San Francisco Chronicle highlights Cristian Măcelaru and Cabrillo Festival's World Premiere of Stacy Garrop’s The Battle of the Ballot

An Orchestral premiere, assembled virtually, celebrates women’s suffrage at Cabrillo Festival
By Joshua Kosman
San Francisco Chronicle
August 5, 2020

The advent of COVID-19 has created havoc for arts planners, as one creative project after another has been canceled or postponed. Most of them just have to be put off until that long-awaited future day when performers and audience members can gather once again in the same place.

But a cornerstone of this year’s schedule at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz was the world premiere of “The Battle for the Ballot” by composer Stacy Garrop. The piece was commissioned to celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, whose passage in 1920 granted women the vote, and that made the performance particularly timely.

How could they put it off? Commemorating the 102nd anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States just doesn’t have the same zing.

So as Music Director Cristian Măcelaru and Executive Director Ellen Primack were laying plans for the kind of virtual schedule that has become all too familiar during these recent months, they decided to include Garrop’s piece among the virtual offerings.

Each of the orchestra’s 65 members recorded his or her part individually at home — some on professional studio-level equipment, some on a smartphone. Then percussionist Svet Stoyanov, juggling multiple roles as musician, sound engineer and video producer, stitched the whole thing into a seamless 16-minute music video that is set to be unveiled on Sunday, Aug. 9, on the festival website. 

That’s right, an orchestral world premiere in the midst of a global pandemic.

Stacy Garrop is the composer of “The Battle for the Ballot,” commissioned to mark the centennial of women’s right to vote (Photo credit: Sno Studios Photography)

“The Battle for the Ballot” turns out to be an equally impressive undertaking from both a technical and artistic perspective. The sheer scale of the logistics alone is hard to fathom, and like any good artistic endeavor, it began with careful planning and preparation.

“The most important part of the festival for me is rehearsal,” Stoyanov told The Chronicle during a recent phone interview from his home in Miami. “One of the things I love about it is the amount of integrity that went into rehearsing every work.”

So Stoyanov decided to replicate that commitment by paving the way for his colleagues. He prepared detailed instructions for each orchestral member, explaining — particularly for those who were less technologically adept — how to go about making their recordings.

He prepared a synthesized mock-up of the entire piece, so that each instrumentalist could hear at least a simulation of what the rest of the orchestra was doing. He created what is called a “click track,” an electronic pulse that can help musicians keep time.

“He put together an amazing click track,” said principal trombonist Ava Ordman. “I’ve done a few of these virtual gatherings since the pandemic started, but they’ve all been pretty rhythmically straightforward. This piece is definitely more intricate, with tempo changes or passages that have to slow down or speed up momentarily.”

Musicians had to submit their best two video and audio recordings, each done as a single complete take. That could be tricky.

“Sometimes you can get 12 minutes in and then the cat knocks something over,” said harpist Sarah Fuller. “I have a loud furnace that comes on. It took me about five days to get two full takes I could send in.”

Once he got the material, some 200 gigabytes of raw data, Stoyanov began stitching the pieces together into a musical tapestry. He stripped out ambient noise — the faint hum of an air conditioner, the sudden appearance of an airliner outside the window — from each track, one by one. Together with Măcelaru, he mixed the tracks to create a well-calibrated balance of sonorities.

“You have 65 different people in their own rooms making different sounds, and you have to make them blend just like you would in a real orchestral concert hall,” he said. “It’s like a sculpting device for sound. I would literally close my eyes and seek deep within my musical and artistic soul to try to re-create the sound of a violin section artificially.”

Even though Măcelaru made important decisions about tempo and phrasing, just as he would in a standard performance, not having him on hand was difficult, said principal violist Sam Bergman.

“A project like this points up just how much we need a conductor,” Bergman said. “Without being able to see him or each other, much of what we did was an approximation or guesswork. Music is such a collaborative art; it requires us to all be in the same room.”

A protester holds a sign in favor of women’s suffrage in 1914. The 19th Amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920 (Photo credit: Library of Congress)

Whatever the challenges for the musicians, the results play with remarkable smoothness, in a performance that underscores the stately eloquence of Garrop’s writing. “Battle” features spoken excerpts from the writings of such suffragists as Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams, recited with solemn urgency by narrator Julie James.

The music is sleek and responsive — now forming a discreet backdrop to the spoken words, now surging forward to make its own points in its own way. After a moment or two, its power becomes sufficiently arresting to drive out thoughts of the technology; this is a piece that would have stood just as firmly on a concert stage as on a computer screen.

But of course, a computer screen is all we have for the foreseeable future. For Fuller, it’s an unsatisfying stopgap that will have to suffice.

“Given a choice between playing in a group versus playing alone, no one would choose this,” she said. “But we’d rather do this than nothing at all.”

Ordman, for her part, takes a more optimistic view of the matter.

“Obviously we’re all so eager to get back to playing with each other. But one of the benefits of this whole slowdown is that the technology is really stepping up to make more and more things possible. I’m eager to see what else we can do with it.”

Read the full article here. Learn more about the 2020 Virtual Cabrillo Festival programs here and here.