Meeting some of the singers in the University Chamber Choir. This week, Steph Richardson in the altos.
How did you get into choral singing ? I have sung in many musicals, but University was my first hefty chamber choir experience.
Steph Richardson
What’s your favourite piece ? Of this year’s repetoire, probably ‘Our Love Is Here To Stay‘.
What’s your best/worst memory about singing in a choir ? Best: conducting Carol of the Bells from the back of the Cathedral at Christmas 2011. Seeing some members of the choir crying as we sang (and I conducted) Lullaby (Billy Joel) for the last time. Worst: Having an ichy foot in performance during the whole of ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven‘.
What do you find is the most inspirational aspect of choral singing ? When everyone’s different voices really come together it can be mesmerising and you can hear the depth of the song. The interesting thing about singing in a choir is that every part has a different tune to sing, so every choral singer has a different memory of the piece. Each person’s separate part is the melody to them. This is how the music comes together so well. To me, the alto line is the main, and often the most beautiful, line.
With just over a week to go until our first concert commitment, a bold decision taken at the latest rehearsal seems to have paid off.
Each year, the underlying aspiration (not necessarily voiced to the Choir in the first months of rehearsal), is that we will sing in mixed-formation, in which each singer stands next to someone singing another voice-part. This serves a number of purposes – singers can’t rely on being surrounded by their own section and need to take responsibility for delivering their own line; the overall ensemble balance is better with voice-parts distributed throughout the texture, rather than being grouped in once place; and (most importantly) the nature of the ensemble sound is transformed, becoming richer and more unified. Usually, I wait for this suggestion to emerge from the Choir – members from previous years know we aim for this, and often suggest it – but thus far, it hadn’t come. Taking the carols with which we are the most confident, I asked the Choir to try something different, as a means of testing how well we really knew the pieces – and juggle formation.
Mixing it up a little
After some feverish activity – “Wait, I can’t stand there – I’m near another soprano!” – the Choir settled into mixed-voice line-up, and we sang again. The effect was immediate: a more positive, confident, richer sound. When there’s no-one next to you, singing the same line. on whom you can rely (for which read ‘follow’), each singer has to take charge of their own line. In addition, they can now suddenly hear other voices, other harmonies, and other lines which they haven’t heard previously, and discover with which voices they are moving in parallel, or imitating, and other colours in the chords.
We’re keeping this formation for the concert (assuming everyone can remember where they stood!), and now the ensemble sound particular to this year’s Choir can really start to develop. There’s not much time before the Advent concert – but it will worth the effort.
Meeting some of the singers in the University Chamber Choir. This week, bass David Newell.
Bass desires: David Newell
How did you get into choral singing ? I got into choral singing when I joined Wakefield Cathedral Choir at the age of six.
What’s your favourite piece ? My favourite piece is the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G Minor. I sang the solo from it in Salzburg Cathedral on tour.
What’s your best and worst memory of singing in a choir ? My best memory of singing in a choir is Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit at Midnight Mass (hence the name) with a small chamber orchestra. So Christmassy! My worst memory involves rather too much beer, so I shan’t go into it here…
What do you find the most inspirational aspect of choral singing ? The most inspiring thing in choral music is the homogeneous sound a choir can make. It is 100% human, no instruments to get in the way, hide behind or blame. When it is right it is the most right anything can be. Sublime.
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.
Since writing about the weekend rehearsal, I was talking to a couple of members of the Choir on Monday about how they felt the day had gone.
”Well,” said one of them, ”we kind of felt that, um…that we could do with a piece that’s more…umm…cheerful ?”
And do you know, she was right. Re-considering the programme for March, it did seem that we could do with something more jolly and lively in the second half. The two singers were recalling fondly some of the jollier repertoire we’d done in the past – a vilanelle by Lassus, last year’s madrigal Tanzen und Springen by Hassler – and, with these in mind, I spent Monday afternoon looking for a similar piece. It’s all about learning – they learn from me, I learn from them – and feedback is so crucial, for me, to my role in leading the Chamber Choir each year; to get a sense of how the Choir feels about rehearsals, about repertoire. We’re a democratic ensemble, making decisions together, contributing suggestions and ideas – it makes us function better as a team than as an autocracy, and the resulting performance is always better, too.
And then it struck me. Of course! What about Lassus’ bonkers chickens-squabbling Chi Chi Li Chi ? There was nothing in Italian amongst this year’s pieces, and we could make something almost theatrical out of it, the argumentative roosters sniping at each other in the yard. We could relinquish the Barber Agnus Dei – a great piece, certainly, but perhaps too much for this particular programme.
All in a flap…Credit: Wikimedia Commons
With this in mind, last night’s rehearsal took a somewhat different course to the one I’d originally planned; Matt opened proceedings in continuing Rutter’s Dashing Away – another two verses under the belt – and then we embarked on the Italian Rooster-Fight. There were some raised eyebrows at first, but we worked on the rhythm of the text and the pronunciation, and then added the notes. (I’ve suggested that, to help them develop their pronunciation, that they all watch the new series of Inspector Montalbano on BBC4 on Saturday nights, for Luca Zingaretti’s style).
It’s certainly a bit different to the Barber! But I think we can really exploit the dramatic, theatrical nature of the waspish exchanges between the birds. A quick look at the first two verses of the second of the Brahms lieder, and a revisiting of Sing We At Pleasure by Matt, and the first half was over.
And so to Advent. It’s not Christmas for singers if you don’t start looking at the seasonal repertoire much earlier than December; those Carols for Choirs are cracked open weeks in advance (as Dave in the basses has written about, in poetic form, here). We took our first steps towards the Advent concert with two of the wonderful Advent antiphons, which we are reading from proper plainchant notation – as I said to the Choir, one of the great things about music at Christmas is that it looks forward (there’s usually lots of contemporary carols being commissioned for Christmas) as well as back to the past, and you can really feel the touch of history in the antiphons – they are referred to by the Christian philosopher Boethius (who died in 524 or 525), and had certainly become established by the eighth century. There’s work to do in getting used to the ebb and flow, the wonderful flexibility of the way the phrases rise and fall, to give them a sense of freedom and elasticity rather than a note-after-note-after-note delivery – but it anchors the Advent programme in its history.
The pieces will be coming thick and fast in rehearsals now; we also sang through Ord’s Adam Lay YBounden, the first two verses of Warlock’s Bethlehem Down (possibly my favourite carol), and finished with the Ukranian carol, Carol of the Bells, which leapt off the page so quickly that we had fun arranging ourselves around the balcony of the concert-hall to sing it. (Ignore the crass video here and just enjoy the music…)
Christmas – for the Chamber Choir – is on its way…
There was a magical moment at the all-day Chamber Choir workshop on Saturday when, in a moment of ‘I can’t wait to try this’ recklessness, we ran the last two pages of Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque without the piano. We had literally just looked at the final section for the first time, exploring those chocolate-hued chords and sudden moment of harmonic brilliance in the change from minor to glorious major, resonant and rich chords of C#; and it was a moment of ‘Ok, let’s just see how we get on…’
And we tried it. And it worked. There was a moment’s awe-struck hush after the final chord had died away, and then a real sense of excitement hung in the air – this will be the moment which will end the first half of the Crypt concert in March, and what a poised moment on which to finish it. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one bearing an irrepresible grin across my face at that moment, either…
Matt B leads the Chamber Choir in music by William Byrd
As is customary, we hold an all-day rehearsal early in the first term, in order to get to grips with a large amount of repertoire, build the momentum from the first rehearsal, and get the Choir to bond socially during the day during the breaks and over lunch. The student conductor, Matt, and I had carefully planned how we would use the day, and by the end of it – apart from two movements of the Brahms op.62 lieder – we aimed to have sung through everything in the Crypt programme, over these first two weeks.
There’s a real sense of achievement at the end of the day, that I always forget, and which is very pleasing; from now on, we’re revisiting pieces, rather than having new ones thrown at us (well, rather than my throwing new pieces at them). The psychological effect of this is to make you feel that you are really starting to make progress, rather than starting from scratch each week with something new.
Throghout the day, the Choir took every piece we threw at them, ranging from William Byrd through Brahms to Whitacre. (There were one or two exciting moments in Chilcott’s Steal Away where the basses were singing in parallel octaves rather than parallel minor sevenths, but that will come…) Matt had the Choir in high spirits as he led them through Rutter’s Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron, which is trickier than it looks – whilst one voice has the tune, the other voices are often punctuating with rhythmic chords and off-beat interjections, which takes some getting used to – and we ended with my setting of Gershwin’s Our Love Is Here To Stay, which will show the Choir in jazzy, barbershop form – lots of added-note chords and jazz-infused sonorities to perfect and to tune.
Luncheon of the Singing Party
All in all, though, a very good day, and one in which we all felt we’d made great strides, particularly in singing some pieces (the final section of the Whitacre and Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus) without support from the piano, at this early stage, showing the signs of good things to come.
So, back rehearsing again tomorrow night: and it’s time to get festive with a look at the great Advent antiphons and some carols in preparation for the Advent concert at the end of November. It never stops…
This week, the second week of rehearsals with the Chamber and Cecilian Choirs, has seen a real development since last week’s tentative feet-finding first sessions.
Chamber Choir is still ploughing through its repertoire for the Crypt concert in March – we’ve a weekend workshop this Saturday as well, at the end of which we’ll pretty much have sung through nearly all the pieces in the programme. I’m expecting us all to feel slightly more relaxed after Saturday – a few movements from the Brahms’ Sieben Lieder aside, we will now start returning to repertoire we’ve already seen, which will (I hope) start to make the pieces feel more familiar – instead of being confronted each week by new pieces.
And the Cecilian Choir is really starting to develop a terrific sound; we revisited the Hassler ‘Kyrie’ and moved then into the ‘Gloria,’ before departing Germanic Renaissance for the contemporary shores of Ola Gjeilo’s Ubi Caritas and then back to Germany for Rheinberger’s richly-sonorous Abendlied. As the Choir revisits passages we have previously seen, it starts to grow in confidence, and there’s the potential for a lovely ensemble sound to emerge as we become more confident in singing. As we work to develop the three-dimsensionality of the pieces by bringing out the dynamic contrasts and, in the Hassler, the individual subjects as they enter, the choral sound is really beginning to blossom.
Whilst at the start of the week, the upper-voice incarnation of the Cecilian Choir (we’re still working on a name…) met for the first time to explore music by Hildegard of Bingen and send some medieval monophony soaring around the concert-hall. We’ll be experimenting with performing it with and without a drone accompaniment, and establish the wonderful flexibility of the lines as we become more familiar with Hildegard’s colourful melismatic writing.
And finally, after all the preparations, amassing the repertoire and two days’ worth of auditions, both the University Chamber Choir and Cecilian Choir each had their first rehearsal this week.
On song: Chamber Choir meets for the first time
There’s no gentle easing in for the Chamber Choir; the first commitment, ‘Music for Advent’ looms in about eight weeks’ time, and the Crypt concert in March, and we have to go from zero to full performance assuredness in no time. Ergo, the first few rehearsals represent a whirlwind tour of the full range of repertoire, in order that the singers can get a feel for the geography of the programmes and see what kind of pieces they will be expected to perform. (The other reason for whirling rapidly through pieces is that, if there’s a piece someone doesn’t like, at least they know we won’t be dwelling on it for hours at a time in these early rehearsals).
I’m pleased to say that everyone seems to be taken with Whitacre’s colourful Lux Aurumque with which we ended the rehearsal – the student conductor, Matt, opened with Byrd’s serene masterpiece, Ave Verum Corpus, and I followed with two movements from Brahms’ Sieben Lieder op.62. After the break, Matt led the first steps into Rutter’s Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron, which is deceptively simple and offers some real challenges as it builds.
And yesterday, the Cecilian Choir reconvened, this time in mixed-voice formation; sister-choir to the Chamber Choir, it looks as though it might number close to thirty singers, which is particularly exciting! A whistle-stop tour of some of the repertoire for this particular Choir took in the ‘Kyrie’ from Hassler’s Missa super Dixit Maria, the middle section of Maskat’s evocative Prayer to the Night, the first few pages of Rheinberger’s purple-hued Abendlied, and the second section of Sir John Tavener’s Hymn for the Dormition of the Mother of God, which had the sopranos and altos gliding in medieval-esque parallel fourths whilst the basses were slightly confounded by their line which, on paper, reads simply but actually works against the upper voices to provide those typically Tavener dissonances.After all the preparation and learning over the summer months, it’s a relief finally to be getting to grips with the music, meeting the singers, and getting the Choirs off the ground. Ice-breakers and warm-up exercises served to get people introduced to each other and to singing together in a rudimentary fashion – these first few rehearsals, I always find, are somewhat hesitant as people grow accustomed to singing with strangers and finding their feet with new repertoire in a brand-new choir.
But it promises to be a very exciting year for both choirs – and on Monday, the upper-voice incarnation will meet for the first time to explore some medieval pieces. Watch this space…
I’d forgotten what a heady mixture the summer term is at Kent, of excitement and angst: because it’s exam term, one never quite knows how many people will be at rehearsals over the weeks of term, given that (quite rightly!) many students are revising for exams, or taking exams, or attending revision sessions to prepare for exams. Quite often, one never has everyone in the ensemble until the final rehearsal. And sometimes not necessarily then, either…
For all that planning for rehearsals is fraught, the great aspect of this term, in choral terms, is that the Chamber and Cecilian Choirs are each revisiting repertoire from the year, in preparation for the concert at St Paul’s Without, in Canterbury, on Friday 7 June. Because singers duck in and out of rehearsals, in order to take the pressure off and not add to everyone’s already frantic stress-levels, the summer choral concert comprises pieces the Choirs have each already learned, by and large.
Click to view
Having said that, though, the Cecilian Choir is learning a short piece by Judith Weir, from The Little Tree for upper-voice choir and marimba, whilst the Chamber Choir is learning three new pieces. (Well, as anyone who knows me well will realise, I never like to do things exactly the same way twice…). So, there is some new repertoire with which to grapple, but we are covering pieces we’ve already learned and performed.
And the effect is tremendous. Both choirs have developed a real confidence in the repertoire, and in performing as an ensemble, such that there is a real commitment to the sound and a solidity about the pieces that is new. The confidence comes, in part, from having already performed the pieces in public, and through being familiar with the tonal landscapes the pieces occupy – this is most readily apparent in the Cecilian Choir’s recent return to Britten’s Ceremony of Carols which will form part of the concert in June. There’s a sense that the Choir is enjoying itself anew, and with the confidence comes a richer, more positive sound. It’s very exciting to discover. (And – dare I say it – there’s a sense that the Choir is starting to enjoy the Britten… 😮 !)
The Chamber Choir, meanwhile, is letting its hair down with three pieces ranging from jazz to arrangement of two pop pieces straight out of the current charts (I can’t say which two, as we’re sworn to secrecy – all shall be revealed in the Summer Sunday concert on June 9). Again, as we revisit pieces from the Crypt concert back in February, there’s a developed sense of confidence and a new freedom in the sound.
The sad thing, though, is that all this comes scant weeks before the end of the academic year, when many of the singers will graduate, and the Choirs (as we have know them this year) will cease to exist. For such positive steps in each Choir’s evolution to come only a few weeks before they will finish is sad, really. But very exciting to finish with such a flourish, too.
The University Cecilian Choir has been rehearsing industriously for its concert as part of this year’s Britten centenary celebrations, including working on the Ceremony of Carols together with second-year harpist, Emma Murton.
In rehearsal: the Cecilian Choir
The concert looms this Wednesday, with the additional prospect of hearing other music by Brittten – a short fanfare for three trumpets, and two folksong settings, the lachrymaic O Waly Waly and the regret-tinged Down By The Salley Gardens, which will be sung by two sopranos, Paris Noble and Kathryn Cox.
Also in the programme are two choral pieces from the preceding era, Mendelssohn’s Abendlied and Debussy’s star-light Nuit d’Etoiles, from the Cecilian Choir with pianist Sharon Yam, plus the reading of two poems.
A veritable cultural feast; come and see it this Wednesday, 1.10pm in the Colyer-Fergusson hall – admission free!
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.
And so to Advent. It’s not Christmas for singers if you don’t start looking at the seasonal repertoire much earlier than December; those Carols for Choirs are cracked open weeks in advance (as Dave in the basses has written about, in poetic form, 
A veritable cultural feast; come and see it this Wednesday, 1.10pm in the Colyer-Fergusson hall – admission free!