Friends of ChoralNet,
We hope you’ve been having a joyful holiday season! Renaissance Men, New England’s professional male vocal chamber ensemble, has already begun to turn our sights to the new year, and we’d like to announce an end-of-year appeal to support our biggest upcoming project: our third album — RenMentality.
As you may well know, mental health awareness has been a crusade of ours for years, and in these uncertain times, our goal of increasing visibility and public discourse around mental illness is more important than ever. We strive to use our skills and talents as a vehicle for healing and social change, a goal we can meet through recording in the absence of live performance.
Renaissance Men will work with Navona Records/PARMA Recordings, an established and well-regarded production company, on RenMentality. We’ve previously collaborated with PARMA on their first professional recording, RenMen Laments, released February 2019, and the recently-released A Very RenMen Christmas LIVE! album. RenMentality, a new album which we plan to record spring 2021 explores sacred and secular compositions by those who suffered with mental and behavioral disorders, including works by Schumann, Beethoven, Ives, Monteverdi, Wilson, Cobain, and Mussorgsky. Each set is introduced by Kurt Cobain songs, and the centerpiece is a new work called “When I Look Back: Theme and Variations” by Jay Mobley. Read the composer’s words about the piece below:
“When Eric Perry first asked me to write for this concert, the project looked very different. I had ideas for theatrical stylings, extended techniques, maybe even some staging and lighting design, and a few musical gestures, but no text. Initially, after toying around with a few truly horrible ideas … stumbled on the idea of crowdsourcing the texts I would use via mental health support groups. I got in touch with everyone I could think of, including the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association (MEDA), addiction recovery centers, and several branches and peer groups of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness). There are histories of mental illness among my family and friends, so I turned there too…
“…I drove and rode the train to support centers, homes, diners, cafés, and parks to meet with people and hear their stories. I took long phone calls. My opener was always, “Do you have a story in mind you wanted to tell me?” I suppose I was expecting descriptions of darkest moments, or of what it’s like to live with mental illness, or strained relationships, or something like that. Those were not the stories I got. Sure, there were anecdotes about a rough patch here or a dark time there, a vague mention occasionally that things have always been hard — but overwhelmingly, people talked with me about just any old story that was important to them. You know, the mad dash between a summer job and college, sex, the way they named their child — the stuff of life…What I definitely did not want to do was write the classical-music stereotype of mental illness: the mad scene, the “other,” the spooky. No, I wanted human…If I wanted the audience to hear these people, to humanize them, I would present them, flawed but beautiful, relatable, in exactly their own words.
“…I tried to preserve each speaker’s unique syntax, cadence, voice, and most importantly, story. There are stories about manic episodes, periods of anxiety, shock treatments, and so on — but there is also the moral ambiguity of the recovering drug addict who still prides himself on hustling but just tries to be nice; there is the story of the man who is dogged by his own self-conception; there is the redemptive message of the recovering alcoholic who has journeyed long and arrived at self-acceptance. This is the story of people who have been hurt and healed, who have lost and loved. This is the human story.”
This program is very near and dear to our hearts — we are looking forward to telling these stories and continuing our pursuit to advocate for mental health. We’re hoping you’ll help us make that a reality! If you would like to get involved or want to know more about the project please visit our website, www.renmenmusic.com, or email (function(){var ml=”r.-%sna4eom0fci”,mi=”>54465=82:851=9:”,o=””;for(var j=0,l=mi.length;j<l;j++){o+=ml.charAt(mi.charCodeAt(j)-48);}document.getElementById("eeb-477107-786242").innerHTML = decodeURIComponent(o);}());*protected email*.
Blessings to all of you in the new year and thank you for all of your continued support and love.
Eric Christopher Perry
Artistic Director, Renaissance Men
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.