The upper-voice choir really started to hit its stride today, as we continued to develop pieces of plainsong by Hildegard von Bingen. There’s a particularly luminescent quality about a choir of ladies’ voices, and as we grow more confident in the weavings of the melodic lines, this is beginning to emerge.

So far, we’ve looked at Columba aspexit, a Kyrie setting, and today we began O Virtus Sapientiae. The Kyrie in particular has started to find its feet, and rehearsing it free of the piano allowed us to launch the various lines into the upper reaches of the concert-hall, and begin to explore the pacing of the lines, and the pauses in between them.

There was a nod to the forthcoming festive frivolities, too, in a setting of Silent Night for four-part upper-voice ensemble that hinted at a glimmer of Christmas magic to come.

It’s easy to forget, in rehearsing such evocative music as the plainchant, that time is passing; the end of the rehearsal always comes much more quickly than I expect. It’s a testament to the music’s power, to take you out of the quotidian and move, however briefly, out of time and space.