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…
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.
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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.
And yet…there’s always something new, some new direction the choir takes, some undiscovered aspect to its performing that emerges. And this week was no exception; as we picked started our first piece, the dynamic level reached new depths of piano and pianissimo that were entirely unpremeditated; we hadn’t elected to explore singing much more quietly than before, but there was an empathetic, collective response that found us singing much more intimately than we ever had before; and it worked. As the rehearsal unfolded, this contrast appeared in other pieces, and was particularly exciting. Where had it come from ? As the conductor, I certainly hadn’t asked for it; instead, it emerged as a result of the choir’s renewed confidence and trust in one another and in the music; the singers know the pieces extremely well, and can afford to take more risks, broaden the dynamic scope, push with greater energy, bolstered by their confidence in the unity of ensemble sound. The effect of reaching a much quieter sound served also to heighten the contrast with forte passages, which felt much louder (and more exciting) without our having to exaggerate them.
That’s the best and worst thing about this point in the year; having worked so hard together since those first early steps in October, the choir has become a fully integrated musical unit, and is at its apex; in a few weeks’ time, the group will disintegrate as members graduate or go on a year abroad, and that will be that. I’m reminded of that line from Blade Runner: ‘The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.’ This choir is burning very brightly now – we have only a few short weeks left in which to enjoy it, but enjoy it we shall; next month’s revitalised programme will be quite something.
There were moments where this worked very well; there were also moments when words ended at slightly different times amongst the voices, consonants tripped early and peppered the sound, and some entries were rather hesitant. The more we do of this, though, the better we will be as an ensemble.
It’s four weeks until we sing in the glorious Nave of Canterbury Cathedral for the University Carol Service, and so last night we drew out that seasonal favourite, ‘Carols for Choirs,’ to look at the second verse of, you’ve guessed it, ‘Once in Royal David’s City.’ The Carol Service is such a fantastic occasion, I’m definitely not taking that night off…
We ended by playing with space in a literal sense, arranging the choir around the balcony of the concert-hall to sing Alexander Campkin’s carol, Sleep, Holy Babe. This is all about removing the safety of singing in close proximity, encouraging each singer to sing confidently, committing to their line and developing a rich ensemble sound.
