Choral life so far…

Choral life at the University has resumed in full flow this academic year; as we prepare for our Anniversary Weekend celebrating ten years since the opening of Colyer-Fergusson, two events in the run-up have opened our seasonal programme.

First, the University Cecilian Choir ushered in the Advent season with a sequence of carols, antiphons and moments of stillness by candlelight in St Michael’s,  Hernhill, a fifteenth-century church lying at the heart of a Kentish village. Students, staff and alumni came together to sing a meditative sequence, including the great Advent antiphons, to bring music ancient and more recent together in a highly effective performance on a dark winter’s night.

And our upper-voices chamber choir, Minerva Voices, has just performed as part of the final Lunchtime Concert of the term, a sparklingly seasonal concert given by visiting harpist Harriet Adie, for which the choir joined the concert to sing movements from Britten’s Ceremony of Carols. The evergreen ‘Spring Carol,’ the reflective lullaby ‘Balulalow’ and the bravura ‘This Little Babe’ were delivered with real poise around Harriet’s mesmerising reading of the ‘Interlude’ from the sequence.

So, a great start to the seasonal programming, and full steam ahead into the anniversary celebrations this weekend – and then more to come next week… Well, it IS Christmas!

Minerva Voices with harpist Harriet Adie

Back at the Cathedral for the first time since 2019: Minerva Voices

Minerva Voices, the University of Kent’s upper-voices chamber choir, returned to Canterbury Cathedral last night, singing at the Cathedral again for the first time since December 2019 for the University Carol Service – and what a relief it was to be back.

A necessarily streamlined Carol Service, lasting an hour, presented a sequence of lessons and carols, for which the Choir sang three pieces. Comprising both undergraduate and postgraduate students, there’s an international aspect to the ensemble this year, with members from California, Toronto, Hong Kong and from Taiwan, as well as from across the UK.

The service was the first time we’d been singing at the Cathedral since before the pandemic, and we’ve missed that lush acoustic. Well done too to final-year Music Award Holder reading Psychology, Felicity Bourdillon, on a glorious opening solo verse to ‘Once in royal David’s city.’

Congratulations to everyone involved; as the vibrant sound of the Choir lifted into the vaulted roof of the Cathedral, we all had but one thought: it’s good to be back…

Back to singing again! Although somewhat differently…

It was a relief this week to resume rehearsals; the concert-hall has been silent since March, but, for the first time, choral rehearsals for the University Chamber and Cecilian Choirs resumed – although a little differently to the way they took place before…

The floor of the concert-hall has been marked out with a grid, and chairs placed evenly at a distance of three metres; each choir only uses one or other set of chairs at either end of the hall, and rehearsal time is limited to one hour with the COVID-compliant air-conditioning running throughout (not a problem at the moment, but it’ll be interesting as external temperatures start to drop as we head towards winter…). And there’s no socialising before or after rehearsals, no mingling in the foyer; the singers have to sit socially-distanced outside, come into the hall in line, and leave the rehearsal in rows and follow the one-way system out from the building rather than mingling afterwards.

A socially-distanced Chamber Choir rehearsal

Sitting so far apart from one another, in rows rather than the usual gentle crescent-shape, is going to take some getting used to. No longer can you rely on those either side of you for support, drawing your sound and theirs together as part of the overall ensemble sound. And the singers at the back row are languishing a considerable distance from the front row, from the piano, and from the conductor. The wonderful intimacy of singing as part of a cluster of people has been replaced by a stark arrangement akin to an examination hall.

A first, socially-distanced rehearsal with the Cecilian Choir

But – it might yield different skills. The singers are going to have to develop a more confident sense of robust, internal rhythm; they’re going to have to watch more; they are going to have to listen harder to relate to what’s going on around them. Whilst we are working in this new, strange set-up, it might actually lead us to develop other skills to the ones we would normally develop in ensemble rehearsals. This term, repertoire includes richly-hued works by Will Todd, Steven Griffin, Michael Haydn, and the wonderful Advent antiphons; it will be fascinating to see how we learn them under the new ways of working – how differently, more quickly or slowly – and what the finished product will sound like.

And who  knows; taking those newly-developed skills back into singing in traditional formation (whenever that might be) might lead to a better overall ensemble sound. Like choirs everywhere at the moment, we are just going to have to wait to find out…

Sweet singing in the Choir: Chamber Choir at the University Carol Service

There was a special atmosphere in the Cathedral last night, the annual University Carol Service which brings over a thousand members of the university community together each December. A packed and expectant congregation gathered and stood as the Cathedral lights were extinguished, leaving only the dancing flames of the multitude of candles held by everyone ranged around the Nave and aisles, as the Chamber Choir stood at the West End Door to begin the service with a lively rendition of The Holly and the Ivy. Following this, the voice of third-year soprano Sophia Lyons lifted clear and confident into the roof of the Nave in a ringing opening verse to Once in royal David’s city and the service – and Christmas – was underway.

Later in the service, second-year assistant conductor, David Curtiss, led the Choir on the steps behind the altar in a ravishing reading of O magnum mysterium by Morten Lauridsen, a testing choral piece that requires considerable stamina from the performers.

Second-year David Curtiss rehearsing the Choir in the afternoon

The Choir’s third solo carol was a rendition of Sing Lullaby in a flowingly expressive setting by Jonathan Rathbone, delivered with great flexibility and lyricism.

The first time the Choir sings in the Cathedral is during the rehearsal late in the afternoon, and that first moment of launching  a choral sound into such a richly-resonant acoustic is always a special one. The lengthy acoustic means there’s no hiding from your own sound; at the end of a piece, you can hear your chord travelling around the Nave, with no opportunity to disguise the tuning! I’m delighted to say that there was nothing to worry about, as we listened a little anxiously to the ends of verses drifting down the Cathedral…

There’s always a lovely sense of occasion at this point in the year, as the University gathers to celebrate and renew the Christmas message, and this year was no exception; a wonderfully evocative service lit both by candles and by music. Congratulations to all those involved, and to the Chamber Choir on delivering a polished set of carols as part of the service.

 

Cecilian Choir launches the Advent season in meditative Breathing Space event

Congratulations to the University Cecilian Choir, which launched the season of Advent last Friday with a highly atmospheric combination of antiphons, carols and periods of silence in a special Breathing Space occasion at St Michael and All Angels, Hernhill.

The interior of the church was bathed in candlelight for this unusual event, which is part of a series run by the church during the dark winter months, as an opportunity to escape from the pressures of the Digital Age and find the chance to enjoy a reflective, meditative space on the last Friday of each month. The Cecilian Choir travelled out to the fifteenth-century church to sing a sequence of carols, each prefaced by one of the great Advent antiphons, creating a contrast between the solemnity of the plainsong and the colours of the carols which followed.

The sequence began with a glass-clear rendition of the opening verse to Once in royal David’s city from second-year soprano, Felicity Bourdillon, which opened the door into the ensuing procession of carols and antiphons, punctuated by periods of stillness illuminated by the dancing candles set around the church.

The Choir, comprising staff and students at the University, relished the opportunity to usher in the season from the closeness of the choir-stalls. Afterwards, congregation and performers left in silence, following the line of candles flickering along the sides of the footpath leading away from the church and into the Christmas season.

Between Worlds: first rehearsal with the composer

Amongst its many performing commitments this year, the University Chamber Choir is busy preparing a new piece being written especially for the choir and ensemble by Deal-based composer and performer, Anna Phoebe.

Anna’s new piece, Between Worlds, is a distant cousin of the Cellular Dynamics project, a collaboration between the Music department and the School of Biosciences exploring links between music and science. What’s new about Anna’s piece is that it is a direct, original musical response both to scientific research and to the laboratory environment, drawing on hi-resolution spectroscopy, video evidence and even sampled sounds from the laboratory to create a musical reflection, or response, inspired by the material gathered.

The Choir had the opportunity to work with the composer at Tuesday night’s rehearsal, at which Anna also played the violin in two of the movements. One of the sections features a dialogue between solo soprano and violin above a slow-moving choral backdrop, and it was thrilling to hear the solo violin lifting and skirling around the concert hall, weaving highly decorative arabesques around the soaring soprano line. It’s the first time that Anna has written for choir, and it’s apparent that she has an innate grasp of writing for the ensemble, structuring the vertical sonorities to create colours and contrasts.

What is striking about the piece is that it’s an engaging emotional, and highly expressive, response to the scientific environment; Anna’s musical language employs added-note chords and suspensions, the occasional slight portamento effect in the voices, creating a richly-colourful musical landscape. Her vision for the piece is cinematic in scope, and there are some scintillating dissonances, highly-charged moments that require the choir to know exactly where their notes are, and to have courage to sing them confidently to make the dissonant colours ring. Elsewhere, the texture includes field recordings made in the laboratory – the clinking and tapping of day-to-day lab equipment – such that the music sounds as though the lab itself is stirring into life; the fabric of the laboratory environment reaching out from the visual imagery and to become part of the sonic environment, a unique connection between science and sound. Last night’s rehearsal was the first step in building the composition, and putting the choir and solo lines together; there were some wonderfully atmospheric moments (notwithstanding the fact that several members of the choir were away that night) that have the Choir looking excitedly ahead to further movements as the piece unfolds.

The Choir and Anna will perform several movements from Between Worlds in a concert on Friday 8 March at Wye Parish Church, a taster of what’s to come when the piece receives its full premiere in Colyer-Fergusson Hall on Friday 7 June. It promises to be quite an event…

 

The fifth element: Blest are the Pure in Heart by James Webb

As part of its programme of contemporary works this year, the University Chamber Choir has been developing Blest are the Pure in Heart, a strikingly colourful anthem by James Webb published by Chichester Music Press.

The piece reflects the tone of the text (Blest are the pure in heart, for they shall see our God) in revelling in the sparse beauty of the open fifth, first heard at the opening in the sopranos and altos; the tenors and basses reply with the same interval on the dominant, creating an overall chord built now on fourths; the upper voices re-present their initial fifth, prompting the lower voices to respond with another open fifth, now on the mediant, which creates a contrasting combined sonority of a first-inversion major seventh. The simple juggling and combining the same interval at different transpositions creates three different gestures within the first two bars – an evocative start to the piece, which then unfolds in a more melodic fashion, but with the harmonic language still underpinned by the prevalence of the open fifth. It’s as though the music is trying to work out how best to respond to its first chord, exploring options in order to find the most suitable; its dissatisfaction with the first two (wonderfully colourful!) choices becomes the catalyst for the rest of the piece’s gradual unfolding.

Later still, when the opening returns, the music unfolds to include a flattened sixth, a small harmonic moment of great expressive power; the piece concludes with a final presentation of the opening gestures which now resolve into the tonic major, but hovering in second inversion, giving the end a wonderful sense of weightlessness.

A former producer with BBC Radio 3, James Webb also won the inaugural  BBC Young Musician of the Year Composers Award in 1992; his music has been performed by groups including London Voices, the Delta Saxophone Quartet, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

At its dress rehearsal this week in preparation for singing at the University Carol Service in Canterbury Cathedral next month, the Chamber Choir made a recording of the piece:

We are very much looking forward to performing this work in the resonant acoustics of Canterbury Cathedral and elsewhere as part of the Choir’s repertoire during the course of this academic year; it will work especially well in the evocative surroundings of the Cathedral Crypt in May.

Find out more about Chichester Music Press here.

Minerva Voices returns

I’m very pleased to say that our upper-voice chamber choir, Minerva Voices, has risen from the ashes like a phoenix this year, and is currently rehearsing ahead of a concert in March.

Minerva Voices at the University of Kent

Following on from auditions at the start of term, the upper-voice choir comprises undergraduate and post-graduate singers, and this year is working on some wonderfully colourful repertoire, including a new piece by Russell Hepplewhite, which is part of an anthology recently published by OUP, As You Sing. Russell’s piece, Fly away, over the sea, is a gorgeously-flowing setting of a poem by Christina Rossetti, and the choir has already begun working on it as part of its programme for March. The concert will also include the evocative Tundra by Ola Gjeilo, and movements from Vivaldi’s enduringly fresh-faced Gloria, in an arrangement which reflects how the work might originally have been performed at the orphanage in Venice, where Vivaldi was working at the time, for which the choir will be joined by members of the String Sinfonia.

There’s a particularly wonderful homogeneity to a choir of women’s voices, and the concert will reflect the different colours which various composers distil from the ensemble. You can come and hear the results for yourself on Weds 13 March, 2019, when Minerva Voices takes to the stage in the concert-hall for what promises to be a ravishing programme of choral music…

New year, new Chamber Choir

With two days of auditions over, this year’s University Chamber Choir is underway and preparing for a particularly busy calendar of performing commitments throughout the course of this academic year.

Comprising both undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the University community, this year’s ensemble consists of eighteen singers, who will be working towards the usual events in the choir’s annual choral calendar, as well as some exciting new events (about which more anon…). Our first public engagement will be the University Carol Service at Canterbury Cathedral in December, always a magical opportunity for the Choir to take flight publically for the first time.

Later in the year, we’ll also be singing Choral Evensong at the Cathedral, and giving our annual concert in the Cathedral Crypt; also in the diary are a return to St Michael’s Church, in Hernhill, for a meditative sequence of music and silence by candlelight in Breathing Space, a performance at Wye Church, and the performance of a new piece for choir, strings and electronics, for which rehearsals will start in November.

This year, the Assistant Conductor is second-year Hannah Ost, who also MDs with the Musical Theatre Society, and recently completed a busy summer working at the French Woods School of Performing Arts in New York.

It’s a relief for us to be finally up and running – we’re looking forward to the year ahead. See you along the way…

A visit to a Kentish village in May

The University Chamber Choir (pictured) and members of the String Sinfonia travelled to the picturesque village of Hernhill, in Kent, last Friday to perform The Agony and The Ecstasy to a packed audience in the twelfth-century church on the village green.

Set amidst the rolling orchards and fields of rural Kent, the countryside was filled, on a perfect summer day, with choral music ranging across the centuries, from Tudor polyphony to a modern Lenten motet by composer Sarah Rimkus, with at its heart the dramatic Stabat Mater by a youthful Pergolesi, completed shortly before the composer’s tragically early death. Assistant conductor, second-year Matt Cooke (pictured in rehearsal), also led the Choir in music by Rachmaninov and Passereau.

The audience at St Michael’s church responded with enthusiasm and rousing applause at the conclusion of the performance, and we’re delighted that the retiring collection, in support of the church’s much-needed renovation funds, raised close to £500.

Thanks to all the performers and to everyone involved; the Chamber Choir is back on Tuesday 29 May, when it will sing Choral Evensong at Canterbury Cathedral, and the String Sinfonia will perform next on Thursday 7 June as part of the annual Summer Music Week festival at the University; more details here.