BOSTON CAMERATA

For anyone who has followed the career of Cohen and the Boston Camerata, Simple Gifts should come as little surprise. Cohen has painstakingly researched and recorded a previously neglected body of American folksongs with sacred resonance, most centrally on The American Vocalist: Spiritual and Folk Hymns 1850-1870 (Erato). Like that effort, Simple Gifts is chiefly an album of a cappella performances sung at a sacred site (the 1790 Shaker meeting house at Sabbathday Lake). But distinguishing this recording is the magically rapturous collaboration among Cohen, the Camerata, and nonprofessional vocalists for whom these songs are the very cornerstone of their spiritual lives.

Although Simple Gifts is the only collection of Shaker songs available on disc, there were previous LPs (Harp of Joy on the Musical Heritage Society label and Music of the Shakers on the Pleiades label). The former offers dryly devout versions, the latter "arty" renditions, heavy with operatic vibrato. The vocalists on Simple Gifts resist either extreme; they occupy a middle ground between the poles of "art song" and folk tune. What emerges from this album is the sense of Shakerism as a dynamic contemporary religion, one with a sense of fun as well as of solemnity, and one rooted in ecstatic celebration of divinity through a wide range of song types and vocal styles.

Some of the 34 songs included in this hour-long collection are sung solely by the Shakers, some just by the Camerata (supplemented occasionally by the singers of the Schola Cantorum), several by everybody united under Joel Cohen's direction. The recording sessions were held late at night (in order to avoid outside traffic sounds by the meeting house) for a week. Informal song sharing, sparked by Cohen's research into the sheet-music library at the Shaker community, formed the basis for this album.

Included among the numbers are short chants ("Come Life, Shaker Life") and historic ballads that sound like old English folk songs ("Mother," about the Shaker's founder, Mother Ann Lee, who's seen as a female Christ figure). There are wry marches ("I'll beat my drum as I march along" has the singers imitating tooting trumpets) and songs in untranslatable "spirit" languages. The one familiar tune is " 'Tis the Gift To Be Simple," also known as "Simple Gifts," which was incorporated by Aaron Copland in his Appalachian Spring.

The Shakers have always believed spirituality should be celebrated in physical movement (a counterbalance to their vows of celibacy), so many of these a cappella performances are seasoned with hand clapping and foot stomping. The rhythms invite this. These performers sing as if every note were a heavenly gift intended to make the earth heavenly. The album is more than a document of superior vocal art, though it is surely that. "There was an incredible power being generated by the music being made," Brother Hadd reported. This album proves him right. (Joel Cohen, the Boston Camerata, and members of the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community will be performing tonight, November 16, at 8 p.m. at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge. Call 496-2222.)

- Norman Weinstein