in praise of … Cathedral choral societies

Posted on February 13, 2021 by vhk10

I was sorry to hear this week of the death of Lucian Nethsingha. One of the tributes I read mentioned that while director of music at Exeter Cathedral he had also conducted a choral society based there. And this set me thinking that such choral societies, attached to a Cathedral and conducted by its director of music, are becoming rather an endangered species.

The Exeter one appears no longer to exist, and I know two others which have disbanded this millennium: Manchester Cathedral Cantata Choir, and Bristol Cathedral Special/Concert Choir, which did not long survive its Diamond Jubilee in 2014. I had fond memories of singing in the Cantata Choir, so I was sorry to see it go. I’m happy to say though that Gloucester Choral Society is flourishing.

I imagine these choirs started springing up in the 19th century (Gloucester has just had its demisemiseptcentenary, that is its 175th anniversary). Manchester’s and Bristol’s were more recent. As for why some have been lost, I suspect the reasons are mostly a combination of a heavier workload for Cathedral directors of music and large choral societies being out of fashion. (I think that in recent years they may have started to come back into fashion again – certainly it looks like that in Bristol – but that is a topic for another post.)

It is a shame when they disappear. Being conducted by the Cathedral’s director of music ties the choir closely into the musical life of the Cathedral in a way that does not happen when a choir simply uses the building as a performing venue. And there are practical advantages to having the Cathedral at the choir’s disposal if it isn’t otherwise in use.

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Amen to that!

Posted on February 9, 2021 by vhk10

Following on from the canticle and anthem ‘World Cups’, Twitter has recently been enlivened by a similar venture to find the setting of the best setting of the word Amen. I followed this from the start and indeed nominated a couple of my favourites. The zippy one from Monteverdi’s setting of Lauda Jerusalem wasn’t used, and the more subtle charms of the third Amen from Philip Moore’s second setting of the Responses didn’t make it past the qualifying rounds, so I was left with deciding between other people’s choices.

I think the Amen from Finzi’s Lo the Full Final Sacrifice was a worthy winner (I voted for it, anyway) and made up for the poor showing of the whole in the World Cup of Anthems. But I wouldn’t have been sorry if the other finalist. Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, had won. What was noticeable was the strong showing of Renaissance music in this competition. Its last representative, Parsons’ Ave Maria made it to the semi-finals along with the Amen from Messiah (whose MS is reproduced on a poster which hangs in our music room).

I hope at some time we might get the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany anthem competition, as anthems for those seasons were excluded from the other.

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in praise of … the pieces that swallow rehearsal time

Posted on January 30, 2021 by vhk10

I’m not sure I’m really praising these, as in fact they are a nuisance. We have all encountered them – the pieces which seem innocuous and straightforward, yet which consume the lion’s share of rehearsal, possibly leaving others unprepared. How can they be identified and the problem avoided?

I once sang in a performance of Messiah on limited rehearsal time with a choir of people who’d sung the work before and an enthusiastically evangelical conductor. He liked the text of But thanks be to God (possibly because a well-known chorus sets the same text) and included it, only to find that practically none of the choir knew it. And with its fragmented vocal lines it turned out to be rather difficult to learn. (It is one of Messiah‘s less successful choruses adapted from a duet, and is almost always cut along with the preceding duet.)

Around the same time I sang at a wedding with a choir made up of guests which had one rehearsal immediately beforehand. We sang the hymns from a hymn book, but one hymn was played from a different hymn book and a very different arrangement. Unusually, there were no problems with the words, but sorting out the differences in the melody, working out where there were extra bars and so on, left little time for the polyphonic Mass setting we were also going to sing.

A more recent programme included a piece by Schütz which had never caused me much problem in the past but which took much longer than anything else to rehearse. The reason probably was that some in the choir weren’t used to singing German and there was a lot of text in this particular piece.

There are various morals to be drawn: do background research on whether a particular piece is well known; give the choir the exact same music as will be used by the accompanist; and check on linguistic competence! I’m sure there are many other ways that pieces can turn into cuckoos and deprive others of their rightful amount of rehearsal time.

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Lockdown encore une fois

Posted on January 23, 2021 by vhk10

So this month everything went online again. No physical rehearsals and indeed after some debate we have stopped our church services as well. But I still spend several evenings a week in choral activities.

Gloucester Choral Society has now dipped its toes into the world of Zoom rehearsals which at least gives us the advantage of meeting together without having to experience the cold of the Cathedral in winter. The choir has actually managed live performances this season: its traditional Boxing Day carol concerts. (As I was not near Gloucester on Boxing Day I couldn’t sing in either of these, but I did watch one on YouTube.)

Bristol Choral Society is also holding Zoom rehearsals. This term our repertoire includes some of what I think of as standard church music favourites (of many people, not necessarily me!) but which are clearly new to almost everyone else. It shows just how disjunct the worlds of symphony choruses can be from that of church and chamber choirs. We are also learning a recently rediscovered piece by Elizabeth Poston which I find quite challenging; rhythms which wrong-foot you and a liking for major sevenths. Of course I can’t tell how others in the choir are getting on with it.

And meanwhile at church we are back to recording our individual lines which will be stitched together for videos accompanying services. I fluctuate between a perfectionist approach, doing many takes for even a simple hymn, and singing through a familiar piece just once and, having decided it is no better and no worse than what I’d do on a Sunday morning, sending it in ‘as is’.

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what was salvaged from 2020?

Posted on December 31, 2020 by vhk10

Like most singers, I have lost a large number of opportunities to perform this year. A rough list: four concerts with Bristol Choral Society, three with Gloucester Choral Society, the Erleigh Cantors’ 30th anniversary bash, a day working on Tallis’ Spem in Alium, a Cotswold Big Sing Mahler 8, visits to York Minster and Bradford, Portsmouth and Chichester Cathedrals. Plus whatever other concerts I might have been offered (Proms, Bath Cantata Group, CanZona?) and countless church services both regular and special occasion. Opportunities to go to concerts likewise disappeared.

Another way of looking at it:

  • when I next sing a service in a Cathedral it is likely to be two years since I last did so in person
  • when I next sing Choral Evensong it is likely to be over a year since I last did so
  • when I next sing a concert it will be over a year since I last did so
  • when I next sing a concert with Bristol Choral Society it will be two years since I last did so
  • when I next sing in the Bristol Beacon (the former Colston Hall) it will be at least four years since I last did so
  • when I next sing with a large orchestra it is likely to be at least three years since I last did so

Not all of these delays are entirely due to the coronavirus pandemic; the reopening of the hall in Bristol (when Bristol Choral Society can use large orchestras again) was delayed by two years even before that happened, and for various reasons I did little performing outside church in autumn 2019.

So what was I able to do? Rather more than many people, and for part of the autumn I was in the fortunate position of having three choirs which had restarted. The main events, in the order they occurred:

I have also discovered that I don’t get on with rehearsals on Zoom (I tend to crouch over the device) or singing in a mask (I feel disconnected from the sound I make). But I have got practised at singing my line to a backing track, of organ or singers, with clicks or a conductor.

I’m not even going to try to predict 2021. Some already postponed events have been postponed again, but others remain pencilled in for now.

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Lichfield, the geeks’ cathedral

Posted on December 31, 2020 by vhk10

I hope they won’t mind my describing them that way. Not long ago I wrote about their project to crowdsource transcriptions of their 19th-century music lists. I’m still at work on this, a few days of music at a time over coffee. In fact, I’ve done enough that many composer names and anthem titles are automatically suggested by my browser, though I still have to check for capitalisations and variant spellings.

China box with Lichfield Cathedral
I’ve also written before about Lichfield’s Advent and Lent quizzes. Two years ago it was encrypted dedications, and that was repeated this Advent, but using the same method of encryption each time: an online simulator of the Enigma machine. The machine’s daily settings were clued by placenames. With a little help (it’s useful being married to a mathematician) I got going and was able to work out the dedications, and identify enough of them to get namechecked on the winners’ report. A surprisingly large number of the information about dedications could be found on the internet, which was just as well as I failed to recognise some of pieces that I have sung many times.

I have no particular connection to Lichfield, though I might just possibly be singing there in 2021. [February 2021: No! It’s off.]

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2020’s carol services

Posted on December 22, 2020 by vhk10

We did actually get to sing our Advent and Christmas carol services in person, though the usual scramble (they happen 2 weeks apart) got even more compressed with our limited rehearsal time. So we didn’t try to learn anything new. There was one piece I had not sung for many years (possibly the others sang it a recent year when I didn’t do the carol service): H. C. Stewart’s On this day Earth Shall Ring. I now found out that the words are a translation of my school carol, Personent Hodie; each year at school as I progressed with Latin I understood rather more of them.

Some relatively recent pieces included Andrew Lumsden’s arrangement of Come Thou redeemer of the earth and Malcolm Archer’s settting of Creator of the stars of night, performed in the presence of the composer. I sang one of the O Antiphons, and am gradually working my way round them all.

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my verdict on the entries

Posted on December 14, 2020 by vhk10

Right, as promised here are my unedited thoughts on the finalists:

I’m writing this a week before the final of the Mary Otty Carol Competition, hosted by Bristol Choral Society. In seven days’ time my thoughts can be compared with the verdicts of the judges and the audience. By singling out some of the shortlisted entries I don’t want to imply the others were not deserving of a place in the repertoire.

My favourite of all was Matthew Heyburn’s setting of I saw a fair maiden, the text also known as Lullay mine liking and Myn Lyking. This, the only finalist which used the harp, had some of the same feeling as Holst’s setting (not the only piece on the shortlist over which the spirit of Holst hovered) but I felt would be a worthy winner in its own right.

An honourable mention to Nu tendas tusen juleljus by Jamie Brown, a minimalist setting of a short text in a language I’ve never sung in before, Swedish. When initially confronted with this I thought it might not be interesting to learn and perform, but there is far more going on in it than appears at first.

I suspect the audience prize might go to Pam Slatter’s setting of I saw Three Ships for its obvious tunefulness. I was not surprised to find out that the composer has a lot of experience of composing and arranging.

I’m told by those who looked at all the submitted entries that modes were in fashion this year, and some of this was evident in the shortlisted finalists. Another common feature in the shortlisted entries was slightly irregular rhythms (multiples of 7 featured in various ways), something that because particularly obvious when it came to recording them with a click track.

I was proved right and Pam Slatter won the audience prize; she was also pronounced the winner by the judges. Second place went to a piece I haven’t mentioned, James Williams’ setting of Christ’s Nativity. For the record, the other finalist was Mark Chaundy’s There is no Rose. As well as modes, the judges remarked that sharps were also in fashion!

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In the can

Posted on November 27, 2020 by vhk10

I’ve now submitted all my carol tracks for our competition. I’d got practised at co-ordinating with the clicks and was able to ‘go with the pro’ singing my line, but one thing I couldn’t do was look at the waveform on iPad’s ‘Voice memo’ as I sang. (It reminded me too much of a machine I was wired up to when in labour.) The aspect I was most likely to get wrong was actually dynamics, since I had no body language from a conductor and the voices on the guide track were not all at the same volume as one another. But my recordings are all ‘in the can’ now and the only thing that remains for me is the relatively simple task of getting a photo of myself in choir gear above the waist and holding a folder as if about to sing.

We now have two weeks till the day of the final. I feel I’ve got to know the pieces more intimately by recording my line independently, than if I’d turned up to a choral concert and sung it along with everyone else. No possibility of mugging along with one’s neighbour!

I have formed my opinions about the finalists but of course there is an embargo on sharing them at the moment. What I will do is write about which ones I liked most and why, then post my thoughts – unedited – after the final, and we can see how well they corresponded to the views of the judges.

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keeping with the clicks

Posted on November 14, 2020 by vhk10

We have moved our carol competition online, which means recording our own contributions and sending them in to be edited. For this one we have no video of a conductor to guide us, just an audio track. Or rather tracks, as there are several alternatives: SATB, SA, TB, individual parts, individual parts with the other parts faintly heard, SATB without clicks (this last is for rehearsal only, not recording). They use a small group of professional singers.

I haven’t used a backing track with clicks before, and it took me a little while to get used to them and to listen for the higher click at the beginning of each bar. (They have pitch, but not in a way that conflicts with the notes of the piece.) Note to self: 6/4 is not the same as 3/2! Awkward tempo changes are dealt with by extra beats or expressing the new tempo in terms of the previous one.

I initially thought I’d want to record while listening to the SATB version, but I have now decided on the version where the soprano part is more audible than the others. This is not because I need reminding of my notes! I realise that I want to hear the pro soprano as clearly as possible so that I can sing as one with her, not straying from her timing and pitch. This is especially important in those pieces which rely on precision for their effect.

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