For conductor Suzi Digby OBE, every piece of music opens a door to a different world. As the founder of VOCE Chamber Choir, she is passionate about introducing singers and audiences to new repertoire while encouraging composers to develop their own musical voices. On 13 November, she will lead VOCE in Voices: Choral Works from America, the closing concert of the London Festival of American Music.
O Waly, Waly. A Somerset folk song arranged by Nicholas Hare (performed by VOCE)
The program brings together contemporary choral works by Eric Whitacre, Caroline Shaw, Frank Ticheli, Nico Muhly, Reena Esmail, and Michael Gordon, among others. It also features Odaline de la Martínez’s Three Afro-Cuban Poems, reflecting Digby’s interest in using music to build connections between cultures.
Born in Japan, Digby grew up in several countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, where she lived from 1980 to 1992. In Hong Kong, she worked at RTHK Radio 4 and the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. She hosted Art World Presents, the region’s first arts primetime television series, interviewing visiting artists such as Luciano Pavarotti and André Previn.
Her connection to choral music began in childhood, when she sang soprano in church alongside her father, a tenor. In 1990, she received a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study choral training and music education in Finland, Hungary, Canada, and the United States. She later established herself as a conductor and educator in the UK, founding The ORA Singers, which commissions and performs new choral music, and VOCE Chamber Choir.
Suzi Digby
Such openness toward diverse experiences shows in her work with composers. Digby encourages both young and graduate composers to develop their own individuality. “I want them to be experimental,” she said, advising them to take risks and explore various musical languages.
For Digby, originality also means going past music that is simply pleasing. “Music has to go deeper than just something pretty,” she said. She values compositions that challenge listeners, believing music should be “either beautiful or powerful,” rather than merely sweet.
Suzi Digby
As she talked through Voices: Choral Works from America, Digby held up scores to the camera, her eyes beaming up while she described the music. The works she discussed presented a glimpse of the program’s variety and the different ways composers approach text and sound.
She explained that “each piece forms its own world, its own universe”; you have to enter that world and then look at the text to pay respect to what the composer has achieved and discover a sound world.
Caroline Shaw’s And the Swallow, one of the works Digby discussed, sets Psalm 84 against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis. Digby described the eight vocal parts as sounding like autumn rain, with birdsong emerging near the end. Jake Runestad’s Nyon Nyon offers a striking contrast, with energetic rhythms and unusual, technology-inspired vocal effects.
Jake Runestad’s Nyon Nyon
Other selections reveal further approaches to choral writing. Nico Muhly’s Prosperitie takes a more restrained approach, setting words from an early English translation of the Bible. Nick Strimple’s I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, from Water Music (2019), creates an underwater world through aleatoric passages, allowing the voices to interact as though the mermaids are singing to one another.
Digby also discussed Odaline de la Martínez’s Three Afro-Cuban Poems, commissioned by Digby for the ORA Singers as part of her Cultural Bridges series. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, the series seeks to bring cultures together through meaningful musical exchange. Drawing on her Afro-Cuban roots, de la Martínez created a lively, rhythmic work that even uses a donkey’s jawbone as percussion.
The program also includes Frank Ticheli’s Earth Song, Reena Esmail’s TaReKiTa, Eric Whitacre’s setting of Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and Dolly Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning. It concludes with Richard Smallwood’s gospel work Total Praise. To honour gospel’s musical traditions, Digby invited UK gospel conductor Ken Burton to teach the work to VOCE and conduct it himself.
As VOCE closes the London Festival of American Music with Voices: Choral Works from America, Digby brings together music formed by a wide range of ideas and traditions. Through this varied repertoire, she hopes to give singers and audiences opportunities to encounter unfamiliar musical worlds and discover the connections choral music can create across cultures.
To learn more about Suzi Digby, VOCE and the upcoming concert Voices: Choral Works from America, please visit: https://www.vocechamberchoir.org.uk.
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