Master Singers of Milwaukee, one of the city’s premier community choirs, is celebrating its 40th anniversary and Music Director Eduardo García-Novelli has lined up a series of unique concerts for the season that begins Nov. 1-2. García-Novelli, who is also the associate professor of music and director of choral activities at Carthage College and church musician at Racine’s Mount Pleasant Lutheran Church, spoke with Off the Cuff about the choir’s involvement with the community and upcoming performances.
In your four years with Master Singers, what have been some of the most memorable selections and/or performances for you so far?
We have done lots of wonderful things. The concert last March, we had a chance to tackle a masterwork of the repertoire that, for different reasons, has been neglected—the motet Jesu, meine Freude, by Johann Sebastian Bach. And that was a joy to prepare. We’ve also performed a very surprisingly, amazingly good piece by Jonathan Dove, who’s a living composer from the United Kingdom—his Missa Brevis for choir and organ. One of the movements from that piece will be done in our “Mass Mash-Up” concert in November. We have done a variety of incredible repertoire over the last four years I’ve been in charge.
Can you tell me about your upcoming Nov. 1 and 2 concert?
Our next concert is unique and eclectic, a very special one. We call it “Mass Mash-Up.” We’re doing a Mass salad, so to speak. The Catholic Mass text organized in the ordinary way is Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, but we wanted to have a mash-up in which every movement, Kyrie, Gloria, etc., is by a different composer. But we went further than that. The second part of the concert will be the same thing but backwards, starting with the Agnus Dei.
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Now for even more fun, we decided to include exactly in the middle, between the two sections of the Mass, a piece by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt called “The Beatitudes.” This is strictly the text from the Bible from the beatitudes and originally written in English. Pärt uses all of the Beatitudes text and after the choir finishes singing it, the organ comes in and plays a solo, in which the composer traces back all of the harmonic progression that the choir had just sung. It’s a harmonic design that goes in one direction and then comes back. It occurred to me it would be the perfect piece to have in the middle of this concert, so right at the end of the Beatitudes text, but before the organ starts, that will be the perfect center of a sort of mirrored concert. We thought it a fun way to present lots of different composers.
Can you tell me a little about your collaborations with high schools?
It’s kind of a new initiative that we started first in 2011. We wanted to instill a level of singing and share that singing with younger generations. In that line of thought, we invited a high school choir to sing with us that was kind of an experiment. The first one was in December 2011 for our annual Christmas concert with the Muskego High School Choir directed by Matthew Wanner. It was a wonderful success. Right away I was captivated by the amount of people who came to our concert. We noticed that something needs to be done here; we need to be reaching out to kids and families to share this art with them. So we repeated that the following year with Waukesha West High School, and last year we invited the wonderful Milwaukee High School of the Arts. This coming year we invited Muskego High School again Saturday, Dec. 20, and the next day, the 21st, we invited Brookfield East High School. So this year we’re having two Christmas concerts with two different high schools both at St. Joseph’s Convent.
How can people support Master Singers?
There is a myriad of ways that people can help us. Of course we are always in need of wonderful people who will donate money. But there are ways to help that do not require any money, such as helping us in the management of the concerts.
We are also really trying to find ways to be more open and reaching out to the community. We’re looking for opportunities of partnership with people looking to do something together with another arts organization. At our concert in March, called “Celebrating the Arts,” we will have a couple of performing organizations sharing the stage with us. Our concert at the end of May is celebrating the heritage of Milwaukee and its area of influence, so we’re going to have music from different ethnic backgrounds, of peoples that have settled in the area of Milwaukee from different parts of the world. Every concert we do, we have a different kind of look, taste and interest and I think that that can appeal to a wide variety of people out there.
“Mass Mash-Up” will be held Saturday, Nov. 1 at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (914 E. Knapp St.) and Sunday, Nov. 2 at St. John’s Lutheran Church (20275 Davidson Road, Brookfield). For more information, visit mastersingersofmilwaukee.org.
