I sing the body eclectic University of Maine choral group highlights songs by, for women

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It was the first sunny, warm day since last fall, and all around the University of Maine campus, students were walking around in T-shirts – the brave ones in shorts. Every once in a while, a Jeep or a Geo with the top popped off would drive by with Shaggy or Nelly pouring out of the stereo. The air smelled like mud. Spring had finally arrived.

On a day like this, a classroom is the last place students want to be, especially a classroom without windows.

But the 22 women singing in the Minsky Recital Hall weren’t thinking about the weather. They were too busy sounding like angels. But the look on their faces needed some work.

“The faces I can see look worried to me,” conductor Francis Vogt said to the members of Athena Consort, an all-female choir at UM. “I don’t want worried looks; I want happy looks. … It sounds like this was a depressed sound and I don’t think the nuns were depressed.”

The women had just started rehearsing a piece by Hildegard of Bingen, a musician, composer and visionary in the European Middle Ages who wrote music for the nuns in her convent. Though the piece has a chantlike quality to it, it’s supposed to be uplifting. So Vogt demonstrated how changing his facial expression could change the tone of the music.

“Smile and say ooooooooo,” he told the group. “I didn’t do anything different except enliven my face and my eyes. Now when you enlarge that by 22 people, it’s going to sound dramatically different.”

Vogt and his choir were rehearsing for their free spring concert, which will take place at 7:30 p.m. Saturday in the Minsky hall, in the Class of 1944 Hall on the UMaine campus. The consort will perform works that range from the Middle Ages to the present with one unifying thread: They all were written by or for women musicians.

“It’s kind of nice to be part of a group that doesn’t do the standard works, the traditional works,” said Melissa Rosenberg, a senior psychology major who has been a member of the choir for four years. “[Vogt] seems to have us delve into things that the average person doesn’t get to hear every day, or at all. … It’s not all soft, quiet music that you’d hear in a cathedral. We do some upbeat and fun things too.”

Athena Consort formed five years ago to fill a very specific niche in the university’s music community. It wasn’t Vogt’s idea, but he is the founding director. Members can earn credits for participating, though many join just for fun. The women must audition for the choir, and it isn’t restricted to music students, or students at all. The group includes several faculty members as well as women from the surrounding communities with no university affiliation.

“It attracts a really specific singer,” Vogt said of Athena. “There’s a lot of things this group isn’t. It’s the smallest choir on campus. It also is not a razzle-dazzle, big, showy repertoire that we do. It’s an almost out-of-the-way genre of music that I didn’t know much about at first.”

It took time and a lot of research, but Vogt has managed to assemble an eclectic, culturally rich body of works that’s as much a study in music history as it is in voice.

“I went on a hunting and pecking process to find things,” he said. “Now there’s really an enormous repertoire.”

For this performance, the first part of the program will encompass more introspective songs, chants and classical pieces. The second half, Vogt says, will be more upbeat, with something for everybody, including a “big, huge medley of African-American spirituals.” The centerpiece of the concert will be a performance of Brahms’ “Vier Gesange, Op. 17,” during which the singers will be accompanied with two horns.

“It’s a really good mix,” said Nancy Leavitt of Bangor, who joined the group after taking private voice lessons with Vogt and singing with him in the chamber choir at St. John’s Catholic Church. “We have sacred music, very early music, music that was really written for women musicians.”

When the group started performing five years ago, many people in the audience had never heard anything like the works Vogt had selected. And, as with anything new, some people didn’t know how to react to it.

“At first it was sort of new and people weren’t used to it,” Rosenberg said. “[Now] it seems that people are more and more in tune with this type of music and are more open to it now. It’s nice to see that people are coming out for that and having an appetite for that.”

In the beginning, the group attracted a small audience that gradually grew. Now, Athena Consort’s performances draw quite a crowd.

Elise Turner liked what she heard at one of Athena’s earlier performances so much, she joined as soon as her schedule would allow.

“After class, I come over here,” said Turner, who teaches a computer science class at the university. “It’s a great way to end my teaching day. Plus, I love to sing. I come here and don’t have to worry about running things and keeping things organized. Fran gets to do that.”

Tracie Callahan, a senior music performance major, finds Athena Consort to be a pleasant diversion from her opera classes.

“This is a release,” Callahan said. “You come in here and Fran loves to tie in the words with the music and that’s a wonderful thing. He doesn’t just let you sit here and sing. You’re not allowed to just sing. He makes you think, which is good.”

At least once a semester, Callahan says, all that thinking pays off. Sometimes, usually during a performance, things will fall together perfectly.

“We’re so in tune up here when we perform that we were just right,” Callahan said. “It’s something that happens that’s very hard to put into words, but you just know it’s right. Every once in a while, we’ll do something that’s just magical.”

Magic or no magic, this performance will be special in its own right. For the women, many of whom have worked with Vogt for several years, this will be a farewell concert. In August, he leaves for Kansas City, Mo., to pursue his doctorate in choral conducting. The university will hire another voice instructor, but that person may or may not be interested in conducting Athena.

“This group has really been one of the joys in my life for the past five years,” Vogt said. “[But] not everyone is going to be able to feel comfortable [teaching voice and conducting Athena Consort].”

While the future of the choir is uncertain at this point, there’s no doubt that the choir has been a joy for all of the women involved, as well.

“It really has been a special part of my experience here at Maine,” Rosenberg said. “I’ve been involved in many groups … and I would say that Athena would be one of my very top groups. … It’s a lot of women but we all come together in the same ideal, which is to make beautiful music.”

Tickets for the Athena Consort performance are available at the door or by calling 581-1755. The group also will perform with St. John’s Catholic Church chamber choir at 7:30 p.m. Monday, April 30, at the church in Bangor.