Portland State Magazine Spring 2016

SPRING 2016 pORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 11 CROUCHED BEHIND a grand piano in the rehearsal room on the fourth floor of Cramer Hall, Ethan Sperry looks a bit like a cat ready to spring. “One, two, and go ...,” he says, with the “go” in a slightly lower and elongated tone as if invoking a hypnotic trance. The students of the elite Portland State Chamber Choir, who a second ago were joking around, respond immediately by diving into the complex tonality of “The First Tears” by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds. It’s a piece that most of them are singing for the first time. The chords are thick and slightly dissonant. It would take someone with acute auditory senses to figure out what the sound should actually be. Sure enough, right in the middle of a few bars of singing, Sperry stops the choir with a wave of his hand. “The sopranos should be darker than the lower voices. The men have to be brighter. Let’s try that again. One, two, and go …” The singers react quickly, adjusting their sound to Sperry’s demands, but after a few bars, he stops them again. “Keep it alive and tell the story. You are cre- ating a wave as this man tries to land his kayak on an island, but the island is an enormous whale. You are the whale.” Sperry launches the ensemble again, sculpt- ing the air in large gestures with his left hand while playing part of the piece with his right hand on the piano keyboard. CONTINUED spring wr i t t e n b y j ame s bash