Choirs combine in spiritual harmony

Tenor David Horn (foreground) lets loose with a heartfelt rendition of “Amen.”  Joining him are members of Counterpoint, from left to right: Nathaniel Lew, Marybeth McCaffrey, Stephen Falbel, Carolyn Dickinson, Brett Murphy, Linda Radtke, Claire Hungerford, Roger Grow, Melissa Chesnut-Tangerman, Eric Brooks, and Miranda Harris Bergmeier.  Mr. Horn is a graduate of North Country Union High School.  Photo by Joseph Gresser

by Joseph Gresser

NEWPORT — Robert DeCormier moves toward the center of the circle of singers.  He’d been listening to them sing “Great Meeting in the Promised Land” and wasn’t completely satisfied with what he was hearing.

“One more time,” he says, “and be really accurate about where you’re beginning and where you end.”

Mr. DeCormier starts conducting, his arms stretched before him.  He begins to turn, swaying into the beat he wants to hear.  The singers caught the movement of his shoulders as he leaned sharply into each section’s entrance point, as he danced them into a precise performance of the spiritual.

Counterpoint, a 12-member professional chorus, was singing for the first time with the North Country Union High School select choir Saturday afternoon, February 10.  The two groups would present a program that night and sing three songs together.

The remainder of the evening was to be split between the two groups performing alone.

The director of the North Country choir, Anne Hamilton, had been preparing her singers for a month.  Mr. DeCormier visited a week before the concert to work with the students.  But this was the big time.

The combined group finished the first song to Mr. DeCormier’s satisfaction and moved on to “John Henry.” Once again Mr. DeCormier picked up a little problem.

“No syncopation,” he said, looking at the students.

“That was me,” a voice said.

Mr. DeCormier recognized the voice of a member of his group and broke into a smile.  “Oh, it was you — all the mistakes are being made by Counterpoint,” he said.

Nevertheless, the conductor determined that more work was needed, and tenors, basses, and sopranos were set to work singing the intervals that form the foundation for the soloist in the song.

By the time the singers moved to their third song, “Let Me Fly,” Mr. DeCormier was really enjoying himself.

“Good!  What a pleasure!” he exclaimed.  “That was fabulous.  I want to do it again; I enjoyed that.”  With that he raised his arms, and the chorus repeated the song.

Afterward the two groups serenaded each other, the North Country singers performing the anti-war song, “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye,” and Counterpoint responding with “Rorate coeli desuper,” a harmonically complex song from the group’s Christmas program.

Each group applauded the other’s performance, but there was still work to be done.  After a discussion of the best way to arrange singers on stage, it was decided to set up the school’s risers.  A group of students hauled them out of storage and had them set up in a jiffy.

There were rehearsals of getting the groups on and off stage, and each group practiced its own repertory.

All the songs were drawn from the rich literature of African American spirituals, a type of music that has held Mr. DeCormier’s interest throughout his career.

One of his early experiences with African American song, Mr. DeCormier said, came during the late 1940s while he was a student at the Julliard School in New York City.  A group from the Bronx, the Jewish Young Folksingers, invited him to be its conductor.  The group, Mr. DeCormier said, specialized in Eastern European Jewish songs and African American music.

“We made one of the first recordings of ‘We Shall Overcome,’ on Hootenanny Records,” Mr. DeCormier recalled.

Later, as Harry Belafonte’s music director, Mr. DeCormier arranged many of the songs that appeared on Saturday’s program.  One group of songs, Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder, is an arrangement of work songs and blues that Mr. DeCormier created in 1959 as the score for a ballet by choreographer Donald McKayle.  The ballet told the story of a group of convicts on a chain gang.

After rehearsals all the singers headed off to the school cafeteria for a pre-concert potluck dinner. 

As he left for his meal one student shook his head and said, “I want to be able to sing like that.”

If the past is any indicator, it is entirely possible that he will.  After all, one member of Counterpoint was once in exactly the same place.  Tenor David Horn, a native of North Troy, graduated from North Country in 1980 and was a member of the school’s select choir.

Mr. Horn said music has been a vital part of his life from before his earliest memories. 

“My mother used to tell me I would not get to sleep unless I had the radio on.  It had to be classical music, not popular and not country,” Mr. Horn recalled.  “She said I started to sing at three.”

Mr. Horn said music got him through school, too. 

“As soon as I hit kindergarten it was the one thing that attracted me.  It was in there waiting for me.”

School was not always a pleasant experience, Mr. Horn said, but music got him through difficult times. Music, he said, created “an environment where people accepted me as an equal, allowed me to explore, and didn’t criticize me for it.  It was one environment where I didn’t think people judged me by my race.”

Mr. Horn said it was difficult to be African American growing up in northern Vermont during the sixties and seventies.

“If my memory serves me, mine was the only African American family around.

“It was difficult.  Not just for me — people called my brother and three sisters the N-word too.”

Mr. Horn said he senses a change in people’s attitudes.

“People now take note” of his race, he said, “but they don’t make an issue of it.”

During his time at North Country, Mr. Horn studied with Vivian Spates, who ran the voice program.  He said the current program is much larger, but recalled that the quality was also very high in his day.  He recalled walking North Country’s halls thinking of the next concert.

After high school Mr. Horn studied at Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey.  Although he sang in some local groups after his return to Vermont, Mr. Horn had largely stopped performing when a friend suggested that he audition for Mr. DeCormier.

Mr. DeCormier, Mr. Horn said, was looking for singers for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

“After I sang my little song,” Mr. Horn recalls, “Bob asked me, ‘Where have you been?’”

“I asked him if that meant I was in the chorus, and he said, ‘Oh yes.  I’m going to keep you very busy.’”

Mr. Horn has been singing with Counterpoint since 2003; the group has been in existence since 2000.  The songs on Saturday’s program mean a lot to him, Mr. Horn said.  Spirituals, he said, are “an instance of something beautiful coming out of something horrific.”

Mr. DeCormier, Mr. Horn said, has added a great deal to his knowledge of these songs.

“Until I started rehearsing this music with Bob I knew a lot of this music, but I didn’t understand its context.”

He said Mr. DeCormier’s “life has been so rich and so varied, he’s been immersed in so many causes. He’s been such a civil rights advocate.”

Working together benefits the singers and their conductor, Mr. Horn said.

“We feed off of him and he feeds off of us.”

The other singers were finishing their dinner.  Mr. DeCormier led a round of applause for the parents who prepared the meal.

Counterpoint has performed with a number of high school choruses around New England.  School’s contribute what they can toward the cost of the program, and grants cover the rest.

Linda Radtke, a Counterpoint alto, compared the North Country choir to other schools.

“We worked at Andover and Exeter. They’re hot-shot prep schools, but they’re,” she said pointing around the cafeteria, “just as good.”

As the audience began to make its appearance, students and Counterpoint members changed into their performance attire.  Shortly after 7 p.m. they marched into the hall and let loose with “Walk Together Children.”  The audience was with them from the first note and applauded that and each succeeding song enthusiastically.

The last number in Counterpoint’s first group of songs was the familiar spiritual “Amen,” in an arrangement that featured Mr. Horn’s powerful tenor.  Counterpoint singers sang behind him snapping their fingers and clapping their hands and generally rocking the hall.

By the end of the piece Mr. Horn was leaning back, arm outstretched, singing “A- A- A- men” over and over.  At the song’s conclusion the house erupted in applause.

At the concert’s conclusion the audience leapt to its feet.  Mr. DeCormier brought Ms. Hamilton forward for a bow, and the performers stood basking in the audience’s loud appreciation for a few short moments and then turned to leave.

All but Mr. Horn — a sizeable knot of people had formed near the stage gesturing for his attention.  There was one of his sisters, old classmates, at least one of whom had a child in the chorus.  One well-wisher sang with Mr. Horn in Northsong; another worked with him at Ethan Allen in Orleans.

With greetings and reminiscences it was almost a half-hour before Mr. Horn was able to leave his old high school.

As he walked to his car someone called out, “You really tore the place down.”

Mr. Horn smiled. “I tried,” he said quietly.