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View ProfilesPublished April 19, 2023 at 10:00 a.m.
Social Band are a group of singers who usually sing a cappella — that is, with no band in sight. If you're having a hard time wrapping your brain around their name, artistic director Amity Baker advises thinking about it as "a 'band' meaning a group of people: a band of singers, a band of criminals."
The quip is in keeping with the boisterous spirit of Social Band's concerts, as this reporter discovered on Saturday at the group's opening 25th anniversary concert, "Where Does the Music Come From?" (Social Band will reprise the program on Saturday, April 22, at the College Street Congregational Church in Burlington and Sunday, April 23, at the Charlotte Congregational Church.)
The scene was the second floor of the Richmond Free Library, a small room that barely contained the full-throated harmonies of 21 singers plus Baker, who sang soprano whether she was facing her group or the audience. Most sang with their black music folders at their sides, beaming with pure enjoyment.
Their energy was more than matched by the audience — or, rather, the fan base — which hooted after every song and tapped its feet to the catchier tunes. The guy beside me uttered a "Wow" at the end of most of the songs.
Social Band performances can include everything from medieval and Renaissance songs to pieces written in shape note — a simplified musical notation taken up in New England in the early 1800s that uses special shapes for each note in place of key signatures. (At an early rehearsal, the group took its name from a shape-note song titled "Social Band.")
For its anniversary, however, the group wanted to honor four of its own singers who have composed a large part of its repertoire since 1998: Don Jamison, who cofounded Social Band with alto Liz Thompson; Bruce Chalmer, a bass like Jamison; tenor Michael Kellogg, who composes under the name Clyde Powers; and Pete Sutherland, who was considered the leader of American folk singing in Vermont and died on November 30, 2022. Jamison, Chalmer and Kellogg still sing with Social Band.
Typically, half of every concert program consists of new works by Vermonters, Baker noted during a phone interview. The anniversary program features only songs by "the fertile four," as the artistic director dubbed them.
"Between them, they're responsible for 75 of the 100 pieces written by Social Band singers" for the group, she said. The program title comes from the refrain of the final work, "Fiddler's Hymn," a 1985 song by Sutherland.
Sutherland and Kellogg, aka Powers, collaborated on one of the concert's funnier songs, called "Watching That Plant Die," for which the singers passionately conveyed the guilt and shame of failing one's potted plant. A more nostalgic song by Kellogg, called "None of Us," captured the memory of picking up one's children from the bus stop.
Jamison wrote a major work for the Burlington Choral Society, performed in 2021, called There Is a Day, which set to music seven poems by farmer, writer and activist Wendell Berry. For the Social Band program, he wrote a new work, "Here Together," based on another Berry poem. Chalmer's "Clown in the Moon" sets to music the eponymous Dylan Thomas poem. The composer read the verses to the audience ahead of the group's performance — a practice repeated throughout the concert.
"We love a good poem," Baker explained by phone. "We pay a lot of attention to the words of songs. We're a group of people who will sit around and say, 'Well, what does this poem mean, exactly?'"
She added that, as artistic director, she has some influence over what gets sung, "but it's a group of very engaged people. We're very collaborative."
Social Band's singers come mainly from Chittenden County, with a few outliers from Rutland, Bakersfield and Underhill. Their ranks include musicians as well as composers. Alto Elisabeth LeBlanc plays clarinet professionally. New member Patricia Julien, also an alto, is a flutist and music professor at the University of Vermont.
For the most part, however, the singers are ordinary community members: schoolteachers, psychologists, auditors (like Baker). Their performances are utterly without pretense — a pie is raffled off at each concert — and, well, rather social. The group's energy comes partly from the fact that it sings only songs that are specifically written for communal singing — no arrangements here — and brings back favorites often.
"One thing that makes us a little more band-ish than other choruses is that we like to reuse our repertoire," Baker said. "We're not creating a whole new program every time. There's a certain amount of stewardship. We sing songs for years." At the concert, Baker invited the audience to sing along to the final song if they knew it.
After the performance had ended and the enthusiastic applause and whoops had finally died down, my neighbor to the other side neatly summed up Social Band's appeal. "It feels like homegrown music," she said.
The original print version of this article was headlined "In Harmony | Social Band celebrate a quarter century of a cappella camaraderie"
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