Chestnut Street Singers: Search for Home, on Movement and Migration

Some harrowing selections

In the United States, we tend to picture our immigrant ancestors as sturdy people who headed for a new country determined to work hard and seize new opportunities. It’s easy to forget that migration also involves loss, as people leave friends, families, and familiar customs. Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” calls the Statute of Liberty the “Mother of Exiles,” and exile is not a condition people voluntarily choose.

The Singers looked at that aspect of migration with pieces that ranged across the centuries, as their programs usually do. The 14 selections on the program included the 15th-century German classic “Innsbruck, I must leave you”; a modern choral setting of "Wayfaring Stranger"; and a harrowing 2010 piece that plays like a mini-opera.

That piece, Christopher Marshall’s "This Big Moroccan Sea" sets to music a note found on the body of a man who died in 2006, along with all the other occupants of a boat filled with 50 migrants. The engine failed, their guide left them, and the boat drifted in the Atlantic Ocean for months before it landed in Barbados with 11 bodies on board. Tenor Cortlandt Matthews sang Marshall’s setting of the note as the chorus created the rise and fall of the sea in the background.

The note reads, “The situation in the boat is so painful. I believe there’s no way out of this. To those who find me, I would like to send my family in Bassada this sum of money. Forgive me and goodbye. This is the end of my life in this big Moroccan sea.”

Peace and prayer

More serene pieces countered the portraits of exile and loss. “Suffer no Grief” by prolific young choral composer Abbie Betinis set to music a Persian poem that ends with the reminder, “every road must have an end.” A chant from an African pygmy culture called the community together as it imitated the sounds of a rainforest.

Ysaye Maria Barnwell’s “We Are” ends with one of the most effective bits of understatement I’ve encountered. The text works through the different things people are, from our “grandmother’s prayers” to grander roles like builders of nations and seekers of truth. A lesser composer might have given us a big thunderclap on the final line: “We are one.” Barnwell presents it without flourishes or repeats and lets it speak for itself.

The concert maintained the musical standards set by the Singers over the last six years. In the Brahms prayer “When we are in deepest need…,” they surmounted all the complex interactions and surprising touches the greatest composers put into everything they do. Eleven members of the chorus sang solos at different points in the concert and they all produced strong performances.

Much like the Mendelssohn Club, Choral Arts, and other choruses that maintain Philadelphia’s long, illustrious choral tradition, the Chestnut Street Singers are a volunteer chorus. They call themselves a “cooperative chorus” because they don’t have a professional conductor. They take turns conducting and develop their programs with discussions that include all the members. They’re a unique organization with a unique style and they’ve added a fascinating voice to the city’s musical life.