An Interview with
Artistic Director David Babbitt

In its final concert of the 2004–2005 season, the San Francisco Bach Choir will present the glorious music of the lesser-known composer Jacob Handl (Jacobus Gallus).

One part of the Bach Choir’s mission is to expand the choral repertoire by presenting concerts of rare and early music. Our Artistic Director, David Babbitt, has spent much of his career studying and reviving the music of choral masters like Handl. Indeed, Mr. Babbitt’s work in this area is one of his enduring contributions to the choral art.

For our May concert, Mr. Babbitt wanted music the Choir could perform surrounding the audience in the intimate setting and beautiful acoustic of Trinity Episcopal Church. He has always been taken with the few published works we have sung by Jacob Handl, including the brilliant “Pater noster,” which appears on our Ceremonies and Celebrations CD. But since much of Handl’s music is not available at a music store—like most of the music we perform from the polychoral tradition—creating an entire program of his music posed a significant challenge.

Jacob Handl (1550–1591) was an Austrian composer from what is now Slovenia. He served as chapel master for courts and churches throughout Austria and Bohemia and gained a reputation for his beautifully woven counterpoint and vast range of expression. In his time he published a number of volumes, including a collection of works for the church year called the Opus Musicum.

Modern published collections of Handl’s works are rare, and the music libraries that own them rarely lend them out. After our futile attempts to borrow scores from libraries across the country, choir member Richard Buxbaum located the publisher of the Opus Musicum in Germany and generously presented a five-volume set to Mr. Babbitt last summer. Now the work of preparing a concert could begin.

In the following interview, board member Laurel Elkjer discusses with David Babbitt how he chooses music for our programs of rare music and what is involved in creating these concerts.

LAUREL: Can you tell us a little more about why you chose to devote our entire May concert to the music of Gallus?

DAVID: When I was in college, the early music movement was just beginning. One day I checked out a book of music by Gallus from the college library and started to play some of the scores on an organ. My first thought was, “Why isn’t this music performed more often?” That memory has always remained with me.

In recent years, the Choir has performed a few of Gallus’s better-known works, which have been received very well. When we were considering what music the Choir could perform in the particular setting at Trinity, it occurred to me that the music of Gallus would be a perfect fit.

LAUREL: Now that you have Gallus’s Opus Musicum, how did you choose the pieces for the May concert? What draws you to a particular piece? And how do you build a concert?

DAVID: There is a term—second practice—that composers used to describe the new stylistic changes in the music they were composing at the end of the 16th century. One explanation often given for the new compositional techniques is that in the old style (first practice) the music dominated the text, whereas in the new, second practice the meaning of the text dominated the music. But, this explanation doesn’t really express all that was going on—for example, what about instrumental music that doesn’t have text? Composers were looking for new methods and an expanded musical language to express a wider range of emotional content. They believed music could do more and that it had the power to alter listeners in a way that changed them forever. As you listen to music that was composed at the time, and read what composers such as Michael Praetorius were writing about music, this becomes even more obvious. It is this music that most affects me.

A wonderful example of second practice music is Heinrich Schütz’s “Auf dem Gebirge.” The biblical text [Jeremiah 31:15] tells about Rachel losing her children. When you listen to Schütz’s music for this text, there is an obvious difference in the power of the music. And even though the piece echoes the intense feeling that Rachel can’t be comforted, in some way Schütz also manages to convey a sense of hope.

When choosing music for concerts, I look for pieces that are not only beautiful, but which also express something powerful to me. In the case of the Gallus scores I’ve been studying, I find that the musical counterpoint and harmony are always in service of the text and its meaning. Page after page, I discover music as stunning as the “Pater noster” that we recorded on our last CD.

There are other things that affect musical choices when putting together a concert. Of course it is exciting to sing music that is rarely performed or hasn’t been performed at all. Or sometimes it makes sense to choose music by its relationship to the church calendar. Another important consideration is how music will appeal to our audience. But, to start, I always choose music by how it affects me.

LAUREL: I know that you are often busy preparing scores. What do you do with the pieces you choose? How do you prepare them for the Choir and instrumentalists?

DAVID: In the case of the Gallus pieces we are singing, they are written in the clefs and voice parts of his time. The Opus Musicum contains music written for the entire church year and was sung by choirs of boys and men.

The first thing is to translate the music into modern clefs. Then, you have to look at the ranges of the voice parts in the original scores to see if they fit the ranges of our modern soprano, alto, tenor, and bass parts. In a typical four-part piece of Gallus’s time, the middle two voices sang in roughly the same range (or a little lower) as today’s tenor. This means that the second voice part of Gallus’s pieces is often too low for today’s altos. In some pieces, the upper voice in Gallus’s scores is higher than today’s soprano range. It’s possible that in Gallus’s time these parts were played by instruments, or else they were given to singers especially trained to sing in high ranges, as was the practice in England.

There are a variety of solutions for solving the differences in voice ranges, but none of them are perfect. For example, one solution is to raise the pitch of an entire piece so that the altos can sing their part, but that can lead to tenor and soprano parts that are too high. Or sometimes raising the key might work for the voice parts, but then places the piece in a key that is not easily played by our early music instruments. There are other options, perhaps a little hard to describe here, that I prefer since I like to keep pieces in their original keys.

If you look at a Gallus score, you might think the music was intended to be performed without instruments, because all of the musical parts have words. However, the practice was that an instrument could play any of the parts, and the words were actually helpful to instrumentalists in telling them how to phrase their lines. In fact, even nowadays the members of our period orchestra prefer to have the words included in their music.

The fact that an instrument could play any of the vocal lines gives me another choice. When choosing what parts to give to instrumentalists, I consider the ranges the instruments are able to play in and also what keys they are comfortable playing. For example, I probably wouldn’t write a string part in multiple flats. When choosing instruments, I also consider the color and mode of the voice parts.

All of this means that before choosing a piece for a concert, I study the score and determine what we need to do to perform the piece. To produce a finished practical score and individual parts, all of the voice and instrumental parts must be entered into a computer using special music software. The final scores are in the clefs we are used to reading and in vocal ranges that fit the modern SATB choir.

LAUREL: When you bring a piece to rehearsal, are there ever any surprises? What happens when you hear the music?

DAVID: There are always surprises, though some pieces surprise me more than others. In the case of Bach, I can read a score and know how it will sound when I hear the Choir. This is because I’ve spent so many years studying and performing Bach.

In the case of a Gallus piece, you can’t really capture what the music will sound like when playing it on a keyboard. An F chord is an F chord, but it has more variety and changes character in Gallus’s hands. The three notes of a chord can be sung by any of the voice parts, the interval between different notes of the chords can vary, and then the placement of various choirs around the room change the chord further. Gallus used these options to great effect, and in this respect I find him a superb orchestrator of voices.

There are also surprises when we start rehearsing for concerts. Sometimes when we are reading a piece of music, the Choir will sing it differently than I had imagined, and as a result I have to change my thinking about the piece. Furthermore, how you sing measure 12 affects what you should do with measure 26, so preparing a piece for performance means considering the affect of the whole as well as the individual parts of the piece. Ultimately, the affect and arc of that piece will impact how I end up arranging the overall order of pieces in a concert.

Tuning is another factor. To fully appreciate its beauty, this music must be sung perfectly in tune. It takes time, however, for the Choir to learn what this means. The modern piano we are familiar with is tuned using equal temperament, meaning that all the pitches are “averaged” in a way that allows a pianist to play equally well in all keys from six flats to six sharps. However, with equal temperament all intervals and chords are not “perfectly” in tune. The tuning we will use for the May concert is referred to as mean-tone and allows us to use more “perfectly” tuned intervals. This is one of the reasons we use our baroque-style organ at all rehearsals and performances. When you get used to this tuning, a piano begins to sound out of tune!

I believe the audience will enjoy the Gallus concert, but my desire is to create the same sense of awe and wonderment that we experience the first time we see something like the Grand Canyon. To do that, we have to think about how to perform each piece. There is a piece, “Aus Liebe” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, that is a pure musical expression of love. Someone once auditioned for the Choir and sang this piece for me. I was completely overwhelmed by her performance. It wasn’t that she sang the piece with perfect vocal technique, but that she really knew what the piece was about and communicated that through her singing. This is what I mean about discovering how to perform a piece, to bring out what each piece is really about.

LAUREL: Do you have any dreams for the future—any particular music or composer you’d love to perform?

DAVID: There are a number of projects that would be fun to do. I would love to produce a recording of Gallus’s entire Opus Musicum. It would be fun to perform the Polyhymnia Caduceatrix of Praetorius. I think the Choir could also do a beautiful recording of Heinrich Schütz’s Psalms of David. And then there are audience members who always ask us to do a recording of Bach.

My desire is to show audiences what composers were trying to communicate. This means considering how they presented their own music, with how many singers and instrumentalists and with what kinds of instruments. Some purists say that it is enough to try to perform the music exactly as it was performed in its own time. Certainly we do use period instruments and period performance practice in our concerts. I believe, though, that we should also think about today’s audiences—who have been exposed to Wagner in large symphony halls or John Williams in movie theaters—and how they hear music. It’s hard to imagine that we would hear a twelve-voice ensemble performing Heinrich Schütz today and experience the same wonder as the audiences in Schütz’s time did, no matter how “original” the performance. Though there is no simple answer, it seems that I never stop thinking about what the original experience may have been and how that experience might be recreated for our audiences today.

We hope you have enjoyed this interview. We in the Bach Choir look forward rehearsals for our concerts of rare music with Mr. Babbitt. As usual, we can expect to be surprised and delighted when yet another gem is magically revealed to us as he shares his profound knowledge and mastery of early choral music through his sensitive and thoughtful manner.

Please join us on May 14th or 15th at Trinity Episcopal Church for an exciting concert of the magnificent music of Jacob Handl. For details, see Jacob Handl: Opus Musicum III.

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