The Beginnings
Reflections on the Evolution of Classroom Cantatas
by Lissa Hodder, Trustee Advisor


Preparing for the performance of Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents in 1990 served to give the Cantata Singers as an organization a good, hard push into the larger community where education and music collide. In venues new to us—schools and community centers—Donald Sur played and spoke about his music and composing. Students and their teachers worked with him and other leaders, hired by Ann Marie Lindquist, our Executive Director, and together they gained a deeper understanding of the elements of music and heard the personal stories of family members’ lives under slavery. They came to Symphony Hall in March where student artwork was on display, and the Cantata Singers gave the premiere performance of Donald Sur’s Slavery Documents.

By the 1992-93 school year, Paul Brust, a young colleague of Music Director David Hoose, and Judy Hill, a member of the Cantata Singers chorus, had put in place a seven-session program in two Boston schools. They had further assistance from Carol Wright Hovey who had participated in the preparation for Slavery Documents, and they worked with teachers who, themselves, had sung in the performance. And so, the Cantata Singers’ education program was born—a heartening success.

Ably led by Paul for the next eight years, Classroom Cantatas was given its title by Marilyn Richardson, a board member for several years who introduced a second composer, Newell Hendricks, to the expanding program. And in the ensuing years we have found ways to involve more Cantata Singers chorus members, work in several more schools, collaborate more closely with classroom teachers, sing more together, link our schools more closely to music as we are increasingly aware of ways we can share.

The goals of Classroom Cantatas are clear but profound: students write their own texts based on study in the classroom and then, with us, share music they know and experiment with music that seems strange and unfamiliar. They listen to and reproduce the basic elements of rhythm and melody; sometimes they work with harmony. Then they take their texts and, in small groups, refine them, and set them to music. After rehearsing they perform their songs—often for more than one audience. As composers and singers they have become the creators and interpreters of their own understanding. They have learned to cooperate to make choices, refine decisions, practice the hard parts and stand before an audience. And, moreover, their study of text, music, and different compositional styles helps prepare the students for what they will hear in the Cantata Singers’ dress rehearsal and concert. What splendid pieces their cantatas are, yet how amazingly far as a composer, a singer, a musician, it is possible to go! And, no less important, we see faces in our audiences who have never been there before, and we are nurturing the next generation of music-lovers.

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