Word: groupness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...group in these two scenes is called Musica Sacra. The conductor is a hearty, frustrated baseball player and onetime concert organist named Richard Westenburg. Musica Sacra is a time whose idea has come. That is, it embodies a period and style of music-the great sacred, choral works, especially of the baroque-that few before had been able to move from church choirs and amateur choruses into a professional concert series. In the past three years, the group (which works with a nucleus of 29 singers and 28 instrumentalists) has given notable performances of such works as Mozart...
Musica Sacra performances have a luminous clarity, not only in the music but in the text. "I'm a word man," says Westenburg, 47. "Very few people can get as excited about a well-phonated vowel or a well-timed consonant as I can." The group's work does not suffer from the chilly immaculateness of many other early-music groups, especially those of the more-authentic-than-thou persuasion...
...earlier markings might as well have been in red ink. Musica Sacra began precariously in 1964 as an outgrowth of concerts Westenburg organized as choirmaster of Manhattan's Central Presbyterian Church. Encouraged because the decision to charge admission had doubled audiences, the group incorporated as an independent entity in 1973 and progressed rapidly toward bankruptcy. The trouble was that Westenburg tried to do everything himself: collect texts, read program proofs, deliver checks to the musicians' union. Finally, with help from the New York State Council on the Arts, he hired an administrator, assembled a board of trustees...
Today, with subscriptions and ticket sales rising, Musica Sacra seems assured of a secure place in the New York concert scene. But only in the New York concert scene. "When you have a group as expensive and cumbersome to move around as ours, you can't just take it out to Davenport, Iowa," says Westenburg. "Our future for expansion lies in records and television, and we're working on both...
Remember The Group - Mary McCarthy's novel about eight college girls and how they grew? Change Vassar to Radcliffe, the '30s to the '50s, take away the wry tone, and you have Rona Jaffe's readable reworking, Class Reunion. The four women in her sorority are archetypes...