionally, she says, "The select choir in a high school
was the mixed choir; the girls' choir was the loser choir."
That prejudice continues in college. Girls often outnumber boys
three to one at auditions. "Typically, the girls are better,"
Lycan says. "If you actually had a merit system, the top choir
would be the women's choir, and the second choir would be the
mixed choir."
Women's authorship is important, Lycan believes, beyond the
fact that women are capable of composing as well as men. Women
notice different things, and that is reflected in the music.
Lycan cites the "Harp Weaver" piece her group is working on.
In a passage that describes a woman rocking a baby in a rocking
chair, the piece calls for 6/8 meter and a very slow tempo.
Lycan didn't understand this, she says, until she tried out
several rocking chairs and found the meter perfectly reflected
their rhythm. "How else would you know the tempo of a rocking
chair?" she asks.
Confining herself to this music narrows her horizons a bit,
but Lycan can live with that. "I have some regrets that I will
never conduct the [Bach] B Minor Mass. But I don't have anything
particularly new to say about that."
In the church basement with 50 women, some with gray hair,
some in teenage braids, Lycan has plenty to say. For one thing,
the altos are too loud. Stop trying so hard, she tells them.
"It's so easy to sing that note. You don't have to push the
piano through the transom."
They start again: "I who have died am alive again today ..."
Their voices form a big, joyful wind. The low ceiling seems
to vibrate.
Nothing is missing.
Copyright 2002 by The News & Observer Pub. Co.
Reprinted by permission of The News &
Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina.
|
