Ann Moss
By Alice Waugh
Editor’s note: See addendum at the end of this story on how you can support the concert tour.
An accomplished West Coast singer will be coming to Lincoln to give a free concert—but it certainly won’t be the first time she’s been in town. In fact, she has a Lincoln pedigree spanning three generations.
Ann Moss, who has just released Currents, her debut CD, grew up here. Her parents are Weston Road residents Pip and Jane Moss, and her grandparents, the late Lenny and Frannie Moss, lived a short walk away on Woodcock Lane. Moss will return to her hometown on January 31 to give a free concert in Bemis Hall (see details below).
Moss, who lives in Richmond, Calif., just outside Berkeley, sings mostly contemporary music by living composers, but she’s well versed in many musical genres and enjoys making connections where they don’t usually exist, such as singing chamber music, which is usually thought of as solely instrumental, or bridging the gap between composer and performer.
Her eclectic leanings aren’t surprising given her background. She began learning piano at age five from her grandmother Frannie, who taught dozens of Lincoln children over the years. Frannie was also the longtime accompanist for school chorus concerts and musical productions led by her son Pip, Moss’s father and the music teacher at the Brooks School from 1970 until 2004 (what’s now the Lincoln School was once three separate schools—Hartwell, Smith and Brooks).
As if that wasn’t enough, Moss’ grandfather Lenny was a violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra for 43 years, and her mother Jane taught flute to Lincoln students and played in chamber groups while Moss was a child.
Growing up, Moss heard all kinds of music. While everyone in her family played a symphonic instrument, her parents were college students in the 1960s and filled the house with rock, blues, jazz, and folk as well as classical music. She sang in the choir at the Acton Congregational Church (where he is still senior choir director) as well as playing piano and singing in school groups. “It was obvious from an early age that Ann was very musical,” her father Pip said.
However, Ann didn’t start focusing on vocal performance until relatively late in the game. “I didn’t really know that you could study singing like an instrument,” she said. When she was in high school, her grandfather took her to see a performance of a Mozart piece by Italian coloratura mezzosoprano Cecilia Bartoli. “It was impactful. I had never seen a singer in person do that,” she said. She began taking private voice lessons with Mary Crowe (another Lincoln resident) during her senior year in high school and also sang in a funk band.
While music was central to her life, Moss also wanted to study literature and art history in college. “I wanted my undergraduate time to be a full-on liberal arts experience—I didn’t want to get too specialized too early,” she said. Hampshire College, where students design their own programs of study, “couldn’t have been a better place for me to find myself in my own way.” She designed a program called Music and the Related Arts even as she realized she wouldn’t be pursuing piano as a career.
“It became clear to me I was not going to have the technical chops to stay with the [piano] literature as it got harder and harder. Piano was not going to be my main instrument,” Moss said. Meanwhile, she was being praised and recognized by her choral directors with solos, and she found she had a natural facility for voice. She went on to earn a graduate degree at the Longy School of Music, where she also started singing in a chamber ensemble with piano and viola as a way to work more closely with other musicians.
After spending her entire life in Massachusetts (and suffering regularly from strep infections in the winter), Moss decided it was time for a change, so she set out for the West Coast and wound up at the San Francisco Conservatory for more training — and more chamber ensemble singing. After graduating, she and two other conservatory alumnae founded One Art Ensemble, a chamber group highlighting new and historic works for soprano, viola and piano that performed in Bemis Hall in 2010.
“In school, I was with singers 24 hours a day and I started to lose my mind,” Moss said. Normally a singer rehearses with a pianist or a whole opera cast on a specific program or piece, “but in my chamber ensembles, I rehearsed with the other players all the time, like in a rock band. We were working on establishing a group sound and a group sensibility.”
Moss has sung at many festivals and concert series across the country and is now a voice teacher herself, as well as a regular guest lecturer on composition for voice. In the 2013-2014 season, her performances include the West Coast premiere of Henri Dutilleux’s Le Temps L’horloge for Soprano and Orchestra, Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 on a concert tour with the Hausmann Quartet, and new chamber works composed for her by Vartan Aghababian and Liam Wade, with whom she co-founded the new music repertory group CMASH in 2008. CMASH is a New Music repertory group that fosters collaborations between composers and performers.
“Versatility has become my specialty,” Moss said. “I like to mix old and new. It’s great living in California because there’s a lot of openness about genre blending and a lot of freedom designing programs.”
Moss’s eclectic musical interests can be traced back to her family members’ wide-ranging tastes. “When [Frannie] talked about Duke Ellington, it was with same reverence as when she talked about Mozart,” she said. Likewise, for her father, “Dylan and Bach — it was all of equal value.”
There was more new territory to be discovered in creating a CD, which involved not only singing but planning, budgeting, fundraising and publicity. “It was an intense process—it was like doing three graduate programs at once,” Moss said. Her goal of working with a “dream team” of musicians in different musical styles and locations also proved to be one of the biggest challenges. “It was nuts trying to coordinate all this stuff,” she said.
Along the way, Moss also learned about yet another aspect of modern music. “I thought of myself a live performer — I didn’t understand recording as its own art form,” she said. “It’s a total collaboration. The engineer, the producer, the mixer—everyone plays a role in sculpting this sound artifact.” Currents was recorded at Skywalker Sound with producer/engineer Leslie Ann Jones and is available on Amazon.com and other sites.
“It’s very much a self-portrait. It’s a retrospective of the last 10 years of my work with living composers and chamber ensembles,” Moss said. The album features everything from flamenco to Joni Mitchell and combinations including voice and piano, voice and string quartet, and voice and guitar, as well as two song cycles written especially for her.
Doing an album was a lot of work but also an education, and “now that I’ve done it once, I just can’t wait to do it again. I already have my list going for my next project,” she said.
Ann Moss’ Lincoln concert is Friday, January 31 at 7:30 p.m. in Bemis Hall. Admission is free, but you must order tickets online by clicking here. Also featured will be Steven Bailey on piano with special guests Ryan Shannon on violin and Justin Ouellet on viola. CDs, digital download cards and tour posters will be available for purchase.
Addendum, Jan. 19 — There is no admission charge for the concert, but attendees and others are welcome to make a tax-deductible donation to support thee tour through through CMASH’s Indiegogo site. Optional perks for donors include a CD or digital download of the album, a signed tour poster, and your name in the concert program.