SAP’s Damien Riehl also assembles Porchfest music

By Dave Healy

Five years ago, when St. Anthony Park resident Damien Riehl wanted to assemble a choir, he wasn’t limited to just local singers.

The group he created, Schola Diffusa (tinyurl.com/Schola-Diffusa), initially included six SAP residents along with 15 others. Eventually, he has drawn on voices from around the world, brought together in Riehl’s studio, located on the third floor of his house.

“When the pandemic hit, there were all these people sitting at home with no one else to sing with,” he said. “A virtual choir was a way to bring them together.”

Riehl put out an invitation on social media, asking interested singers to contact him. He made a listening recording, which he sent to everyone, who recorded themselves on cell phones and emailed him the results.

Using audio and video editing software, Riehl combined the voices, tweaking each part — soprano, alto, tenor, bass — to create a unified sound, and arranging the headshots to make a visual, as well as auditory, choir.

Schola Diffusa has now recorded 18 songs/videos, both sacred and secular, ranging from classical to traditional to pop. Some of Riehl’s choices have reflected a response to current events, such as “What a Wonderful World” after the George Floyd murder, and the Ukrainian National Anthem after Russia’s invasion of that country.

Now “Porchfest” hyperlocal

If Schola Diffusa is international in scope, Riehl’s most recent project, Porchfest, is hyperlocal.

This time Riehl and his collaborators — Clay Williams, Bruce Elliott, Susan Barnes Elliott and Paul Durkee — recruited 35 households in St. Anthony Park to volunteer their porch, front steps or yard for a performance that took place the evening of July 24. They then found 35 groups to play at those locations, scattered throughout the neighborhood.

What the two projects have in common is an inclusive vision of music making and listening.

“Everyone can sing,” said Riehl. “Humans have been doing it for thousands of years. I’m interested in ways to expand the opportunities for making music.”

Riehl was first exposed to virtual choirs through the conductor Eric Whitaker, and to porch concerts via a long-standing series in upstate New York, where friends of his were living.

“It seemed like National Night Out with music,” he said.

Riehl, the product of a musical family whose members sang at home and in church, studied music in college. He jokes that while he was a St. John’s music major and student teaching at St. Cloud Tech High School, two tenors getting into a fistfight over their shared sheet music led him to law school, where he figured he could learn about conflict management.

Riehl’s legal work has included Internet law, computer and technology law, cybersecurity, data privacy, and trademark and copyright law.

The latter interest gave rise to a project he described in a 2020 TEDx talk (tinyurl.com/DamienRiehl): a copyright effort to help musicians in “you stole my melody” lawsuits by copyrighting all possible melodies using the notes of the diatonic and chromatic scales, showing that music can be viewed as mathematical (unoriginal) combinations of pitches, and songwriters all pull from a common mathematical wellspring, so artists should be free to create their music with less fear of being sued for copyright infringement over songs they’ve never heard.

Schola Diffusa is ongoing, and Riehl plans to reprise Porchfest next summer.

“The mechanics — a website and signup system — are in place,” he said. “So next time around it will just be a matter of seeing who all wants to participate. I’m already looking forward to it.” 

Dave Healy lives in St. Anthony Park and is a former editor of the Park Bugle.

Photo cutline: Members of the 2020 version of Schola Diffusa, a virtual choir started by Damien Riehl. Photo submitted by Damien Riehl.