more MacMillan in Julian Road

Posted on June 4, 2005 by vhk10

The Bath Festival Chorus has re-formed this year, and on Monday I went to hear them with James MacMillan conducting music by himself and others.

Inevitably I found myself comparing the account of the Canticos Sagrados with the Exultate Singers’ performance I sang in last September. I started doing this even before the piece began – we had to get our opening notes from the organ part! Setting aside direct comparisons, I got to hear properly the interplay of different voices rather than concentrating on my own part. It became clearer how the long held notes I’d sung in the second and third movements supported the other voices.

I was less impressed by the Westminster Mass, but I was hearing a concert performance of extracts from a work that is really for liturgical use and perhaps works better in that setting.

The programme also included the Magnificat from Tippett’s St. John’s College setting (a setting I’d love to sing one day), a Bruckner motet, Britten’s Te Deum in E (which I’ve sung once, in York Minster), and Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noire (I would have liked some rather more French-sounding vowels here – there’s been no shortage of the language on Bath’s streets this last week, as it must be half-term on the other side of the Channel). But in general it was an impressively ambitious programme to bring off. From what I could see of MacMillan (his back) he appeared to conduct precisely and without extravagant gestures.

The Festival Chorus seems smaller than it used to be, which may be why it sometimes sounded thin in some voices. It’s the only choir of that size I know of which doesn’t have a web page as a means of advertising and recruitment! I still regret not accepting an offer to join some years back and I’ll now have to wait till the 2006 Festival.

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more MacMillan in Redcliffe

Posted on May 29, 2005 by vhk10

I was able to sing in two of the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s services at St. Mary Redcliffe today. Some of the repertoire was very familiar – by Palestrina and Stanford – but we also sang at Mattins the Britten Te Deum in C (which we used to do every term at my Cambridge college) and Walton’s jolly Jubilate.

The new piece was ‘Changed’ by James MacMillan. The only other time I’ve performed any of his music was in the same church a few months ago. As in the third of the Canticos Sagrados there is a long introduction in slow notes (in this case a 3-part canon on a three-note figure which continues throughout the piece) before the choir comes in singing in much shorter note values. Perhaps because of having to think in much shorter rhythmical units, almost like setting a new tempo, this looks easier on the page than it is in practice to perform!

The words of ‘Changed’ are not liturgical or even sacred, though I was told that MacMillan feels they could be given a religious interpretation and hence that his setting is suitable for a church service. I hope to see him in person tomorrow (he is conducting a concert in the Bath Festival) though I won’t get a chance to ask him about this!

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scoring music on a PDA

Posted on May 25, 2005 by vhk10

I recently posted this request to an email list and may as well make it here too. Meanwhile, I think I’ve been invited to sing in two concerts in the first week of July (Chandos Singers/Exultate Singers) but am trying to sort out which I’m doing!

My trusty Psion 3c is giving up the ghost in various ways and is in any case hopelessly dated. I’d like to get a Palm or other kind of PDA to replace it as a personal organiser.

One of the applications I regularly use is called ‘Composer’. It allows you to notate a single line of music on a stave. If the note values add up you can get the Psion to play it back to you, though I can read scores well enough not to need this. But I find it useful for noting down melodies such as new Anglican chants (please don’t laugh). A musical equivalent of the Notepad.

So, my question: are there applications around for PDAs which do this? It would help me to choose between the various models available, or at least ensure that when I do take the plunge I can get the new gadget to do all that the old one did.

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Which Russian composer are you?

Posted on May 18, 2005 by vhk10

For a bit of fun I recommend the Dead Russian Composer Personality Test. I took it and came out as a Stravinsky, while my husband was a Shostakovich, which seemed right somehow. A few friends sat the test, producing more Stravinskies and a Rachmaninov; fortunately none of them was Mussorgsky. I notice that the same site also offers tests to associate you with a stringed instrument or with one of the friends of Elgar commemorated in the Enigma Variations.

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encountering the ringtone

Posted on May 16, 2005 by vhk10

A couple of years ago I finally got a mobile phone, which allowed programmable ringtones of a rather limited kind (monophonic, and with equal note values). I set it up to play the principal tone-row from Lulu, and have used this ever since. As it happens I haven’t heard any music from the opera since then, so I approached last Friday’s performance at the Coliseum with some concern. Would I find myself reaching for my phone all the time? Conversely, if anyone rang me up afterwards, would I interpret the sound as a memory of the opera rattling around in my head and ignore it?
In fact neither of these things happened, and I wasn’t much aware of this form of the row in performance. Either it is for the most part well buried in the score, as often with serial works, or my ear isn’t as good as I thought.

The Guardian‘s reviewer felt that the production had gone off the boil a bit in revival, though I thought it stood up well. This may be because in the meantime I’d been to a rather eccentric production in Wedekind’s home town of Hannover. I’m beginning to get used to Richard Jones’ liking for the 1950s – with in this case some nods to more recent popular culture.

I still feel the translator missed a trick with the name of the company whose shares crash and bankrupt the entire cast in Act 3; this was left as the Jungfrau Railway when it should of course have been ‘Virgin Trains’. Perhaps they feared a writ from Mr. Branson.

It was my first visit to the Coliseum since the building was refurbished. I haven’t been to ENO enough for the changes really to leap out at me, but it looked splendid.

This is my 100th posting to this blog. The Bath Festival starts on Friday and I hope to get to two or three concerts, which I’ll write about.

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the wheels on the bus

Posted on May 4, 2005 by vhk10

[I see that a lot of people have found their way to this page looking for guitar chords for ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. Here is a simple harmonisation of the version I know (there is a different one in an American book ‘Kids’ Songs 2′ which we have).
2 bars G – 1 bar A minor – 1 bar D
2 bars G – 1/2 bar A minor – 1/2 bar D – 1 bar G
This is in G – it could also be sung in F but anything lower is in my opinion too low (see my comments below).
Now read on … ]

My favourite among the tapes of children’s songs that we have is the BBC’s ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. It has the merit of being accompanied (as far as I can tell) mostly by real instruments, not a synthesiser, and the accompaniments are subtly varied in rhythm and instrumentation from verse to verse so that, subliminally, the listener’s interest is retained. The only longueur is a song called ‘I jump out of bed’, which I’ve never encountered elsewhere, in which the singer enumerates incrementally the first ten things they do in the morning, each of which is mentioned three times: ‘I brush my teeth, brush my teeth, brush my teeth….’. The children greet this with a shout of ‘It’s the boring one!’.

Another popular tape is one we bought in France, ‘Petites chansons pour tous les jours’ which accompanies a book of the same name. Here some of the songs are sung by children. The arrangements have a rather more sophisticated feel compared to the busking-style instrumentation on ‘The Wheels on the Bus’; one almost expects Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg to start crooning at any moment.

The book of ‘Petites chansons’ contains the melody line of the songs as well as the words, which shows up most English equivalents. Wishing to expose the children to musical notation at an early age, I scoured Blackwell’s children’s bookshop in Oxford to find a book of nursery rhymes which included music. The only one I could find was The Oxford Nursery Songbook, an updated edition of a work first published in the 1930’s, and I’m not sure that wasn’t in their music shop rather than the children’s bookshop. Comparison with bookshops overseas shows that music is included more routinely in French and German books of nursery songs.

I did see another book of such songs with music recently, but was horrified that the song on the cover went down to an A below middle C, with the high note being the C above middle C. Why is it thought desirable to force children’s naturally high voices to sing so low? The French book assumes a range of middle C to the second F above middle C, as does our Reclam edition of Kinderlieder, though the latter only goes above D for special effect. The Oxford Nursery Songbook has a similar range to these, though the modern edition adds guitar chords which are optionally in lower keys.

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back in the saddle

Posted on April 25, 2005 by vhk10

I hadn’t done any singing since Magnus was born apart from joining in hymns, but I got an appeal to be part of the choir for a special service; ‘I’ve written an Ave Maria for the curate’s final service … could you sing the top line … rehearsal Friday … Sibelius-ed copy will follow …’.

So I was back in action again. I have always found it harder getting back into singing after a birth than singing in the months immediately beforehand; something perhaps to do with not being sure where the relevant muscles have got to. This time it wasn’t too difficult and I hope to be singing as normal relatively quickly.

Other music for the service included bits of Darke in E which makes a change from Darke in F (we also do Darke in A minor, for some reason only on Easter Sunday). And a rare chance to sing a triple chant (not that I mind doing them rarely, as I’m not very keen on them. A well-placed single chant on the other hand can be most effective).

Meanwhile I have to fix the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s week in 2007, which I started negotiating months ago! Durham Cathedral never replied to any emails. I had more success with a couple of other Cathedrals, one of which is now in possession of a CD of the choir, but they both seem to have stopped answering emails too, so it may be time to pick up the phone.

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Dalton’s Weekly

Posted on April 20, 2005 by vhk10

One of the most useful reference works for music that we have is a 1985 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, edited by Michael Kennedy. This manages to pack a huge amount of information into a paperback of 700-odd pages, especially when it comes to listing works by major composers. (To say nothing of entries on individual compositions, performers, instruments, organisations, terminology and so on). It achieves this by using abbreviations as much as possible without becoming unintelligible, for example ‘Comp. 2 vn. concs., str. qt., vc. sonata, etc.’ – hence our nickname for it*.

It has its idiosyncrasies too. In the composers’ biographies, it is regarded as almost essential to list the years in which they visited Britain (if they weren’t British already). On a more macabre note, the cause of death is usually given, when it’s known. But it doesn’t give precise dates of birth or death or reveal their embarrassing middle names, unlike one of the other musical dictionaries that we have.

A longer review would comment on surprising omissions. Allowing for the date of the volume (some composers or works have come into favour since, or simply weren’t around at all) I’ve found few and will cite only one here: no separate entry for Peter Grimes! (Eleven of Britten’s other operas have their own entries). But we wouldn’t be without this volume and it is particularly useful for settling discussions about when a particular work was composed: ‘Look it up in Dalton’s Weekly!’ is the refrain.

* Note for readers outside Britain: Dalton’s Weekly is a small-ads newspaper, where advertisers pay by the line. As a result the advertisements in it are heavily abbreviated in order to take up as few lines as possible.

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music for labour

Posted on April 7, 2005 by vhk10

Despite the market in Mozart for Mothers-to-be and the like I’m not sure anyone has produced any discs for labour and birth (and if they had, I suspect my choice of music might be very different from their suggestions!). Actually I did listen to some Mozart – early symphonies – a few hours before Magnus was born. I hadn’t tried to select any music in advance, but after the Mozart I decided one of the Priory Records CDs of evening canticles was what I wanted to hear. My husband carefully selected one without too much music by Sumsion or other composers whom he knew I didn’t care for, so we listened to the one performed by Bristol Cathedral Choir. As a result there are several canticle settings which are never going to seem quite the same again: Noble in B minor, Jackson in G, Leighton Second Service and Howells in G (with the ‘Star Trek’ Gloria to the Magnificat). There was also a ‘local’ setting by Raymond Warren (whose daughter I used to know in my Cambridge days), one by Morley (the midwives’ favourite) and a plainchant one. While I’m not a great plainchant fan the last was what I most appreciated in the circumstances. We played the CD twice through (no time to choose a different one!) and Magnus was born about half an hour after it ended. ‘Still talking about music’ is one of the comments part way through the midwife’s notes.

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through the night

Posted on March 31, 2005 by vhk10

We’re now rediscovering Radio 3’s Through the Night programming, now that we get woken in the small hours by Magnus (born Thursday March 24th). We listened to the programme regularly during the infancies of our older children so it will be interesting to find out whether the content has changed much. Is the most frequently occurring piece still the overture to Ruslan and Ludmila? Are certain other other pieces such as Richard Strauss’ First Horn Concerto, which came round more often than you’d expect, still regularly played? Are a disproportionate number of the performers still Canadian? And what about the composers who used to turn up week after week but whom you rarely encountered elsewhere, such as Clérambault and Hellendaal? (A little unfair. I have performed music by Clérambault; as for Hellendaal, he is buried in the churchyard of the church I used to attend and where we got married! Their music doesn’t get broadcast except in the middle of the night though.) I will report back in a future contribution.

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three works I hope not to sing again

Posted on March 23, 2005 by vhk10

For reasons that will become clear I probably won’t be posting here an account of a performance of any of the following in future Holy Weeks:

a) Maunder, Olivet to Calvary. I sang this at a local church a few years ago and cannot remember anything much about the music, except that it didn’t impress me at all!

b) Malcolm Williamson, Procession of Palms. The only time I came across this was when I sang it a long time ago in a church in Reading. It was an odd piece in a mish-mash of styles, including a token modernist passage which stuck out a mile. (An internet search reveals an item about the piece in Ship of Fools, which confirms my impression of it).

c) Charles Wood’s St. Mark Passion. This was a Manchester favourite, in which I once sang one of the soprano arias, but I remained as immune to it as I am to just about all of Wood’s music. There’s one beautiful melody in it; however it’s not by Wood but lifted from Tallis for one of the hymns! Someone tried to convince me at the time that it was a standard piece in the repertoire of King’s College Choir, not realising that I’d recently spent six years in Cambridge and knew better ….

After recalling these I realise that Stainer’s Crucifixion has its merits and is certainly worth singing every few years (as I find myself doing), despite its cornier moments as regards music and text (anyone who’s familiar with the piece will know what these are).

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All Souls’ Day at St Mary Magdalene

Posted on March 18, 2005 by vhk10

Every year there is a performance with orchestra of a French setting of the Requiem Mass at St. Mary Magdalene, Paddington, at the High Mass on All Souls’ Day. This isn’t of course very topical, but I’ve been reminded of it by a couple of things recently.

I sang at this Mass several times in the 1990’s, in performances conducted by Nicholas Kaye. In the last few years I’ve fallen off the postal mailing list (they’ve never as far as I know used an email list to recruit singers), or the invitation has come too late for me to accept it; I hoped to take part a couple of years ago, but the date of the service was changed a few weeks beforehand which made it impossible. Once I was invited to sing at another service there. I felt flattered that I’d been asked to come all the way over from Cambridge, until I was told the reason: because I wasn’t a London-based singer I didn’t have to be paid!

A couple of times I sang the Duruflé Requiem, as it was a rare opportunity to perform the work with full orchestra. Otherwise I’d try to turn out for some of the more obscure settings I’d probably never sing otherwise. One year it was the Bruneau Requiem, in what was believed to be its fourth ever performance (two of the previous three being in Paris in the 1890’s, the third in Paddington a few years previously). The orchestra were playing from the original parts, a century old! I can’t say that this work was really overdue for revival, though I was happy to sing it once, and I did subsequently hear another choir perform it on Radio 3 so it didn’t sink back into total obscurity. I recall various bits which were clearly ripped off from Verdi’s setting, especially the Agnus Dei (right down to the flute obbligato!).

The last Requiem setting I sang there was the one by Saint-Saëns, not a favourite composer of mine. However, this piece, written after the death of one of the composer’s children, had more depth to it than I find in much of his music and I’d sing it again (provided that I didn’t have to invest too much time!). The orchestration is notable for requiring four harps.

There are other settings they do, such as those by Ropartz, Desenclos and Inghelbrecht. This year the Requiem is by Henri Tomasi, of whom I haven’t previously heard; I don’t know yet whether I’ll try to sing in it.

[I eventually gave up this fixture when the date was changed one year at short notice to the nearest Sunday; fortunately I hadn’t bought a rail ticket. The postal invitations also dried up.]

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