Anglican Rikkyo University Choir in Oberlin for Performances and Workshop, Sunday and Monday By Michael Chipman
	Rikkyo University Choir in Oberlin: • Workshop with Collegium Musicum and Oberlin College Choir on Sunday afternoon, February 28, 2-4 p.m., Room 110 of the New Union Center for the Arts. The workshop open to the public after 2:45 p.m. The workshop will focus on Thomas Tallis' expansive 40-voice motet, Spem in alium. • Evensong at Christ Church Episcopal, Sunday, February 28, 7 p.m. • Concert of English choral music at Fairchild Chapel on Monday, March 1, 8 p.m.		The chance to revel in a rarely performed masterpiece of Renaissance choral music, rich in pure harmony, was reason enough for the Tokyo-based, Anglican Rikkyo University Choir to schedule a mid-country stop in Oberlin during its current California to Massachusetts tour. The stop will offer three chances for local audiences to see and hear the choir. Under the direction of James Dawson ('83), the Rikkyo University Choir will hold a joint workshop with Collegium Musicum (college-wide early music choir) and Oberlin College Choir on Sunday, February 28, 2-4 pm, in Room 110 of the New Union Center for the Arts. The workshop will focus on Thomas Tallis' expansive 40-voice motet, Spem in alium. This workshop will open to the public after 2:45 p.m. The idea for a joint workshop arose last year during the planning stages of the tour when Dawson, who studied organ at Oberlin and Stanford University, wanted his choir to have an "Oberlin experience," says Steven Plank, professor of musicology and director of Collegium Musicum. "We wanted some form of collaboration during their visit," says Plank. "Since a collaborative concert seemed out of our range at this early stage of the semester, we decided that a workshop/rehearsal would be the best, and most fun, option. Tallis' Spem in alium was the perfect vehicle because while everyone who knows the piece would love to do it, most choirs simply can't because it requires forty individual voice parts. We will have enough voices to do it, so we decided to give it a try." A short glance at the huge score of Spem in alium, with its 40 individual lines divided for eight choirs, is enough to provide a glimpse into its allure and monumental challenge. Plank places the size of the piece in a historical context: "An Italian composer named Alessandro Striggio went to London in the 1560s with a 40-voice motet. As the story goes, one of the English nobility heard Striggio's piece and challenged any English composer to match it. Tallis took the challenge and answered with Spem in alium. It may not have happened exactly that way, but it seems quite clear there was a relationship between the two motets." Plank adds, "During the Renaissance the English had a particular taste for sonic effects. In the early 1500s they wrote extraordinary pieces with a very low bass line, the middle voices close together, and a soaring treble voice sometimes even an octave above the rest. It was a sonic trick, but they loved reveling in the sound of it. And what a better playground for reveling than Tallis' 40-voice Spem in alium? Even today, people love to make music with such pure sonorities. To listen is nice, but to experience the music from within and create that purely blended sound with a group is what hooks people for good." He concludes, "By far the most consistent characteristic of students who have sung with Collegium Musicum over the past ten years is that they simply enjoy doing it. I hope that sense of enjoyment, if nothing else, is what the Rikkyo University choir takes from their visit here."
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