From the November 3, 2007 issue of The Cape Cod Times
[Margaret Bossi is the music teacher at Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School.]

Chorale sings Bossi's praises

Photo by Paul Blackmore / Cape Cod Times

By NORTH CAIRN
STAFF WRITER
November 03, 2007

It's barely 7:30 on a balmy Cape autumn night. The headlamps of cars probe the dusk with long cones of light, interrupting the darkness, as drivers wend their way into the parking lot of Cape Cod Covenant Church at Airline and Satucket roads in Brewster at the Dennis line.

Indoors, 100-plus members of the Chatham Chorale already are running fast scales under the instruction of artistic director Margaret Bossi.

A few stragglers - not even late yet - scuttle in.

"Let's SIGH," Bossi calls out, mimicking the act as she says the word. "And back rubs."

One by one, the singers turn and massage the shoulders of the person next to them. It's all part of the warm-up for the 2 1/2-hour rehearsals that begin at this hour every Thursday night, mandatory.

Twenty-three days away from the concert. Five minutes into practice.

"You're going to try to look as if you're not seeing this for the first time," Bossi says, alerting her chorus that downtime is over. "Too slow on 'over you,'" she coaxes as they resume singing. "Go right over it. Not 'ee-you,' not 'ee-you.' 'You.'

"Nice, basses, that's good." They move on, striving for something like perfection on "Why I Wake Early: Eight Poems of Mary Oliver For Mixed Chorus, String Quartet and Piano," by Northampton composer Ronald Perera. A close friend and longtime musical colleague of Bossi's, Perera was commissioned by the Chatham Chorale and the New Amsterdam Singers of New York City to write the piece, which is being performed first on the Cape to celebrate Bossi's 20th year directing the chorale.

"No," Bossi chides the singers. "It sounds so growly. It sounds like you're talking to your dog ... Altos, no honking down in that range. Shhhh!" she hisses at some talkers in the bass section.

She is not kidding around. Twenty-two minutes into rehearsal, the temperature in the sanctuary is up five degrees. Minimum.

Bossi, her glasses perched in her silver hair, urges them on, snapping her fingers constantly to indicate the underlying beat, the pulse of the music.

"Tenors," she calls over the voices. "You're singing an A. That's pretty stinky. I do not want you singing the note on the page. I want you singing a D." Snap, snap, snap, her arm rising and dipping. "If you can't sing a D, now is the time to keep your mouth shut, because you do not want to reveal that you don't know where a D is."

8:02 p.m. Bossi steals a glance at her watch while her arm sweeps the air. She's feeling the time crunch, the pressure of "the thousands of notes each of you has to learn."

Temperature still rising from the exertion of the raised voices of this many people, even in a good-sized chapel.

"To believe in everything," Bossi reads from the score. "Bah-leev. Wahnts. Whith - that would be best with just a little 'h.' It's not difficult, but it's difficult if we have to start at zero every week. I want to hear us as a unit."

She stops, has the chorus speak the words before singing them. "It's got to sound like English," she explains, then starts them in again.

"Good," she nods, more satisfied. "It's getting better, guys."

"Hwhite hed-on," she calls, sounding out the syllables which, when sung, will sound like "white heron" to the audience. "I think you have to have the image in your mind," she continues, theatrically moving her hands and arms in the exaggerated padding strut of a heron in the shallows. "We gotta move on."

"'The dream of my life' - Page 26. When we left this last week, it was darn near perfect," Bossi tells the group. "So you know how it goes. It's very hushed. You're all singing way too loud."

Hushed. The energy, the sounds of angels in praise.

8:30 p.m. Five degrees hotter.

"And ... turn," Bossi says. One hundred fifteen pages of music flip at once. "Quieter turning," she says, never missing a beat.

Perhaps not angels, then. Not yet.

But still heavenly.

* * *

This kind of music doesn't just happen; it's the product of hours of score preparation and study, practice and commitment. Eight hours a week is consumed with rehearsals, "encountering the chorale," as Bossi describes it later in an interview at her home in Dennis. And "never think a rehearsal is supposed to be a democratic process. I'm their benevolent dictator."

Over and above rehearsal time are the seemingly countless hours spent in preparation. "Just deciding what you're going to sing takes a tremendous amount of time," she says. "And you kind of have to learn all four parts."

For Bossi, now 60, the chorale is just one of a number of jobs. For the last nine years, she also has taught sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders about 15 hours a week at Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School in Orleans, and from 1985 through 2003 she was musical director of St. David's Episcopal Church in South Yarmouth. Three months ago, she assumed the roles of choir director and organist at Dennis Union Church, a position that puts her and her musical endeavors up close and personal with the community in which she lives. "Now," she says, "the people I see in the post office, I see in church."

On the back wall of the Cape Cod Covenant Church sanctuary, at which the chorale regularly practices, hangs a banner, "Grow Where You Are Planted" - an accidental synchronicity with the quality of Bossi's tenure with the group. After serving as acting director in 1985-86, she took on the leadership of the chorale in the 1987-88 season, blossoming where she found herself - in a growing choral group.

She never looked back. Since then, she happily has "really put in ... time convincing people that singing and being in a chorus is really worthwhile," she says. Bossi has extended herself into virtually every aspect of the Cape choral and classical music scene. "I really like being rooted in my community," she says.

And that she has become - like a taproot in the choral-music spheres of Cape Cod. She has guided the Chatham Chorale from a town chorus to a prestigious regional group with a strong and dependable financial base. Additionally, she has helped keep the 25-member Chatham Chorale Chamber Singers a vital musical force. She has initiated collaborations with other musical organizations, including the Cape Cod and New Bedford Symphony orchestras, as well as been instrumental in creating new ones, such as the chorale's 25-member orchestra, Cape Sinfonietta.

"It was Maggie's idea" for the orchestra and the chorale to work together, says Russell Patterson, who co-founded the Sinfonietta with Bossi. "She's a first-class musician," and she has the kind of personality that gets "people - people who aren't really pros - to sing almost better than they're capable of," he says.

"It's a joy to be around her," says Russell, himself a longtime innovator who founded the Lyric Opera of Kansas City (Mo.) and the revived Kansas City Symphony, and retired with his wife to Centerville in 1998. Bossi, he says, "gets the best out of people ... in a kind, loving way."

Some might call it tough love. As a conductor, she comes off a little bit drill instructor, a little bit mother - disciplined, strict and supportive. She eases the work for her all-volunteer chorus with liberal doses of humor (stopping one recent rehearsal to lead the chorus in a rousing rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" to celebrate the Red Sox pennant victory), but no one could get the idea that the chorale's practice is anything other than serious business.

"It's not like herding sheep but keeping them in line," she says of directing the chorale. "And I have much less tolerance about wasting time than I used to."

Music fills "well over 40 hours" of work a week for Bossi, so that by the time she is in her car or at her home - a converted barn near Corporation Beach - she is ready for a break. "I kind of want to give my brain a little rest," she says, so she keeps time at home "pretty serene and quiet."

Married for 32 years to Arnold, a retired Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School teacher, Bossi enjoys close relationships with her three sons and a daughter, with whom she speaks by phone nearly every day, and her two sisters, both New Englanders. Born in Croton-on-Hudson, which lies at the convergence of the Croton and Hudson rivers, Bossi and her family enjoyed suburban village life in the greater New York metropolitan area, punctuated by summers on Chebeague Island, Maine.

Her mother was a high school English teacher, "a powerhouse ... a real dynamo," says Bossi, who from all accounts has followed in those footsteps. She remembers her mother most vividly doing practical work around the house, "fixing things and repairing things" - another trait Bossi has embraced, relishing those opportunities in her very full life when she has had the time for hands-on projects like wallpapering and painting. Her mother's attitude, Bossi says, was "do it and do it yourself," a good balance to her publicist father's "drifty and dreamy and not particularly practical" personality.

Bossi's interest in music was sparked early when, as a child, she tagged along to a friend's piano lessons, watched, listened and taught herself how to play. She took up the clarinet at age 8 and kept with it through graduate school, adding viola da gamba during her 20s and organ, which, of course, she still plays regularly. As a teenager, she "got sent to an incredible music camp" - Greenwood in Cummington, Mass. - "sent kicking and screaming," she acknowledges now. But it was probably the single most formative music experience she had during her childhood, until she began studying at Smith College in Northampton.

"I so thought I was going to be an academic," she recalls. "I just never wanted to leave Smith." After she earned her Bachelor of Arts in music in 1969 and a master's degree in music in 1971, she did leave, working for three years before embarking on a doctoral program at Brandeis University in Waltham. She never finished, she says; the idea of writing a dissertation held no appeal.

But she has no regrets about the turns her life has taken. "Oh God, no," she says. "There are certain times of the year that I get pretty frazzled," but for the most part the different aspects of her life blend in a harmonious way, she says, rather than leaving her feeling fractured.

"I've always thought of myself as a musical entrepreneur," she says. "It's my temperament. And it's my good fortune to have these great jobs."

All else aside, the work required of a conductor is hard, physical labor - all that waving of arms and controlled, expansive breathing. Because of it, "conductors live a long time," Bossi says. "And I spend a lot of time at the gym ... four or five times a week for an hour ... a lot of vigorous exercise, and especially weightlifting. You can't stop the sagging," she says. "But you can stay steady on your pins. That's what I want."

During her 20 years with the chorale, things have "changed a lot," she says, but "the enthusiasm and the commitment are a constant. It's a very different landscape, even musically, than it was 20 years ago. There are more choruses. I don't see that we're competing for singers so much," but "we're competing for audiences more."

Mastering those changing conditions has required Bossi's own commitment to cultivate the most and best talent she can evoke from herself and her chorus - to produce "well-trained, extremely competent choral singers. And I do believe that things will always work out. To think otherwise is to be really weak.

"I know I'm a strong personality," she says unapologetically. "And I've been on a real tear with the chorale lately ... I'm ambitious for them to wring as much out of me as they can. I love these people so much, and I keep loving a new bunch of people" every time there's turnover in the chorus.

"She is very good at energizing the chorale," says pianist Donald Enos, of Brewster, who serves as accompanist for the chorale and has been with the group since Bossi came onboard two decades ago.

As an accompanist, he finds Bossi "easy to follow," a conductor who "physically ... can convey what the music is about. It's a matter of precision, too."

That precision and energy have led Bossi and the chorale to take on challenging - and rewarding - works through the years. She has cherished the collaborations with the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra and the recent performance of the chorale with the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra in the Mozart Requiem.

As for the future, "I don't know," Bossi muses. "I think I'll just keep doing this till it doesn't feel like a good fit anymore." But, for now, she is counting her blessings. "I still can't believe that they pay me to do this job," she says. "It's great."