In the Chamber Send us off in style this week BY BECCA DEWAN

I’ve been writing this column for a year and have yet to really self-indulge, so you’ll forgive this transgression, but there’s just so much I could tell you about the USM Chamber Singers’ upcoming performance on April 21. I am a senior at USM, and I have been a member of the Chamber Singers for the three years since I transferred to USM.

Under the direction of Dr. Robert Russell, the USM Chamber Singers have big news: Like art rockers Cerberus Shoal, we’re getting ready for our European tour. We leave May 23 (and we’re all counting the days, hours, and minutes until our plane departs). We’ll travel to Salzburg, Venice, and Aix-en-Provence in France. While we have formal concerts planned, and participation at Mass at St. Mark’s in Venice, it will be the impromptu concerts, the street singing, that will round out our experience. We went to Washington, DC, to participate in Mass at the National Cathedral last year, and it was singing in the crypt during a tour of the cathedral that most of the singers will remember forever.

Our final concert before leaving for Europe is next Thursday, at 7:30 p.m., in Corthell Concert Hall in Gorham. We could use a communal goodbye kiss, and have a killer show planned.

The Chamber Singers have long been regarded as one of the stellar choirs in the Southern Maine area, but this year I feel like we’re actually earning that recognition. Discussion began more than a year ago about touring Europe this spring, and we’ve been looking toward that goal this entire year. In preparation for the multiple concerts we’ll be singing, we have even opted to memorize our music.

"Big deal," you say? Ha! While some of the pieces we sing are tonal and homo-rhythmic, others are more . . . 20th century. When you come to our concert next Thursday, be sure to listen for "In Pace," by Rene Clausen, and you’ll understand what I mean about the difficulty of memorizing some of these pieces. But it’s worth it.

Being touchy-feely is a necessity for being part of a choir. Choirs go on bonding retreats, have pot-luck dinners, talk about how the music feels during rehearsals and after concerts, and give backrubs before singing. How many instrumental ensembles do you know that do all of the above? What would the PSO say if Toshi instructed his players to stand in a circle and rub their neighbor’s shoulders? Music making of all types is psychological, but I feel this holds even more truth in the realm of singing.

Choral singing is all about connection: connecting with each other, with the conductor, with the audience, and most importantly, with the music. By memorizing our music, we have allowed ourselves to be more available for connections of all types, thus elevating our music to a higher level.

I know we connected with an audience in Damariscotta. At the fourth concert in our day-long tour of Maine in early April, we sang at the Baptist Church, sharing the stage with a wonderful high-school choir. The simple, box-like design of the church made it a phenomenal singing space. The concert was magical. Women in the front row pantomimed fainting, old men grinned broadly, and singers and audience members alike had tears gleaming in their eyes.

So you’ll understand if I get all worked up about having the privilege of singing three Bruckner motets in his native Austria. So much of choral music, especially what the Chamber Singers sing, originated in Europe. While a tour of China or Africa would be fascinating, touring Europe is special because we’re visiting the history of our music. History becomes tangible in Europe, not some vague list of names, dates, and facts.

However, singing in foreign countries can be nerve-wracking when singing in their native language. Debussy’s Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans is a voluptuous setting of three poems by 15th-century poet Charles d’Orleans performed in their original French. But the possibility of having our accents critiqued by actual French speakers is well worth it because these pieces are simply marvelous. They have been at the center of my conducting lessons with Dr. Russell, and I will be honored and thrilled to conduct them on our tour. Really.

What European audiences enjoy hearing from American choirs is American music, according to our esteemed director. We have in our repertoire two types of American music: art songs and spirituals (hopefully that’s a fair classification). The wonderful Eric Whitacre’s "Lux Aurumque" and USM’s former resident composer (and former writer of this column) J. Mark Scearce’s "Be Anxious for Nothing" are in the former category. We perform a number of spirituals, including our show-stopper "Ezekiel Saw de Wheel," arranged by William Dawson. Not in either category, my favorite piece is Gustav Holst’s setting of the Nunc Dimitis text.

Among the many reasons people sing in their showers is the fact that almost everyone sounds good in the bathroom. It doesn’t take an acoustical engineer to recognize sound reverberating off hard walls creates a sound much fuller than anyone could produce on his or her own. Rooms with such acoustics are like a rich cheesecake for a choir. We’ll be dining daily on cheesecake in Europe. Check out the menu at our farewell show.

Becca DeWan can be reached at beccadewan@mac.com