Tag Archives: Martland

So that’s how we can sound! A moment of realisation

There was a wonderful moment of realisation at the end of yesterday evening’s rehearsal.

We’d had a hard two hours, in particular looking at the rhythmic minefield that is Steve Martland’s Make We Joy Now. We’d also worked through a further four carols, including the rich sonorities of Peter Warlock’s heart-rending Bethlehem Down, a piece in which you have to be constantly on your toes to be ready for passing chords and leading passages that occasionally don’t do what’s expected of them.  Parry’s Welcome, Yule! Is a sprightly, consort-style carol that nevertheless has some tricky passages. We’d also looked at a new Advent Antiphon, O Clavis David, that doesn’t quite lie as easily as the earlier ones.

Looking beyond Christmas to the Crypt concert in February, we’d also begun working on O Sonno, a wonderful Italian madrigal with deeply sonorous harmonies exploring the plaintive text; more Italian vowel-shapes to perfect…

The final piece in the rehearsal, the rich and strangely haunting Remember, O Thou Man, we had looked at in a previous session, and the group sang it confidently. On the spur of the moment, to keep the choir on their toes and give them something new to think about, I asked them move into mixed formation, such that each member was standing next to someone singing a different voice-part, and we began the carol anew.

As soon as the first verse began, it was clear that something different was happening: the sound had changed and was deeper, richer and more sonorous – the result of each member suddenly having to take full responsibility for their line when they were unable to rely on hearing the same line sung by their neighbour. The transformation was immediate – and you could see an awareness of this gradually permeating the group as the verses unfolded. There was a palpable sense of excitement at the new sound, and some of the group started to smile without being able to help themselves.

When we finished, the atmosphere was electric: we’d stumbled across something quite dramatic, and something that made the whole group aware that there was a quite astonishing sound waiting to emerge. We’ve decided to explore this idea in future rehearsals: whether we use it in performance or not remains to be seen. Having written previously about the idea of moving the choir around in rehearsal, and the positive effect it can have, it was quite something to see it working, and to see the group as a whole come alive to its potential.

Great stuff: well done, team. (Just make sure you keep looking at the Martland in between rehearsals!).

And just to whet your appetites, here’s King’s College, Cambridge in Warlock’s carol…

Mighty madrigals to intimate Saint-Saens

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…