The Now Chorale presented their spring concert Tuesday in the Carnegie Building Root Room, featuring six works by current Oberlin students. The chorale—made up of Conservatory, College, and community singers—is a relatively new student-led music group, formed in fall 2023, that rehearses and performs contemporary music. 

Founder, musical director, and Conservatory third-year Mathew Brown expressed his excitement in founding a group that combines his two passions: contemporary and choral music. 

“Sometimes contemporary classical music is written off as a little too academic,” Brown said. “I think when it has a text, it becomes more accessible. I’m so lucky that I found[ed] this group [that has grown to] now 20-something singers who are willing to explore repertoire and challenge each other.”

All of the works for this semester’s concert were interpretations of poems and texts originally written by students, some Creative Writing majors, as well.

“I’m a composer,” Brown said. “I don’t paint. I don’t really write profound poetry, but I share a community with people who do. And I think taking advantage of that is something we ought to do.” 

Conservatory fourth-year Zola Saadi-Klein outlined what the process looked like for their piece “Shadows and stars fell from your shoulders onto mine.”

“It was written using the words of a poem that my housemate wrote,” Saadi-Klein said. “It reminded me of a snow globe, capturing a little traveling person or being in this snowy landscape and watching the sun over the horizon.” 

This experience of having a choral work premiered exposed Saadi-Klein to the intricacies of the composer–conductor relationship. Additionally, they reflected on the experience of hearing their composition live for the first time. 

“I’ve only been in some of the later rehearsals, so I learned that conductors don’t want you coming in at the very start, and that can be scary,” Saadi-Klein said. “It’s always crazy to hear it live versus in your head or on the computer, especially because the computer doesn’t speak text, so you’re just hearing, ‘Ah.’ To hear the words, the harmonies, and to see people make it come alive is a really exciting experience.”

Double-degree fourth-year Katya Mueller had the unique opportunity to both write an original text and create its musical interpretation.

“[‘Sleep’] is a conversation between the self and the anxious thoughts that one might have when trying to fall asleep,” Mueller said. “I wrote it for a friend who was going through a really hard time and was just constantly in this churning wheel of thoughts that would not let them rest. I am a Creative Writing major and a Composition major, though often they remain separate. If I’m writing poetry, I’m not thinking about the musical setting, and usually my musical works don’t have text, but in this case I wrote them actually at the same time.”

Majoring in Creative Writing and Musical Studies, College third-year Max Lang happened to be in the same boat.

“I went to the Allen [Memorial Art Museum] for an English assignment to pick a piece of art and write a poem about it,” Lang said. “In one of the exhibits, there were two TVs playing videos of cityscapes. [They] utilized pictures of Tokyo, London, Beijing — all sorts of cities around the world. And in the back, there were these cliffs that had little lights in them. They were buildings and cliffs at the same time. Midway through the video the northern lights appear and all of the motion in the streets completely ceases. It’s meant to be reminiscent of the way the world fell out of motion during the COVID-19 pandemic.” 

In only a short few years, Brown has turned a passion project into a structured organization with official recognition as a chartered student organization by the College.

“Beyond budget, it gives the infrastructure for the leadership to be passed into new hands through an election process and that’s a great relief to me,” Brown said. “I love what we’ve done here, and I think this organization can serve student composers — from conducting and learning how to lead rehearsal to directing performances.”

When prompted to share one final thought, Brown said, “I think whatever your idea of what choir music is, it could probably be wider.”