The music the chamber choir The Thirteen sings has the power to reach across 500 years and grab the
listener’s attention.
The music may use religious texts but it is also a vehicle for sensuality.
Those qualities will be on display when The Thirteen opens the Festival Series at Bowling Green State
University with a concert Monday at 8 p.m. in Kobacker Hall at the Moore Musical Arts Center on campus.
Tickets are $15 and $5 for BGSU students. Call 419-372-8171. The Thirteen will also perform on Tuesday
at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Perrysburg as part of the St. Tim’s Discovers series.
Matthew Robertson, who conducts the 12-member choir and serves as musical director, said the program
reflects the ensemble’s current focus on early English repertoire from the 16th century.
The program opens with "Salve Regina" by William Cornysh (either the father or son, scholars
are not sure).
It is striking, Robertson said, in how "new and daring it comes across." It may very well be
the "hardest piece of music written in the Renaissance."
The centerpiece of the concert is the mass that uses the popular tune "The Western Wynde" as
its basis. The tune repeats throughout the choir, sung by the sopranos, tenors and basses.
It represents how though ostensively a religious piece, secular ideas infiltrate the music.
The popular tune tells of a man, perhaps a sailor at sea, wishing for the western wind to blow him home
to the woman he loves.
While Taverner uses the melody to support the text of the mass, the familiar tale lingers "in my
mind’s eye," Robertson said.
The Thirteen was founded in 2012. A number of the singers knew each other from Westminster Choir College
in New Jersey. Robertson said the singers loved the "stunning Renaissance polyphony," yet no
ensemble specialized in performing it.
As the ensemble grew more active with recordings and touring up to eight weeks of a year, the personnel
changed, he said. Now singers hail from all over. Each has a busy individual career as soloists and
members of other ensembles.
"Renaissance choral music is the closest choral music gets to absolute music," the conductor
said. "You see the composer making the most of the harmonies and textures … with the words being
a guide."
This creates a certain "freedom from the text," he said.
In the Renaissance "you see this tremendous flowering of choral music you haven’t really seen since.
The finest composers were almost exclusively writing choral music."
The result was choral works of the "highest" quality, be said. Not, he added, that there aren’t
also "wonderful works" from other eras that the performers sing in other settings.
Still the masterpieces of the Renaissance and Baroque are where the ensemble’s heart lies.
The music provides many challenges.
Though some contemporary editions try to shoehorn the music into more modern metric structures, the music
wasn’t written with bar lines in mind, Robertson said. "You have to find a way to wrap your mind
around rhythms that have no relationship to what you were taught from the time you were a young
singer."
They must negotiate this as an ensemble.
The vocal ranges, he said, for singers are wide, spanning as much as two octaves.
Another surprise "is just how fast this repertoire moves," Robertson said. It requires
extraordinary singing.
Performing music from this time also means a certain amount of scholarship into how it was originally
presented.
The music was written for working choirs with a firm knowledge of how the music would sound. "The
composers were practical church workers who had too many demands so they found as many ways as they
could to save time."
What was clear to their singers can now be a mystery to contemporary vocalist.
Most editors and musicologists "are good about telling us what they know and what they’re guessing
at."
The Thirteen works to find "its own authentic performance practice."
Despite the passage of centuries, the human voice is still the voice. "What feels comfortable in the
voice gives us so much information about what the performance practice might have been."
