2004-5 seasons on Web pages

Posted on October 29, 2004 by vhk10

I’ve been surfing around some websites for Bath choirs/music to see what they’re performing this season. I started doing this because I hadn’t received the mailshot I usually get from the Bath Camerata around the beginning of October. Their website lists just a Christmas concert, apparently their first performance since the beginning of June*. The Paragon Singers and the Chandos Singers also don’t go beyond the end of 2004 yet. The most informative of the websites for chamber choirs is the Chantry Singers’, which lists a concert in March 2004 and their Bach Festival in autumn 2005. The Bath Minerva Choir doesn’t appear to have a website at all [this has been put right – see the comment below]. The Bath Festival Chorus, being an occasional choir, doesn’t have a web page anywhere; if you want to join, you have to find out about it from someone who already sings with them. The Bath Philharmonia has no information after November 2002! Bath Baroque promises concerts in January and March 2005 with details to follow. The larger choral societies (City of Bath Bach Choir, Bath Choral Society), as you might expect, have details of their programme until summer 2005. All of this is as at the time of writing of course.
(* 17 November – I’ve just had the Camerata mailshot. The apparent lack of recent activity is because they’ve been making a recording).

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a day trip from Reading

Posted on October 27, 2004 by vhk10

Lichfield. I had thought of the Erleigh Cantors’ stamping ground as the south of England (I think the furthest north we’ve been other than this is Tewkesbury), but this time we took off in a new geographical direction for our Saturday evensong. Actually, if you can get to Birmingham easily by train or car, Lichfield is not far beyond. But that’s a big qualification. One set of engineering works on the railway compelled me to travel from Bristol Parkway rather than Bath. Then when I checked again nearer the time I found that a second set of engineering works near Cheltenham meant I had to set off an hour earlier than planned, passing through Worcester. On the return journey my train was partly replaced by an (unadvertised) bus between Birmingham and Gloucester. I suppose it meant I got to see some more Cathedrals than I’d expected to. Perhaps I should have eased my journey by taking advantage of the minor cottage industry in B and B’s in the Close and nearby streets, some of which are in the homes of Cathedral clergy. Would that more Cathedral cities had this!

All the music in the service was new to me, something which rarely happens now. The introit O Lord, arise by Weelkes must be (along with Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh keep silence) one of the longest I’ve ever sung. There is now only one anthem in the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems which I’ve never performed: This day Christ was born by Byrd. (I’ve never been within range of a sufficiently good choir at Christmas).

We made up for the long introit by only getting 8 verses of psalmody. Lichfield (like Ely) only allows visiting choirs to do a subset of the psalms on their first visit – a bit hard on choirs which like to go to a different Cathedral each time, especially when Precentors can and do compare notes with one another about their visitors. But in any case we needed plenty of rehearsal time for some of the other music such as the Piccolo responses. These (like Howells’) integrate the versicle music and the response and are one of the trickiest sets that I’ve done. We also needed rehearsal time to get used to Lichfield pitch!

Our canticles were Shephard’s Liverpool Service, new to us all and as far as we know unrecorded. They reminded me of various other pieces, in particular the Offertorium from Fauré’s Requiem. The anthem was Rutter’s Hymn to the Creator of Light, which was written for the 3 Choirs Festival about 10 years ago and is strikingly different, especially in the opening section, from the chirpy music one normally associates with him.

Next up this coming weekend it’s the Cathedral Chamber Choir at Sheffield and nearby High Bradfield Church, or as much of the weekend as the railway system will let me manage.

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Henley at the Abbey

Posted on October 20, 2004 by vhk10

I went to hear the choir of St. Mary’s, Henley, sing evensong at Bath Abbey on Saturday (their conductor is the usual organist for the Erleigh Cantors); it was the first time I’d been to hear a visiting choir since before the summer. Although the Abbey doesn’t inform you what the canticle setting is going to be at these services, I can usually tell when a choir is about to burst into Stanford in C by their faces as they gear themselves up for the opening entry. This service was no exception! The anthem was ‘And I saw a new heaven’.
The hymn, unfortunately, was ‘The day thou gavest’. I hope this doesn’t mark a return to the days a few years ago when this hymn was chosen by visiting choirs at about half of these Saturday services, regardless of the liturgical season. No one ever considered how boring it got for anyone who went to Saturday evensongs regularly! In a service where the congregational participation is just Creed, prayers and hymn (and sometimes at Bath Abbey the collective contribution to the prayers is confined to a solitary ‘Amen’ – not even the Grace), you need some variety in the choice of a hymn for them to sing!

I hope to get to rather more of these services over the next few months, and encourage others to do the same. Especially if you like singing ‘The day thou gavest’ or listening to Murill in E, which seems to be the favourite setting of visiting choirs. The best of these choirs can be very good, and they often bring music which isn’t in the repertoire of the Abbey’s own choirs. As it happens, last Saturday’s service was well attended (and not just by people who’d come from Henley with their choir), but sometimes they aren’t, or the people the choir bring with them aren’t familiar with evensong and would feel more at ease if there were others around who were. The Saturday evensongs aren’t routinely publicised on the website or in ‘Abbey News’ as they used to be, but there’s always a notice up outside the NW door on the day if there is one, and they are mentioned in the weekly pew sheet given out the previous Sunday.

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Composers in the British National Corpus

Posted on October 15, 2004 by vhk10

I have recently come across this intriguing graphical representation of the frequency of words in the British National Corpus, a corpus of spoken and written British English dating from the early 1990’s. As it includes proper names, I tried various names of composers (the number is the place in the frequency table, low numbers signifying high frequency):

Mozart 6234
Bach 11830
Beethoven 11942
Haydn 20025
Stravinsky 21886
Tchaikovsky 22807
Elgar 23091
Purcell 24229
Schubert 24638
Mahler 26589
Shostakovich 29140
Debussy 29336
Schoenberg 30784
Puccini 41577
Tippett 43223
Webern 47165
Messiaen 53446

What I don’t know is the absolute frequencies and I wonder whether at the less frequent end differences of thousands of places may conceal little or no difference in frequency. I left out some names which could turn up frequently as common nouns or other people’s names (e.g. Strauss (17539), Gibbons (20388), Wagner (11505, though I bet most of these are the composer)). Sometimes something named after the composer may inflate their count; I suspect the Tallis Scholars have done this for Tallis (12911) though the Monteverdi Choir has not boosted Monteverdi (34755) very much, and maybe the Purcell School has done it for Purcell.

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where do you put flyers?

Posted on October 8, 2004 by vhk10

I’ve been discovering again where to distribute flyers and posters for concerts in Bristol. By keeping my eyes open for opportunities I’ve found various shops and other places near where I work which can take them and display them prominently. I also used a contact in the university’s Modern Languages department to get some publicity for ‘Viva!’ into the Spanish part of the department.

One place for putting flyers which I really miss is Bristol Classical Discs. I was very sorry to return to the area after a few months away in 2002 to find that this shop had gone. As well as being a useful source of information about forthcoming events and local musical groups, it was particularly well stocked for 20th-century and choral music. Fortunately Bath also has a very good CD shop.

Another obvious place is the University’s Victoria Rooms. I used not to like going in there because the behaviour of the porters was enough to induce paranoia in the most confident; they would be in conversation as you walked through the door, but immediately stop when they saw you and stare at you until you left – even if you were just inspecting the table in the lobby with publicity on – as though you were a management spy or a dangerous criminal whose activities they’d just been discussing. When I last went in they’d been replaced by other porters who knew how to observe visitors more discreetly and not make them feel intimidated.

I’ve got into trouble recently for turning up to sing at services at the last possible minute. Now here is a challenge: I’m aware that parents of young children are in general a group which the Church of England has difficulty getting to attend church frequently. Are there many other mothers of two young children out there who turn out most weeks to sing in the choir at a 9 a.m. service (that’s the service, not the practice!)? I bet you’d have to go some way to find any, but I’d be interested to be proved wrong.

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Viva!

Posted on October 1, 2004 by vhk10

On Saturday I performed in a concert of music associated with Spain and Latin America in St. Mary Redcliffe church with the Exultate Singers.

This considerably expanded the list of languages I’ve now performed in, with the addition of Quechua, Nahuatl and Portuguese, together with a piece in a creolised form of Spanish (sung to a proto-rumba rhythm).

Along with early choral music from the days of the missions (hence the Quechua and Nahuatl) and some Spanish Renaissance polychoral motets, there were two substantial 20th-century pieces on the programme. I hadn’t come across Ginastera’s Lamentations of Jeremiah before. In this wartime setting words to do with death get great emphasis and the first of the three sections makes a much more aggressive approach to the text of ‘O vos omnes’ than settings of it usually do; nevertheless the work brightens up a bit towards the end. One thing I missed: the Hebrew letters which preface the sections in settings such as Tallis’.

This was also the first (and rather belated) time I’d performed anything by James MacMillan, in this case his Canticos Sagrados (I missed a chance to do them with the Bath Festival Chorus a few years ago). This used the mighty Redcliffe organ to good effect and seemed to make a great impression on choir and audience alike. I’m not sure in my case whether this wasn’t at least as much due to the words (translated from Latin American poets) as the music. As with anyone else, it’s a case of ‘know your composer’ and it took a little while for me to get used to MacMillan’s quirks, such as the use of very long and very short notes simultaneously and his liking for note clusters (being a second soprano I was right in the middle of some of these). I feel I understand and appreciate his music rather better now for having performed some of it, but I’m still left with the reaction I always have to MacMillan – that I ought to like his music more than I actually do.

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what the stats tell me

Posted on September 27, 2004 by vhk10

I generated a stats page for the first year of this blog and have been perusing it with some interest, despite my well-founded reluctance to take website stats at face value. I have tried to exclude most spiders, robots and the like from the calculations.

During the first year, the number of pages accessed increased about tenfold. After Great Britain and the USA, the most hits have come from Japan, Australia, Canada and the Netherlands. Many other countries also feature; I can’t imagine what the readership in Togo and Belize made of all this, though as they only looked at one page each it doesn’t seem to have interested them much.

When it comes to readership in the UK, I can sometimes see particular acquaintances of mine showing up in the stats, identifiable by their IP address. Commercial ISPs of course don’t give much away, though there must be quite a local readership to judge (for example) from the comments that were posted in the Bath Abbey article. And I know from what people say to me in person that many people have read these pages without posting comment! I’d love to know who burns the midnight oil reading them at the library in the University of Dundee. I suspect it’s a spider; but if you are real, Dundee reader, I apologise!

The most popular article was the account of my audition for the Chantry Singers. There’s no obvious reason why, except that at one time this article was a popular target for spammers.

Apologies for the downtime last week (the power supply to the machine room was accidentally cut) and for the glitch which prevented anyone from posting a comment for a while. I should have realised something was up from the lack of spam attempts.

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Two events at Bathwick

Posted on September 17, 2004 by vhk10

I’ve recently sung in a couple of performances at St. Mary’s Bathwick (which I’ve been told was visited last year by the Ship of Fools’ Mystery Worshipper).

First up was Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang with orchestra, performed in aid of the organ fund at an all-Mendelssohn concert. I’ve never sung this before, apart from once doing the duet ‘I waited for the Lord’ as a communion anthem. Some of the choral writing was surprisingly hard work, especially in the long chorus ‘The night is departing’, where there were pages on end with only the odd (fast) quaver rest to catch your breath. I think the two soprano soloists get much of the nicest music. The text has a very generic feel to it, although it is biblical. This was partly because we were singing it in the Novello edition’s translation which is adapted to fit the rhythms of Luther’s German as originally set. But I noticed that (apart from some Trinitarian formulae in the doxology of ‘Nun danket’) there is no reference to any New Testament doctrine, or indeed to any biblical event.

I was back a week later to sing in the patronal festival evensong, where I reacquainted myself with ‘Sing we merrily’ by Sidney Campbell.

My next performance is a concert at St. Mary Redcliffe on September 25th (8 p.m.) with the Exultate Singers; Viva! – a programme of music from or about Spain & Latin America.

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what have I learned?

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

It’s now just over a year since I started this blog, and time maybe to review some aspects of the experience. I intend also to analyse some usage statistics in another posting.

a) I originally expected this to be little more than an annotated version of the list I keep of music I’ve performed. Although I sometimes structure entries that way (e.g. the recent entry about Southwark), the blog has moved in a different direction. It’s also a place to ask questions that have occurred to me, and to relate incidents, not necessarily recent, which have amused, puzzled or saddened me, and maybe to get an alternative account of them.

b) My postings have been mostly concerned with performances I’ve taken part in myself, rather than accounts of those I’ve attended or heard on broadcasts. I will try to keep putting in the latter from time to time. I also have some other ideas which I haven’t tried out yet, such as book reviews or descriptions of buildings where I’ve performed. Even within my own performing life, there are some things that are under-represented, such as the music I work on in singing lessons.

c) It’s often observed that some search engines are biased in favour of blogs in the order in which they present their results. I can confirm this; e.g. a search on ‘Exon Singers’ at the time of writing using one popular search engine puts this site above the Exon Singers’ own official home page! (Apologies to the Exon Singers, as writing this has probably made the problem worse.) I have to assume that what I write is likely to be read by anyone I mention by name, or by someone who runs any organisation I name. This puts constraints on what I can say but also makes me feel that what I write here may make a difference somewhere along the line. Keeping close to home tends to generate the most controversy.

d) At a very early stage spammers started posting pseudo-comments. I used the ‘ban IP’ facility but this was really shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted. Being something of a Perl hacker, I have made some small changes to the scripts and templates provided by Moveable Type to filter out unwanted comments; now fewer than 10% of the attempts to post spam succeed. I’m willing to describe these changes in general terms with anyone who also runs a blog using Moveable Type software. (Conditions of use prohibit me from sharing actual code).

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the Virginia Knight B & B choir

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

The Cathedral Chamber Choir was renamed to something like this on the car parking permits issued to drivers staying at King Alfred’s College during the week at Winchester Cathedral (because I’d made the booking there). I don’t think the name will stick! Another source of confusion was that in addition to our principal conductor Martin Hall, another Martin Hall joined us on some days to sing or play the organ.

The spirit of Wagner wasn’t far from the music at some points, as when we sang the Sanders responses, which use the Dresden Amen, or in the Tristanesque climax to the Nunc of Bairstow in D. It was in fact the first time I’d sung Bairstow in D; I’m not sure how I managed to miss it, since I’d heard other people do it so many times that I knew exactly how it went. Bairstow is not a favourite of mine so it wasn’t on the wishlist, but it’s one more thing to have done.

The first day that I sang was Wednesday, when we performed Howells ‘Westminster’ Canticles, my favourite setting of his after ‘St. Paul’s’, although I appeared to be almost the only one in the choir who’d sung them before. Our anthem was a world premiere of The lilies of his love, a setting of Henry Vaughan commissioned from Ronald Corp by a member of the choir. This proved to be musically interesting without being so difficult that we couldn’t master it in the time available (it’s quite a long anthem), and I found my part singable (notwithstanding a leap of a tenth at one point).

I skipped the Friday (thereby missing And I saw a new heaven, an anthem I don’t care for at all) and returned for the weekend’s services. The highlight of all the pieces I sang was The Angels by Jonathan Harvey, the first time I’d performed a piece by him. We were told this was in the Cathedral Choir’s repertoire (the words are by a former Bishop of Winchester) so this was probably less new to many in the congregation than to us. I was in the first choir, which has a much more mobile part than the second. This is one of those pieces which really makes you aware of the difference between a tone and a semitone, and where I find it essential to stay in tune (we did) because pitch memory can help to find the notes. We rehearsed this during the week rather than just on the day, so that we had time to learn the expression markings thoroughly too.

To leave time for the less familiar works, much of the rest was old faithfuls such as Stanford in C Mag & Nunc and Darke in F Communion settings. I was singing as well as I’ve done at any time this summer, but no solos this time as this choir tends to do verse/solo sections full so the supply is limited!

Next up is a performance on Saturday 4th (at 7.30) of the Lobgesang, as part of an all-Mendelssohn concert in St. Mary’s Bathwick.

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Priory Voices (4): Durham

Posted on September 1, 2004 by vhk10

Firstly, apologies for some downtime over the last few days. The air conditioning in the room in which this server lives is faulty and the server had to be switched off during the Bank Holiday weekend in case it or other computers overheated when there was no one around to notice.

The final outing of the year for Priory Voices was to Durham Cathedral, not one to be missed. I found little had changed since I last came, though the Cathedral has done a major about-turn in the matter of candles in recent years. There are now two large banks of votive lights prominently located on each side of the nave; it’s not very long since the only candles in the building were at the tomb of St. Bede! I appreciated the opportunity for visitors to wander round the building well into the evening; no locking up immediately after Evensong, as happens at some places. It is not a hugely resonant acoustic – I think the heavy columns in the nave soak up a lot of sound – but a strong choir can persuade the echo to come out and play.
There was quite a lot of new music for me this weekend. Most excitingly, it was my first opportunity to sing Purcell’s anthem Jehovah, quam multi sunt hostes mei, which I was smitten by on hearing it for the first time on an evensong broadcast some ten years ago. Ever since then, I’ve longed to sing it, but it’s not often done, perhaps because of the deep bass (written for Gostling?) and tricky tenor solos (don’t know who Purcell’s tricky tenor was). The choral parts are for five voices, giving added richness and the opportunity for some stunning dissonances (e.g. the ‘-gunt’ of ‘insurgunt’ in the second phrase), which some recordings are rather coy about. I regard it as one of the masterpieces of the cathedral repertoire, though the Latin text has led some to conjecture that it was written for Catholic or even secular performance. I don’t get asked to do as much Purcell as I’d like, perhaps because many of his anthems are long and it isn’t easy to get hold of sets of copies.
We also sang Bryan Kelly’s Jamaican Canticles, new to me. I prefer them to the better-known Kelly in C, though I think they lose some of their lightness when re-arranged for SATB from the original treble voices only. (I have an LP of Reading Phoenix Choir singing another choral work by Bryan Kelly, ‘Linda’, which begins ‘Linda went out in her wedges’ and culminates with the moral ‘Promises break like biscuits’. I need hardly add that this was commissioned for the opening of the Reading Hexagon in the 1970’s). Incidentally, I noticed on the back cover of Kelly’s canticles that the publisher also has on its list an arrangement by Stephen Cleobury of the hymn tune ‘MacCabeus’, as if the hero of Handel’s oratorio had hailed from Scotland!
Other than that, there was another chance to sing Vierne’s Messe Solennelle at Romanesque columns as at Gloucester, and another shot at Howells’ ‘Coll. Reg.’ morning canticles, which I felt more secure about this time. We did my favourite Responses, the Lloyd second set, which was a case of coals to Newcastle as they were written for Durham. I enjoyed being able to sing the full complement of psalmody on the Saturday, and I even got some psalm chants which I didn’t know (and which weren’t home-grown), something which rarely happens these days.

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plainsong

Posted on August 17, 2004 by vhk10

I don’t usually choose the places I go on holiday for musical reasons, but when I found out that we were going to spend a fortnight only half an hour’s drive from the monastery of Solesmes in Western France, it became essential to go and hear the singing of plainchant there. I went to two services, a Vespers and a Mass. Both were attended by several dozen lay people and clearly visitors come from far and wide to hear the community perform, though Solesmes doesn’t have the trappings of religious tourism apart from a shop at the monastery gates. The Vespers was lightly accompanied on the organ; the Mass was unaccompanied and for the chanting of the Propers with their more elaborate music a smaller group, rather than the entire community, was used. It isn’t really appropriate to apply ‘reviewing’ criteria to a religious community which isn’t performing for your benefit. I’ll only comment on one stylistic aspect; the marked ‘tailing off’ at the ends of lines which is often copied elsewhere but which doesn’t always travel well to drier acoustics.

I have been exposed to a lot of plainchant over the years. This becomes obvious when I have to sing a plainsong hymn in a Cathedral or perform a work which uses plainsong in some way; I can usually sing the melody straight off while others struggle. And being able to identify the eight psalm tones is a party piece of sorts. But it was clear from inspecting the publications in the bookshop at Solesmes, as from earlier experiences such as a workshop with Mary Berry in Oxford, that there are whole dimensions to Gregorian chant that I’m ignorant of, as I’ve never really got into the neumes business.

Ultimately I have to admit that I miss harmony when singing with or listening to a choir doing plainchant, or anything else in unison for a long time. This also applies to unison hymns (which is why I haven’t enjoyed the last couple of weddings where I’ve been in the choir!).

Other musical points of interest in the holiday included the five pianos on view in the château at Le Lude and the extravagant piece of French organ music we heard someone practising in Angers Cathedral. We were able to listen to concerts on France-Musique though the area we were staying in wasn’t covered by digital broadcasting.

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