Vocal Currency

THE ESOTERICS
St. Joseph's Church and Town Hall, 344-3327, $17 Sat., Oct. 12-Sun., Oct. 13 and Sat., Dec. 14-Sun., Dec. 15

If there are still any local ensembles that avoid 20th-century music using the self-serving rationalization that audiences aren't interested, they should consider the Esoterics, who pack the house performing nothing but contemporary work. This 40-member a cappella choir led by Eric Banks has built a loyal following without the benefit of opera's glamour, chamber music's prestige, or the orchestra's sonic glitter.

The group's two fall concerts will reflect several of Banks' particular enthusiasms. His support for local composers (me, for example; they performed a work of mine in 2001) is unsurpassed by any other Seattle conductor—both concerts will consist of locally commissioned premieres. Banks chose a nine-poem cycle by the Greek philosopher Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.) describing the planets, and another cycle by the Roman poet Manilius (ca. A.D. 10) describing the zodiac, then offered each poem to a different composer to set to music, using the original Greek and Latin. (For the second concert, each composer was assigned a poem matching his or her own zodiac sign.)

Banks likes to program choral works using texts from ancient to modern times, and from as many cultures as possible; Chinese, Sanskrit, and Hungarian turn up regularly on Esoterics' programs. But he also shapes them into an intelligent thematic whole, elegantly expressed in striking one-word titles. The group's first season, 1992-93, consisted of a Christmas concert on the subject of Natus (birth); Missae was a program of musical settings of the traditional Mass text; and Flora gathered music evoking flowers. These themes help make the unfamiliar repertory less forbidding. Other choirs' programs "consisted of a bunch of pieces kind of thrown together, without anything really tying them together," says Banks, "and I watched the audience just sit there and applaud politely—for me, that's not what I wanted to do as an artist. I was interested in having a narrative flow in a concert, so I found myself programming pieces in an order that made sense. . . . I wanted a choral concert to be more like theater or opera."

All this takes a lot of work—Banks is continuously researching old scores and looking over new pieces sent to him by composers from all over the world. The Esoterics is a full-time job for him; he's also the group's business manager. Banks first convened the group while a UW grad student, as a pickup choir to perform on his three required degree recitals. But the singers' enthusiasm, and the niche they filled in the choral scene, persuaded Banks to take the group out of academia: "There were a lot of people interested in the challenge, and there was a possibility of bringing in an audience and actually making something of it," Banks says. "A need was not being met. . . . There were lots of big choirs, but not lots of small choirs, and lots of choirs doing common-practice music, but not a lot doing contemporary music."

Over the years, the Esoterics have experimented with, and refined, every aspect of concert production. The music itself covers the stylistic spectrum from conservative neo-tonal Americana to improvisation and all manner of outr頶ocal techniques. Playing with blocking and stage placement, Banks has arranged singers in circles, horseshoes, in the balconies, and down the aisles—anything to avoid what he calls "the choral blob." During a 1996 concert with the d9 Dance Collective, the singers even danced.

Between pieces, Esoterics members offer poetry or personal reflections further evoking the concert's theme; at one Christmas concert, for example, we heard latke recipes and gossip about composer Francis Poulenc's sexual preference. "It's often the case that people who are good singers are also really good public speakers, so that was part of the audition process—I would look for people who had lots of stage presence. . . . I don't want to call it 'multimedia,' because for me it's all within the medium of sound." Even the posters and programs, the work of Banks' partner David Gellman, are a sophisticated cut above the rest.

But perhaps more than anything else, what's drawn appreciative listeners for 10 years, three CDs, and more than 130 performances, is their concerts' atmosphere of enveloping goodwill, the warm enthusiasm for choral music that Banks and the singers transmit to the audience—who aren't just subscribers, but genuine fans, people who wouldn't dream of missing a concert. The Greek word esoterikos describes a person who belongs to a close-knit community; yet, as Banks puts it, "the whole point of the group is to subvert its name, to turn people onto [contemporary choral music] because it is a really beautiful and rich art form."

gborchert@seattleweekly.com

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