MSU College of Music leaves video legacy of music made in 2020

Pearls of polyphony pour from a parking garage. Jazz licks flow from a dozen scattered bedrooms, offices and studios and swirl into a soulful statement of ultimate unity. Beethoven does not roll over, and Ellington puts up his dukes.

In spite of everything, the students and teachers at MSU’s College of Music found a way to keep the music alive in the pandemic year of 2020.

A growing legacy of live streams and videos, available on the college’s website, is more than a document of a challenging year. As winter sweeps in, they will comfort music-starved fans until in-person concerts can safely resume.

From formal faculty recitals to raucous virtual ensembles, there is too much variety to describe here, but a few highlights suffice to give a glimpse of the musical miracles the college wrought in 2020.

“Against All Odds: Choral Singing In a Pandemic,” a video document of the college’s year-end choral concert, epitomizes the challenges that defined 2020.

Everybody knows the sad science. “Singing produces aerosolized particles that hang in the air and are believed to transmit the coronavirus,” MSU choral director David Rayl declares in the intro.

A stripped-down group of 16 graduate students rehearsed in the Kellogg Center parking ramp, standing 20 feet apart and wearing masks.

The sounds they make send your neck hair straight up. “To the Mothers in Brazil: Salve Regina,” a choral arrangement by Swedish composer Gunnar Erikson, shimmers like an aural apparition, transforming the structure’s concrete slabs into a holy space of remembrance and communion.

The Jazz Studies Department wrought miracles of a its own in 2020. Undaunted by the barrier of social distancing — anathema to the collaborative spirit of jazz — and unfazed by head-spinning technical challenges, jazz studies director Rodney Whitaker, the professors and students carried on the tradition of bringing distinguished visiting artists to rehearse and perform full-on collaborative concerts.

In a Dec. 4 online concert, guest guitarist Dave Stryker talks about “dealing with the cards we’re dealt.”

And deal they did. At its craziest, the Stryker concert splits into 18 screens. The spectacle of so many committed students hearkening to each other from their own bedrooms, basements, recital cubicles — wherever they could set up — is overwhelming evidence of the human drive to come together, no matter what. About an hour into the live stream, the band boils with creativity and synergy on Stryker’s composition “Aha,” unspooling a mesmerizing counterpoint of bass and piano lines, multiple guitars (including Stryker’s) and looping fugues in the reeds and brass. It’s the perfect set-up for the funky, organ-soaked arrangement of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man” that follows.

“It’s a unusual way to do a residency, but we’ve all had to do some adjusting,” Whitaker tells legendary Detroit bassist Marion Hayden in an interview prior to her Nov. 6 concert with MSU students.

Hayden called musicians “the healers of our society” and got straight to work, grooving with a kaleidoscopic array of students who come and go in deftly engineered squares and rectangles. (You also get to see what their art and bookshelves look like.)

The resulting concert is a healer and a half, highlighted by Hayden’s own lyrical, heartfelt compositions. Her pensive ballad, “The Calm Before,” centers on eloquent solos from Hayden and the students, with miraculous handoffs from one voice to another, across distances that vanish with the grace of technology.

The faculty and student recitals captured on video in 2020 run a huge gamut of styles and genres, from usual suspects like Chopin, Mozart and Bach to far more adventurous fare. A percussion concert from Dec. 16 jumps with vibrant patterns like the “Toccata Xoropo” by Claudia Calderón Sáenz, for no less than four vibraphones, enhanced by an assortment of shakers and happy noisemakers. “Chic,” by Molly Joyce, twinkles with gentle glockenspiel tintinnabulations.

Clearly, mallet percussion is off the hook at MSU, thanks to largely stellar professor Gwen Dease, and it’s one of the few instruments that don’t suffer at all from social distancing. For Eric Saroian’s “On Endeavor,” a marimba duet, students Dan Hartung and Isaac Pyatt face off in an epic samurai duel of temporary alliances, all-out conflict and uneasy equilibrium.  A sextet of students coax a calculated clangor from various-sized saucepans and other household objects, including a butter churn, in Joe W. Moore III’s “At a Distance.”

“Lift Ev’ry Voice,” an Oct. 5 concert devoted to the music of Black composers, brings the classical and jazz sides of the college together. Baritone Mark Rucker pours his heart into a song cycle by mid-20th-century composer Florence Price. “Song to the Dark Virgin,” with text by Langston Hughes, and later brings the hammer down on a tender and thundering set of songs by Chicago teacher and composer Lena McLin. Pianist Xavier Davis plays Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, joined by bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Randy Gelispie for a rocking Ramsey Lewis arrangement of “Wade in the Water.” Even though there no audience in the hall, and the musicians are wearing masks, their confidence, energy and warmth gives you the mojo to keep on wading in the water until we all get across.