Music and the Imagination: Thoughts on Sound Imaginarium

Google the word “imaginarium” and you’ll find an array of results: toys, toy stores, museums for children and grownups, aquariums, science centers, a digital animation studio, even a movie.  A noticeable sense of play runs through it all, and the message seems to say that stimulating the imagination is fun!  And since MCE members love to sing, and have a great deal of fun doing it, we’ve created Sound Imaginarium, a playful concert exploration, through choral sound, of the weird and wonderful world of the human imagination.

How does sound kindle the imagination?  All kinds of ways of course, although the marriage of words and music certainly helps trigger the mind’s eye.  Many of the numbers in our upcoming concert on March 10 combine music and text in image-generating ways.  Notice how Mashed Potato/Love Poem, by Paul Carey, piles up dreamy images of delectability simply through luscious melody, lingering tempos, and reiterated text; or how John Muhleisen’s Aversion To Carrots drives its point home through a jazzy style, clashing chords, the rich, reedy sound of the clarinet, and repeated words; or how the lilting melody and rhythm of Music is Beauty by Abraham Kaplan (my conducting teacher, by the way) underscore the lyrical rhythm of the poetry; or how the expansive melodies and robust organ accompaniment in Antiphon (Ralph Vaughan Williams) invoke images of a singing globe; or how the strong, block chords in William Mathias’s Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates match the strength of the “Lord mighty in battle.”

The linking of music and text is particularly a propos in the music of Bach, and his motet Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden (Praise the Lord, all Nations) bursts with word painting, the direct reflection of textual meaning through music.  You’ll need to follow the translation to catch the ascending lines that suggest heaven, the descending lines that suggest earth, the laughing lines that render the idea of “praise” almost visible, and much more, but doing so opens up a whole world of meaning, a rendering of the visible in the invisible, in Bach’s music.

Words are not always necessary; sometimes sound alone can stir the imagination.  Listen to the liquid beauty of Stephen Hatfield’s La Lluvia (The Rain) as it evokes the gentle flow of falling water, or the primal strains of Past Life Melodies by Sarah Hopkins, a piece that borrows from an ancient tribal technique, overtone singing, to transcend time and place.  Or discover what Bach may be conveying through his organ solo, Fugue à la Gigue.  Gigue is the French word for jig; let it tickle your imagination and “see” where this delightful dance may send the feet of your mind!  Your imagination may not need any spur as it takes in my own amusing rendition of the overture from Rossini’s opera William Tell!  Certain images are indelibly connected with it!

Sound can also help penetrate the overall sense of foreign texts.  The Mongolian folk poet of Naiman Sharag penned stunning images of the horse, so important in his culture, set by composer Se Enkhbayar against an almost ceaseless galloping rhythm redolent of Genghis Khan.  The French chanson La Guerre, by Clement Janequin, calls on an entire range of vocal sound effects to recreate the battle of Marignano in 1515, complete with fanciful explosions, zinging bow strings, trumpet calls, and the thudding hooves of charging war horses.  Perhaps the most “image-full” of all is the demanding, captivating Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, inspired by da Vinci’s sixteenth-century drawings of a flying machine.  In it composer Eric Whitacre captures Leonardo’s restless imagination and tormented dreams of flight through intense dissonances, vocal lines that suddenly sweep towards the sky, and agitated rhythms.  Leonardo’s dream ultimately remained only a dream, but music can transcend reality and carry the human imagination aloft.  And so, in the final section of the work, Leonardo’s dream takes wing, and he draws breath and “leaps.”  At this superlative moment the music soars, lighter than air, on text-less syllables of joy as the seductive voices of the heavens bear him off and away, over the horizon of his mind and out of sight, the wind whistling in his wings.  It is truly a celebration of “the triumph of a human being ascending in the dreaming of a mortal man,” as the text declares, in one man’s vision and in the magic of music.

All of these require the creative imagining of the singers as they reproduce, through the medium of the human voice, what is on the page, and of you in the audience as you listen.  So set your mind’s eye free, follow the sound, and see where it takes you.  It may, like Leonardo, carry you out and away, over the horizon, into imaginative flight.  And it will be fun!  After all, that’s what imaginariums are for.

Dr. Linda Gingrich
Artistic Director and Conductor
Master Chorus Eastside