Ah, the carols for Christmas. Comfortingly familiar, and yet so familiar that everyone sings what they know, which occasionally isn’t necessarily what’s on the page!

The anthologies having arrived, this week was the chance to get in a festive mood by working on the carols for the Advent service looming around the corner. To start, Ding, dong merrily on high! and the opportunity to work on sustaining the long phrases on ‘Gloria,’ and to get the bell-sounds pinging off the page – as with the Vaughan Williams ‘Full fathom five,’ there needs to be a really percussive ‘d’ to the ‘ding’ and bright vowel-shapes to get the notes crisp and vibrant, rather than heavy and dragging.

The Angel Gabriel from heaven came needs real shape and direction in the long, legato wordless chords in the lower three voices; in order that the phrases have some meaning and don’t lose momentum, we worked on pointing them towards particular chords. The carol is full of lovely accented passing-notes and dissonances resolving as the parts keep moving, with florid lines in the alto and tenor voices in particular.

The Holly and the Ivy offered a multitude of land-mines: there are crisp dotted rhythms in some bars that need to be quite different to the gentle triplets sung in other voices at the same time. There are some terrific flowing lines in the lower voices, although sometimes the basses weren’t always quite sure where the lines were going – there were some moments where they weren’t quite as confident as they were elsewhere, and sometimes one heard ‘Oh, the ner ner hmm hmm da di  SUN! And the hmm pom some-thing da di DEER!’ which caused some hilarity. However, by the time we’d finished working on it, the carol was in great shape, in particular the delicate coda that extends ‘sweet singing in the choir’ with some lovely harmonies.

Thence to a first look at one of the Crypt concert pieces: Gabriel Jackson’s To Music.  This is a marvellous piece, full of rhythm and dance and joy; it moves at a terrifying pace as well! But this was our first encounter, so we started halfway through (reasons for this in a forthcoming post in the ‘Not drowning but waving’ column) and looked at the ‘Fall down’ section rather slowly. The divisi soprano parts peal like bells over one another throughout, with tolling chords in split tenors and basses and altos chiming their descending phrases in the middle – a terrific passage, that came together very quickly at rehearsal tempo. We then took a cautious dip into the opening 5/8 section to get a sense of what is to come.

The last two carols, I saw three ships and O Come, o come Emmanuel having been sung as well, we’ve now covered all the music for the Advent concert. We ended the rehearsal by singing through Ding, dong merrily… again – it’s always good to end with something the choir can sing well, to end on a positive note – and, with heads now out of the copies and the choir looking up and singing out, the transformation was immense. It will be the last piece in the concert, and promises to be a vibrant finish.

Hopefully, the rehearsal either next week or the week following will be at the church itself, St. Mildred’s, which will give us the chance to explore the acoustic properties of the performance space and get accustomed to the sound in the church before the concert; exciting times…