Double treat: Brooklyn Youth Chorus at BAMcafé and Roulette

What I find most interesting about the Brooklyn Youth Chorus is the elegance with which the ensemble, led by founder Dianne Berkun, serves two vital purposes at once: they are both an institution dedicated to high-quality musical education for young singers (ages 7-18), as well as exciting and progressive performers, capable of tearing through John King’s eerie, experimental, Ligeti-like Muse Cast Aside War one night, then backing Elton John at MSG the next. It makes perfect sense, really: as an educational entity, BYC is dedicated to preparing their students for a professional career, which means they must be necessarily diverse in their repertoire. They must familiarize students with all manner of styles and techniques, and give them opportunities to perform in real-life settings. At the same time, they’re a choir of young, open-minded musicians in one of the music capitals of the planet. Why not collaborate with anyone and everyone in town? And who better to perform new works, written in new styles, than young musicians? Musicians who, while not yet at the technical level of older professionals (although not very far behind them, either), have also yet to develop habits, established patterns, and comfort zones? Isn’t it a boon to a composer to work with musicians who are still discovering their personal style and sound? And even play a role in their development, while also getting an opportunity to have their works performed? The concerts I attended recently, at the BAM Cafe on May 5 and at the Roulette Theater on May 19, featured music by modern composers like Missy Mazzoli, Bryce Dessner, and Shara Worden, whose pieces written expressly for the BYC defied easy categorization, emphasizing the adventurous nature of the ensemble.

Shara-Worden (My Brightest Diamond) performs her song "Before the Words" with BYC - Photo by Robert Maass

The chorus, accompanied by piano, percussion, guitar, and a string quartet, played a short, refined set at BAM, but headlined at Roulette and featured an extended program. Dessner was able to join them as a guitarist during the BAM show, which surely helped bring out some fans who wouldn’t normally come to a modern classical concert, as he is better known in indie rock circles as a member of The National, a moody and intelligent outfit whose sound resembles a geeked-out Nick Cave, and have contributed songs to television (Game of Thrones) and video games (the deliriously hilarious Portal 2) in addition to their own critically acclaimed albums.

Dessner, Mazzoli, and Worden are perfect partners for the choir, sharing their sensibility of the malleable nature of genre in music. Call them what you’d like (indie classical, art rock, etc.), the truth of the matter is that they write music that isn’t just difficult to categorize, it’s functionally impossible to categorize. Dessner’s To the Sea might sound to you like Steve Reich writing a smeary, ever-sinking fugue, or one of Opeth’s grandiose, mellotron-heavy bridge sections, depending on your point of view and frame of reference. Of course, it doesn’t really sound like anything but Dessner. Mazzoli, too, doesn’t so much blur boundaries as she outright ignores them; she’s the kind of composer that clearly believes genres and definitions are unfortunate baggage that must be cast aside in order for music to progress. Her contribution, As Long as we Live, packs a ton of material into a short piece, compressing dense musical information into something almost resembling pop-rock as conceived by Scriabin. An expert in ever-reaching, never-quite-resolving-yet-always-spiraling harmony, her climaxes come not as the explosive bursts one expects, but instead as infectious, ear-wormy hooks and joyously simple harmonies, relieving the listener from the dense and dangerous sonic swamplands of the opening.

Bryce Dessner accompanies BYC on guitar in two of his own works - Photo by Robert Maass

Berkun refers to Worden’s Before the Words as “something of an anthem for us”, and it’s clear why: the piece for unaccompanied choir, resplendent with variegated rhythmic figures and shifting melodic patterns, is a fresh and modern-sounding work, as well as a compendium of unorthodox sounds and techniques well-suited to an education-oriented ensemble. Worden takes a few simple lines of text and spins them outwards, progressively adding dimensions in a manner resembling a line evolving into a hypercube. But brainy modernism is only part of the picture for the BYC. Interspersed amongst the more complex pieces were sea shanties, Brazilian folk songs, Kodaly arrangements of Hungarian peasant songs, and soulful, pop-gospel rave-ups. The different styles are not segregated on the program, broken off into their own sections; they are treated equally, with the same passion and vigor going into Happy Days are Here Again as Dessner’s gorgeously monstrous Tour Eiffel. The climax of the evening, Dessner’s post-Romantic poetic ode to the titular tower layers contrasting lines of ominous text over each other in an ever-widening mass of lofty, somber harmony.

Youth orchestras, choruses, and ensembles seem to only get better as time goes on, and as the 21st century has seen a new glut of talented composers, these groups will only have more material to bring to a widening audience of modern art-music fans. And the young musicians who fill their ranks shall enter the musical world better prepared than generations previous, having cut their teeth on a dizzying array of styles and sounds, reaping the benefits of growing up during the death of genre (as I hope/imagine the early 21st century will be thought of by future historians). And special congratulations to the BYC’s graduating class of 2012, whose ceremony I felt honored to be present for: if you, and other musicians your age, remain as open-minded and committed to experimentation as yourselves, we’re all in for a lot more wondrous, and unpredictable, music.

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Evan Burke is a bassist and composer living in Brooklyn.