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The Making of Bar Scott's CD "Liturgy"
Tracey Thomas in the New Church Book Center can be given all of the credit for causing Liturgy to happen. She called me in the fall of 2001 and asked if I would be interested in recording hymns from the 1966 Liturgy for those of you who love that generation of New Church hymns. I loved the idea right away for several reasons: 1) it was a project I knew I could handle on my own in my home studio; 2) It was music I wanted to know; 3) music that would introduce me to a part of my husband Peter Schoenberger's life that I did not know; and finally, 4) it was a project that I could hope to make a living from since I could keep the costs manageable by working at home. If all went well, enough copies could be sold to justify a second recording of other hymns from other hymnals. It took my entire life thus far to create this CD in the sense that I grew up singing alto in our neighborhood Episcopal church choir and all of that harmonizing prepared me for this recording. I love the effect that those hymns had on me then and I love the way hymns help me feel to this day. The vocal harmony of hymns is in my blood and I think it's fair to say that much of my current musicality is inspired by my early exposure to church music. Like any project, considerable planning had to be done before the music-making could begin. The first task was to choose which of the hymns to learn. Figuring that out meant asking myself what the purpose of this recording was: who would hear it? What would they like to hear? How did I want to record it - straight out of the book or with embellishments? Because I am not a member of the New Church, I had to understand my personal intention for the record so that I could sing the hymns with integrity. I also had to consider my costs so that I wouldn't sink my ship before I'd even launched the vessel. My answer to the question of my intention for this project was happily resolved by deciding to make this recording a gift to my mother-in-law, Shirley Hyatt Schoenberger, who loves the New Church and Her music. I asked Olma to make a list of her favorite hymns and also asked various friends and family to cast their votes, added a few of my own choices, and the final list was made. I decided to perform the hymns as written with the exception of a few key changes to make it possible for me to sing soprano. As for the money, here's what it cost:
Maybe this is more than you want to know, but if you do the math, you'll figure out that each CD costs me $5.45 to make. You may be wondering, then, why I'm selling them for $16 each? It's a good question. Here's the answer: First of all, it's important to tell you that selling 1000 copies of any CD is very difficult and perhaps impossible in this specific a market. The book center's best selling CD to date has sold around 500 copies over the course of several years. In my 15 years of making music, and with 6 CDs available, I have only sold about 5000 CDs all together. Divide 5000 by 15 years and you'll see why Peter pays our mortgage. Add (or subtract) to that the fact that most of my recordings cost in the neighborhood of $16,000 each to produce and you get an even clearer picture of why any CD costs what it does for you, the consumer, to buy and why Peter also buys our groceries. Finally, don't forget to calculate that when the book store sells my CD for $16, they cover their costs by keeping 5 of those $16; or, if you buy one from my web-site, that my hosts keep 3 of those same $16. And in case you think I'm independently wealthy, I'm not. Each of my CDs has been financed by some credit card company, which I pay back over the course of about two years for each major recording. But I digress... When all the planning was done, I needed a tenor and a bass so I called my friends Jim and Matt Ulrich - a father and his son who make a beautiful sound together. We began recording and quickly learned that things would go much more smoothly if I recorded the alto and soprano parts first and then get them come back to do their parts later. We would do this by using a technique called multi-tracking which allows someone like me to sing more than one part in a song by layering one harmony on top of the other, or, in this case, for Jim and Matt to sing after I had sung my parts. That's when I realized that without another living, breathing female person to sing alto with me (the soprano), this project would never get done. I called Kirsti Gholson who had recently moved to Woodstock and was the obvious person for me to ask. She knows these hymns the way I know the Episcopal hymns, and her input was invaluable. She pointed out several mistakes we'd made in the piano parts, she inspired me to get things done by showing up day after day to sing, and she brought to these hymns the emotional attachment that I did not yet have. I'm guessing that the five of us spent about 55 hours recording, and that I spent another 50 hours or so on my own in post-production for what turns out to be 35 minutes of music. Lots of mistakes were made along the way and the learning curve for me in my studio was rather steep. In many ways it's a miracle that any of this was finished. The first big mistake was that Joshua Pearl performed and recorded the piano parts in his own studio without my being around. He did not grow up singing hymns, so he didn't know the natural cadence churchgoers feel when singing hymns together. As a result, the hymns with multiple verses had no space at the end of each verse in which to take a breath, so we had to digitally add that time at each of the relevant spots. At the same time that we made those phrasing changes, we made some tempo adjustments too after I played all of the piano performances for a very patient Chara Daum, along with Dale and Gray Glenn, over a speaker phone from Woodstock, NY to Kempton, PA late one Wednesday night. When I thought I was just about done with the whole project, I recorded "Heavenly Father" by myself - which is to say, I sang soprano, alto and tenor. When I played it for Peter hoping that he would love the way it sounded, he said "Bar it's got to have the bass line, it's just one of those pieces". I was heartbroken and frustrated. And he was right. Jim, the bass, was out of town and I didn't know another bass, so I asked Peter if he wanted to give it a try. He bravely agreed, and then quickly learned that singing in front of a microphone is not as easy as it looks. It wasn't going to work. When he left my studio, I decided to give it a try myself. HA! As it turned out, Jim saved me by coming back from vacation in time to come around and sing that prayer for me, but if you listen closely, you'll still hear me singing bass along with him on the CD. In the end, the piece did not sound right with 3 of my voices and one of Jim's, so I used my bass part to blend his better performance into the whole. The final embarrassment happened after singing all of the parts of "Heavenly Father", "The Lord is My Shepherd" and "Come Unto Me" by myself, and then recording Jim's bass parts just days before this project had to be done in order to be duplicated in time for our concert at MPAC on September 27. I had asked my engineer friend Dave Cook to come by and listen to these last three hymns and help me figure out why they sounded so different from the other 12. His discovery was that I had sung these last few hymns into the wrong side of my microphone! YIKES! No wonder it didn't sound right. And you can probably guess what that meant: I had to re-record those three hymns on the last possible day in order to get the CD done on time. Again, if you listen closely, you'll hear the difference on those hymns because I was unable to get Jim back to redo his bass lines. His voice sounds further away than mine - like he's singing in a different room than me. Like I said: the learning curve was steep! So here we are now, 3 weeks away from our CD release concert that will take place in The Mitchell Performing Arts Center in Bryn Athyn on September 27. My thoughts for the event were to integrate spoken word into the concert's program so that it became more than just a performance of the hymns. The words we will speak have been adapted from a script put together by Barbara Pickhardt, conductor and musical director of Ars Choralis, Woodstock's local choir. Her script is a collection of inspiring quotes, thoughts and prayers from teachers throughout our history and from all walks of life. My intention is to allow the hymn's music to inspire us just as our teachers do with their wisdom. It feels right to put these beautiful hymns in a worldly context so that they speak not only to you who are members of the New Church but also to those who know nothing about the New Church. For me, these hymns are so perfectly inspired that they speak to everyone just as all great Art does. I hope that New Church members will be inspired by their faith which is reflected in these wonderful hymns; and that those who do not know the Church or who may be distant from it, will be inspired too. As a final word, I would like to express my gratitude to the composers and lyricists who created these hymns and who allowed this music to come through them, and in turn, have given it to all of us.
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Some projects take a long time to begin and then an even longer time to
finish. Recording Liturgy was definitely one of those projects. In a way, it
has taken my entire lifetime to do it; practically speaking: two years from
start to finish.
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