Monthly Archives: October 2011

Touching the past: the Advent antiphons

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And so, this week we ventured yet further into our Advent repertoire. With the concert looming at the end of November, time to start the great Advent antiphons. As written about in a previous post, the magic of these antiphons resides in breathing life and flexibility into them, finding a rhythmic freedom that will allow the lines to ebb and flow with a naturalness, whilst still retaining the integrity of the ensemble. We explored the first and third, ‘O Wisdom’ and ‘O, Root of Jesse.’ Singing this music is a direct link with the past; you really feel history coming alive as the music unfolds. The antiphons date from before the ninth century, culled from Old Testament texts to foretell the coming of the Messiah, and singing them puts one in direct contact with a tradition dating back over a thousand years.

From medieval simplicity to the rich, clashing harmonies of the carol, Remember, O Thou Man; we worked at particularly pungent chords, moving very slowly between particular dissonances in a way that rendered certain passages actually rather alarmingly modern.

Steph then led the group in their first look at the Carol of the Bells, getting the choir to sound like bells ringing. A sprightly piece, this, and popular with the group. Lots of words to get across, too…

Time also to get to grips with a tricky corner in Barnum’s Dawn, building some of the chords note by note, a real opportunity to revel in the rich colours of many of the added-note chords that require great commitment from the voice-parts: the chords need to be delivered with great conviction for the colours to bloom.

Brahms’ In Stiller Nacht is maturing nicely; just some pronunciation aspects to sort out, as there are also in Monteverdi’s Ecco mormorar l’onde. This piece is the hardest so far. By contrast, and as a respite from the linguistic minefields afforded by these pieces, we went back to Sleep Wayward Thoughts, which is starting to lift off the page and achieve some rhythmic grace.

A final return to Whitacre’s Sleep, to look at the climactic section towards the end; tricky lines for the choir, where each part has to have courage to follow their lines through and stand firm in clashing dissonances.

A great rehearsal, full of colour; next week, we’ll be getting seriously in the Christmas mood as we broach, for the first time this year, that harbinger of the Christmas season: Carols for Choirs…

Mighty madrigals to intimate Saint-Saens

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Extremes of contrasting repertoire this week veered from Monteverdi’s epic five-part Ecco mormorar l’onde, rich in textural contrasts, to the understated homophony of Saint-Saëns’ Calme des Nuits, by way of Vaughan Williams’ Rest, a revisit of Barnum’s Dawn, and our first footfall in repertoire for the festive season.

The Monteverdi is a mighty piece, a meditation on the approaching dawn, with the rustle of leaves, birds singing, and the colours of the sea and sky beginning to appear. Monteverdi uses the piece to demonstrate his consummate skill in textural writing, with imitation, stretto, echo, homophony and antiphonal passages breaking out all over the place; there’s never time to relax into one style, as a few bars later, you’re into a different one. The two soprano lines vie for supremacy as they duck and weave over and around each other, whilst the inner voices ripple with imitative runs or move in similar motion with one or other voice-part. And on top of all that, there’s the Italian pronunciation to get right as well.

Steve Martland

Steve Martland: image credit Schott International

Our first piece for the Christmas season this year is Make We Joy Now by the contemporary British composer, Steve Martland. Martland’s music can be brash, bold, and full of rhythmic verve, and this carol is no exception. Its terrific rhythmic impetus sees the melody in the verses bobbing and weaving, wrong-footing the regularity of the pulse with sudden accents or crotchets where you’d expect a quaver; this is interspersed with a chorus that moves into triple metre, and builds dynamically in a truly exciting fashion as the same phrase is repeated – ‘make we joy now.’ We’ve worked slowly through the first verse and chorus, and it’s starting to develop, although the unpredictability of the metre is proving something of a challenge.

Steph returned to The Long Day Closes‘and had the choir exploring the dynamic contrasts with different sounds – humming for piano passages, ‘eeh‘ for crescendi / diminuendi and ‘ah’ for forte passages, which revealed the dynamic contours to good effect. A very useful exercise: I might have to nick that one…!

The rich sonorities of Vaughan Williams’ gently flowing Rest were followed by the intimacy of Saint-Saëns’ Calme des Nuits, a marvellously understated piece which, apart from the central eight bars, never really gets above pianissimo: the challenge with this work will be to bring off singing very quietly with good ensemble and intonation. Oh: and the French pronunciation, of course…

We ended by returning to Eric Barnum’s Dawn, in particular the last page, which uses an aleatoric passage for upper voices: the sopranos and altos each take a single note from a collection of eight, which they then sing over and over again, breathing where necessary, but in a way that should not coincide with anyone else: the score talks about creating the effect of ‘golden light.’ This was definitely new territory for the group (that’s modern music for you), but they took to it well, and eventually it started to work. We talked about creating the effect of a shaft of light falling through a prism and breaking into rainbow hues, and this seemed to help them make sense of what they were trying to achieve. In the Cathedral Crypt, it could be an amazing moment…

This choir frightens me…

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This year’s choir is frightening.

At last night’s rehearsal, we covered six pieces in two hours. Four were new, and a further two were works we had looked at in last week’s rehearsal. And three of the pieces were in foreign languages: one French, one Italian, one German.

What’s frightening is the speed with which the group picks up repertoire, how rapidly they grasp the overall stylistic feel of a piece. To begin, we immersed ourselves in the gentle, somnolent harmonies of Brahms’ In Stiller Nacht, complete with all the linguistic trickery of singing in German, and the spirit of the piece materialised quickly. This was swiftly followed by a musically geographical shift to Elizabethan England, to Dowland’s Sleep, Wayward Thoughts, with its metric variety, moving between 3/4 and 3/2, and the group adapted to the deft changes with ease.

This year’s student conductor, Steph, then took the group through Sullivan’s The Long Day Closes, looking at the meaning behind the text and getting the choir to bring this out in the music.

Lassus’ Bonjour, et puis quelles nouvelles ? presented the most challenging material at this week’s session, with syncopation, free-flowing imitation and rapid changes from homophony to polyphonic and antiphonal textures. This was the most difficult piece, and there’s still lots of work to do; but a good first reading.

We literally danced through Tutto lo di when we revisited it this week; already the piece has great verve and rhythmic spring, even if the Italian isn’t quite as accurate as it might be! And to close, further exploration of the rich colours of Whitacre’s Sleep, building passages chord by chord and starting to develop a rich, sonorous sound.

The work-rate over these first two rehearsals has been intense – eight pieces in two weeks, lots of sight-reading, embracing foreign languages, notwithstanding the fact that the group is itself brand new and the members are mostly new to one another. And it’s alarming, how quickly the group is picking the pieces up and adjusting stylistically to each new work as it comes along. Yes, there’s still some note-bashing to do, some corners to tidy up and lines to clarify; there’s balancing to develop, dynamics to address and articulation to improve, not to mention vowel-sounds in the Italian and consonants in the German to correct. But what’s immensely reassuring is the fact that the group is reading through these pieces so quickly, and are prepared to have a bold attempt when confronted by new material.

It’s scary – and exciting. In equal measure. Hold onto your hats, this could be an electrifying year…

A new Dawn, a new day: the new Chamber Choir

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And rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of last year’s Chamber Choir is the new ensemble, which met tonight for the first time.

First meetings are always tentative, with new members suddenly thrown into the fray alongside returning singers from the previous year. It’s difficult to sing confidently amongst strangers, especially when grappling with new pieces to sight-read and sometimes different languages in which to sing, in an unfamiliar venue on a campus at which you might only have arrived a few weeks previously.

And the group rose to the occasion splendidly.

After some tricksy warm-ups from Steph Richardson, this year’s student conductor, it was straight to work, looking at four pieces for the Crypt Concert in February of next year. First up, Dawn by the American composer Eric Barnum, a Whitacre-esque meditation on the rising day. We followed this with Vaughan Williams’ Sweet Day, a mock-Elisabethan part-song.

A sojourn in Italy next, with Lassus’ Tutto lo di, a deft villanelle which trips through various metric values, full of life and vigour. Some might consider not introducing the challenge of singing in a foreign language at a first rehearsal – all those tricky vowel-shapes and the minefield of pronunciation – but the group rose to the challenge with spirit.

We finished by looking at some genuine Whitacre,  Sleep, his profound and beautiful piece to a poem by Charles Anthony Silvestri. Some astonishing chords here, with consonant sonorities supporting semitone clashes that give a real piquancy to the music, some rich colours and breath-taking sonorities – we’ve begun building certain passages chord-by-chord, and the choir have taken to it straight away.

All in all, a terrific first rehearsal: well done to all the choir for their work, to Steph for leading the group through the warm-up exercises: more next week. It’s time to start getting excited about the year ahead…