why are you clapping?

…. asked my two-year-old son, finding me with a copy of the Swayne Magnificat on my knee which I was beginning to learn, for a performance with the Erleigh Cantors at Southwark Cathedral at the end of the month.
The cross-rhythms require a great deal of concentration and as always familiarity, possibly to the point of memorisation, will make it all easier. There are several ways of making sense of them, the most basic being as a kind of binary on-off sequence, though this doesn’t give you any sense of structure. To start with I’m looking at it bar by bar (most of the piece is in a strict 4/4). Often it’s clear how there are smaller, repeating rhythmic cells, though when they turn out to be 3 ½ or 1 ½ beats long it may not be a huge amount of help knowing they are there! At the moment I’m concentrating on one passage of about six bars where the rhythm is especially irregular.

There are several other new (to me) pieces in this weekend: O Praise the Lord by Rutter, Piccolo’s Canterbury Mass, O vos omnes by Gesualdo and Jubilate Deo by Gabrieli. The last two from the OUP European Sacred Music volume which I’m increasingly asked to sing from and which has brought a lot of things into the repertoire.

Meanwhile I have the music for the Priory Voices visit to Gloucester Cathedral and a new CD player to play the accompanying CD on, and the Chantry Singers’ concert of church music is this coming weekend.