Maestro Bailey Conducts Auxiliary Workshop for Local Edmonton Choirs

In conjunction with his guest appearance conducting Edmonton’s professional choir “Pro Coro Canada” in a concert of Ukrainian sacred music titled “Heart of Kyiv,” acclaimed Slavic music expert Mark Bailey also held a workshop for local Edmonton choirs on Saturday, January 30^th, 2010. At the invitation of Pro Coro’s acting CEO, Mr. Russ Mann, the day-long workshop was organized by the Ukrainian Music Society of Alberta and co-ordinated by Dr. Melanie Turgeon, who supplied practice scores and provided logistical support at her home campus of King’s University College. It was attended by nearly eighty choristers, conductors, and music teachers from numerous Ukrainian community and church ensembles in Edmonton, including St. Basil’s, St. Elias, St. George’s, St. John’s, St. Josaphat’s, Axios, Dnipro, Ukrainian Male Chorus, and Verkhovyna.

The official introduction of Maestro Bailey and an overview of his stellar career were given by Mrs. Luba Boyko-Bell, President of the Ukrainian Music Society of Alberta. Whereupon he embarked upon a highly professional presentation to support his general theme, that “Ukrainian composers changed the shape of liturgical music throughout Eastern Europe, particularly Russia,” starting in the 17th–18th Centuries.

He described how the monodic znamenny chants inherited from Byzantium and Bulgaria developed into the “more tuneful and characteristically Slavic” Kyivan and other indigenous chants, and subsequently how Western influences began to appear in three-part kanty, which arrived in Ukraine via Poland. Mr. Bailey called it a kind of “religious folk music,” and related that much of it was paraliturgical, often performed on the steps of the church after a festal liturgy. The kanty became very popular among the laity, being strongly rhythmic in melodic composition as well as strophic in structure, allowing entire stories and legends to be told in a harmonized musical setting. One of the best-known early composers of full-fledged part-sung liturgical pieces at this time was Mykola Dyletsky.

At each stage of the historical journey narrated by Mr. Bailey, workshop attendees were given the opportunity to hear recorded examples of the types of compositions being described, and to try singing them from the supplied scores. Thus, in addition to basking in his extensive knowledge of the subject, all members of this ad hoc chorus enjoyed the privilege of making music together under his able guidance. The results were at times quite lovely indeed!

Charting a remarkable course of the evolution of Eastern Slavic sacred music over just a century and a half, Mr. Bailey rounded off his lecture by focusing on the Ukrainian composers Berezovsky, Vedel, and Bortniansky. Exposed as they were to prevalent contemporary developments in Western Europe, particularly Italy, these “Ukrainian boys,” who often started their careers as singers in the Imperial Russian Court Kapell, took sacred liturgical music to new heights with contrapuntal polyphonic composition.

As workshop attendees prepared to sing a few works by these representatives of Ukraine’s “Golden Era” of classical music, Mr. Bailey exhorted them to “forget about Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninov, and even Beethoven” - all of whom did not yet exist in the 18th Century. He invited them to consider, for example, that Bortniansky’s well-known hymn “Iak slaven Nash” ideally takes the form of a Baroque minuet, giving due consideration to the temporal context in which it was composed.

For this and many other insights into the contribution by Ukrainian composers to the development of Slavic liturgical music in the Eastern Churches, Mr. Bailey received the profound gratitude and enthusiastic admiration of the workshop attendees. No doubt they will long remember this very worthwhile, informative, and inspiring event, and will happily look forward to another visit to Edmonton by this uniquely talented conductor and scholar in the not-too-distant future.