Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and no, that's not The Brian Lehrer Show theme. That's a little snippet of some of the sounds from a new site-specific choral work set at the Brooklyn Navy Yard this week called Port(al). That's P-O-R-T and then parentheses around the A-L. We'll explain.

Now we're talking a lot about history this year in our ongoing centennial series on the show, in which we examine the past 100 years of all kinds of topics and often how that history influences our lives today, right? In this last part of our show today, we'll look at another approach to history, this new immersive choral work being performed by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus in the Navy Yard's Agger Fish Building on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

To talk more about this work, the parentheses in the title included, and about what Port(al) has to say about the Navy Yard's past, our future and more, we're joined by our old friend, composer, musician, and storyteller, Jad Abumrad. You probably know him best as the creator and former co-host of WNYC's Radiolab, but he's here today to talk about this new project as co-composer and librettist. He is joined by Dianne Berkun Menaker, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus founder and artistic director and the co-creator of Port(al). They'll tell us how we're really supposed to say it. We'll also hear from a member of the chorus in a bit.

Hey, Jad and Dianne. Welcome to WNYC.

Dianne Berkun Menaker: Good morning. Thanks so much for having us.

Jad Abumrad: It's good to be back.

Brian Lehrer: Dianne, why don't you start and tell us about the space where Port(al) takes place, the building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is now repurposed and no longer connected with the Navy, we should say, or shipbuilding, right?

Dianne Berkun Menaker: Yes. This is taking place in the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. My first experience in that space was with the chorus back in 2021 when we were brought in to film and record a Philip Glass piece, and I just fell in love with the space. Just this enormous, vast space that was transformed with just a few set pieces and lights. It was like an industrial cathedral with this beautiful light streaming through the windows and the way the voices soared. I said, "Oh, we have to do all future Brooklyn Youth Chorus projects in this space," which led to our starting to do our galas there.

Then basically, as we started moving into thinking about what our next original music project was going to be, I decided I really wanted to focus on the Brooklyn Navy Yard and its intersectionality of this vast history spanning two world wars through the present day, and how that tied in with a lot of the issues that our young people are still dealing with today.

Brian Lehrer: That's awesome. Jad, I bet a lot of our listeners have wondered from time to time, "You know, that Jad Abumrad." What do you do after you create the most creative radio show in the history of radio, and then you're not doing that anymore? Maybe it's that you make one of the most creative choral and history performances in the history of choral and history performances. Tell us how you got involved in this and what your role is.

Jad Abumrad: Well, Brian, it's really good to be back with you. I have to give credit to Dianne, and also to composer Paola Prestini, and director Jessica Grindstaff. They brought me in. For me, just sort of riffing on your question, I'm also interested in history. That was a lot of what we did on Radiolab, still do. For me, this is a really interesting way of permutating journalism in a way.

Because essentially, what this performance is-- Imagine 60-plus kids with these incredible voices, walking into this massive empty warehouse at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a place where thousands of people lived and died. They built aircraft carriers. Imagine these kids really listen carefully to all of the histories that are sort of whispering in the air, and they tune those histories in and then they start to sing. For me, it's almost somewhere between oral history and journalism, but in song. I see it as a really interesting adjacent space to where I've been living for the last 20 years.

Brian Lehrer: Jan, why those parentheses in the title? A portal into history and a specific port, P-O-R-T, then parentheses, A-L, Port(al).

Jad Abumrad: Well, I think you sort of answered it in your question. The parenthetical in the title is itself gesturing at the idea that this is a port into the past. When you walk into those doors, you're going to slip into many different time flows at once. The A-L is including everything. This is very much a collage of so many different histories and so many different people, from the first women who entered the workplace, to the first Black Americans who were brought in to help in the war effort, to these kids who are going to make the future of this space and the future of everything. It's trying to operate on those many layers at once.

Brian Lehrer: Dianne, tell us more about the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. This sounds like a very ambitious undertaking for a student chorus, and what kinds of sounds they're going to be making that audience members might expect to hear.

Dianne Berkun Menaker: This is the 33rd season of our chorus. We were founded in 1992. We are a citywide nonprofit organization. We draw students from all over the five boroughs and some even beyond. It's quite an expansive organization. There's a series of multiple training divisions and three performing ensembles, all of which are represented in this show, so nearly 100 singers will be in the show.

Over our history, the chorus was really created to be a community chorus with no barriers to participation, regardless of finances or schools or neighborhoods, so that everybody had a place where they could receive the highest level professional training equivalent to what they might have had if they were instrumentalists or studying privately.

Over the years, as the level of excellence of the chorus has risen, and we've had so many amazing professional collaborations across the span of orchestral world premieres to pop music collaborations, we've been focusing more and more on commissioning and creating original music. Because I wanted the choristers to be able to sing music that really resonated with them, that reflected their ideas, what they wanted to sing about, to use their literal voices for their own artistic expression. We've commissioned a number of evening-length productions, maybe that are best known for Black Mountain Songs that was curated by Bryce Dessner at BAM.

As this work came to be, this was just another opportunity, but I wanted to focus more-- instead of having these collections of songs that some of our other works had, was to be more focused on a unifying theme. In this case, it was the history, as Jad has just described, of time that has passed through the Navy Yard.

Like all of our projects, the choristers have been very involved in both learning about the history of the yard in their own city, in their own backyard, that they've never been there. They didn't have any idea what was going on there. This was a chance for them-- Something's happening in the background. This was an opportunity for them to contribute their own ideas and to share their own ideas about what the impact of these various initiatives were on them, and so to have their voices captured as Jad has recorded their voices and you hear them in the space.

As far as the music goes, it is primarily an acapella show. You're going to hear their soaring voices, but you're going to hear the sound of the building as they literally play the walls, and as Jad has recreated in his sound installation so many of the sounds that are reminiscent of the industry that passed through there. It's going to be percussive and steel, and it's going to be soaring, beautiful lines, and it's going to be mourning and regretful as we talk about loss.

Yes. I think that you're going to hear an incredible span of vocal talent and really interesting, rich music created by Paola Prestini and Jad, together, that explores the human voice and the pretty remarkable advanced technique of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus singers.

Brian Lehrer: Wow, so let's hear from one of the chorus members. We are also joined for a few minutes now by Josie Devlin, a junior at LaGuardia High School. Hey, Josie. Welcome to WNYC.

Josie Devlin: Hi. It's an honor to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Are you excited about these performances coming up? That's quite an inspiration of a description that we just got from your chorus director there.

Josie Devlin: Yes. It's been a while in the making, almost two years for the chorus. It feels kind of surreal to be putting it on its feet finally, but it's been a really amazing experience. We're in the rehearsal room and learning all the music, and Paola has these amazing, complex and layered songs. Then to take them into the space, and we've been in the building for the past week, and there's something so magical about seeing how it reacts with the space around them, like the-- [background noise] Sorry, something is going on.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] There's always something going on.

Josie Devlin: It's very amazing-- [crosstalk] That is very true. It is amazing to see how the voices interact with the space around them. It feels like we're bringing back the people who were once in the space.

Brian Lehrer: Can you describe-- Because we don't have an excerpt of your rehearsals or anything like that, but Dianne talked about using your voices with the sound of the building itself, and you just made a similar reference. What's that like from the perspective of a singer? Are you responding to something about how your voice echoes off the walls or something like that and then feeding back into that?

Josie Devlin: To be honest, it's an insane challenge to have a piece of work that's so complex and to be able to execute the rhythm and the melody. As a singer, there is a difficulty, which is you can never sing with what you hear. You have to go from what you know in rehearsal and what you see from the conductor. There is a challenge of being able to-- You kind of feel the rhythm and you feel the song in your body, and you have to trust that instinct and let go of the other senses telling you other things.

Brian Lehrer: On the content, I'm curious if you have a favorite story or just one that really sticks with you from those people from the past who you'll be evoking in the performances.

Josie Devlin: Yes, I think that-- Oh, man, there are so many great stories, but I would say one of my favorite, oh, God, would probably be Howard Zinn. It's a piece on his experience in the war, and how when you are fighting for something, often you lose sight of what you are fighting for. I think it's very relevant to what we are living through right now, and I think it's important as people in this day and age to be very wary of what we give our attention to. Because I think that attention is a commodity and we take that for granted. I think the song Howard Zinn really brings up questions about herd mentality, and what it means to be an individual in a crisis. As a young person, it really speaks to me. Yes, it's very powerful lyrics, and I can't wait for people to hear it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Jad, you wrote a song about or in the words of Howard Zinn. Some of our listeners will know that name as the author of books including A People's History of the United States. Where did he fit into this for you?

Jad Abumrad: Well, one of the first things that we did when we embarked on this piece was we went into the archives to figure out who worked in the naval yard. Howard Zinn was 18 in 1940, and one of about 400 people who were brought into the naval yard to help build the ships because the war effort was on at that point. The United States was about to enter. He was 18 and just trying to make ends meet.

He was at that time a pacifist, but he really believed in that particular war. His experience in the naval yard and then afterwards as a bomber, flying missions in France, really turned him against war writ large. That led him to write the People's History and to become, really, one of the most famous pacifists in history. It was really interesting to encounter his story and to encounter his transformation in those archives. Then we collaborated with Josie and the other choristers and really got them to respond to that text and then set it all to song.

Brian Lehrer: The overall piece stretches back in time before the Brooklyn Navy Yard or that port-- before the Navy Yard was established at the port in 1801, from what I see in the press materials, and includes the thousands of deaths of American captives held on British prison ships there during the Revolutionary War. That's a story that most Americans don't learn, I think, in US history.

Jad Abumrad: Yes. I've got to tell you, most people-- Brian, you probably know the monument in Fort Greene Park, right?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Jad Abumrad: Underneath that monument is a crypt, and in that crypt are the bones of about 11,500 people who were kept on those prison ships during the Revolutionary War, died on those ships. They were thrown overboard. Their bones washed up on the shore of what would become the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Literally, when they broke ground on that spot, each spadeful from the shovel was filled with bones. It was interesting to us that the place that would become the central engine of war-making in America was actually itself built on the bones of people lost at war, that then goes on to create, in a sense, more bones. There's very much a cycle of history that is embodied in that space, and so we just wanted to explore that.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. The Parks Department website, which I just pulled up, affirms that story. For people who may have just kind of casually walked by that monument and not stopped to think about it, it says the monument marks the site of a crypt for more than 11,500 men and women known as the Prison Ship Martyrs who were buried in a tomb near the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Dianne Berkun Menaker, Brooklyn Youth Chorus founder and artistic director; first of all, you must be really proud of your student, Josie, for being so incredibly articulate and passionate about this work.

Dianne Berkun Menaker: Oh, absolutely. The choristers make everything. It's all about not just training them, but then giving them the agency to be performers and creators in their own right. It's only possible because of how-- These students from all over the city bring such vast backgrounds. They're so intelligent, they're so creative, they're so committed to the creative process – this is an enormous undertaking – while they're simultaneously going to schools and preparing for exams that are happening upon them. Yes, it's remarkable.

Brian Lehrer: Jad, we couldn't help but notice that one story you incorporate overlaps with our history series a little. You include the very first live radio singing performance, which predated WNYC's existence by almost 20 years. I didn't know radio went back to 1904. What was that story, briefly, in about 20 seconds?

Jad Abumrad: It was the story of mezzo-soprano Eugenia Farrar visiting a friend who happened to be an engineer. He had her sing into a giant horn that then got transmitted seven miles into the Brooklyn Navy Yard over a PA system. The guy who was operating the Morse code console in the naval yard at that time was a young operator. He heard voices coming out of the air, and he literally thought that it was an angel singing. It's just a wonderful tiny little bit of history of what we do.

Dianne Berkun Menaker: That was one of the pieces that made me really lock into this project, was I was envisioning this historical sound of Eugenia singing connecting to our live voices, carrying the same song forward today.

Brian Lehrer: Brooklyn Youth Chorus founder and artistic director, Dianne Berkun Menaker; Youth Chorus member, Josie Devlin; and composer, musician, and storyteller, Jad Abumrad, late of Radiolab, good luck with this performance at the Navy Yard. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Jad, do you want to just say how people can get tickets?

Jad Abumrad: Yes. Unfortunately, I think all the tickets are gone at this point, but [crosstalk]--

Dianne Berkun Menaker: Not for Thursday.

Jad Abumrad: Not for Thursday? Okay. Thank you for saying that, Dianne. Yes, you can go to-- Dianne, is it portalbyc-- Is that the correct address?

Dianne Berkun Menaker: I would send people to the brooklynyouthchorus.org website where there's a lot of information on Port(al).

Brian Lehrer: I do have that website you said for people who want it, portalbyc.com. Thanks all of you for coming on. Good luck. It sounds awesome.

Dianne Berkun Menaker: Thank you so much.

Jad Abumrad: Thank you, Brian.

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