Category Archives: In rehearsal

A church, some carols…and Skempton

A miserable night yesterday: dark, windy, cold and raining.

Inside St. Mildred’s Church, however, light, music and jollity abounded; we had battled the elements in order to hold our customary Tuesday night rehearsal in the church, in order to work without a piano and to get a sense of the space and the acoustics for the concert.

The antiphons are developing: a little more confidence in delivery is needed here; singing plainchant is a skill that requires initial groundwork, and many have not sung this style of music before; a combination of flexibility in the line, following the rise and fall of the speech, as well as confidence in taking responsibility for the line and doing so at the same time as everyone else. Tricky – it requires a lot of work to appear effortless!

The carols are progressing, too; singing in the acoustic of the church meant we could really start to draw forth a full ensemble sound from the group, balance the parts, and begin to explore bringing out specific notes and phrases in particular voices. Bethlehem Down especially is starting to develop some three-dimensionality as it lifts off the page, and with some sensitive dynamics starting to be included, it’s going to be a treat.

The final singing of the evening was a chance to re-visit Skempton’s He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. It’s not a Christmas piece, it’s not in the Advent service in a few weeks’ time – in fact, we’re not actually singing it until February. But this was too good an opportunity to miss: the chance to sing it in a sonorous acoustic, arranged in a crescent-shape similar to the way we’ll be standing to perform in the Cathedral Crypt. (And besides, I love the piece, so any opportunity to sing it is welcome indeed…). We took it a fraction under-tempo, as it’s been several weeks since we first sang it, and this is only the second reading; this meant the chords hung in the air for just a little longer than usual, and the colours really had a chance to blossom. It worked so well, in fact, that I’m wondering whether it shouldn’t go at that speed in performance; it’s marked Andante, but perhaps my enthusiasm has pushed the speed slightly ? Something to think about…

(Don’t tell the composer…).

The Austro-German Connection: Brahms and Bruckner

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This week, the Cecilian Choir arrived at the Austro-German part of their programme; pieces by Brahms and Bruckner. Bruckner’s Locus iste is a hardy perennial, and gave the choir a chance to work on their vowel-shapes and sustained phrases. The third section is wonderfully chromatic and harmonically uncertain, ‘irreprehensibilis ist,’ and we strove to capture some of that hesitancy in both the dynamics as well as in the unfolding chromatic lines: there’s a tendency to want to crescendo too soon, but holding back and only reaching mezzo-forte before subsiding back to piano for the reprise keeps the excitement of the passage.

The foggiest notion: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, Friedrich

The Wanderer: Caspar David Friedrich

From Latin text to German: Ach, arme Welt by Brahms, and a chance to develop the linguistic skills of the choir by getting to grips with German. This chorale has some great colours to enhance the text – ‘’Du falsches Welt, du bist nicht wahr (You false world, you are not real) and ‘’Mit Weh und grossem Leiden (with pain and bitter anguish);’’ wonderful lines to sing in German. The most striking aspect of the piece is that, full of impassioned power and dynamics and crescendi, at the last phrase ‘hilf mir, Herr, zum Frieden (help me, Lord, to peace)’’ the piece ends with a diminuendo and ends piano on the final chord. After all the Sturm und Drang of the rest of the piece, it’s a great trick and creates a rapt ending.

We left German Romanticism behind and ended by returning to French neo-Classicism to revisit the first part of the Poulenc that we’d looked at last week. It’s still a terrific piece: I’m delighted we’re learning it.

Sweet singing in the choir: carols in rehearsal five

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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!

Carol singers 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…

Poulenc and Victoria: sunlit music

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A gloriously sunlit October day, suitable for rehearsing the first part of Poulenc’s Exultate Deo. This piece really has the light of the sun glowing through it in the second section, ‘Jubilate Deo,’ with Poulenc’s trademark musical language of added-sixth and seventh chords and prominent major second passing notes; there’s a terrific sense of freedom to the piece, both harmonically and rhythmically in the way the time-signatures changes between three, four and five crotchets in the bar.

Circle Time followed, where we broke ranks and stood around in a circle to sing the section of the Poulenc that we’d learned; it was amazing to stand surrounded by the colourful chords and exuberant harmony of the piece. And a great way to test the integrity of the voice-parts: in general, a fairly sound effort – the odd, typically Poulenc, dissonant sonority needed careful attention, but otherwise an exciting start.

Victoria’s Ave Maria is another motet which has great rhythmic freedom – occasionally there’s a dance-feel that interrupts the regular metric feel, as though he is eager to dance but feels he can’t within the confines of a formal sacred motet, but it’s uncontrollable and sometimes can’t help but burst through. Unlock the dance-rhythm in music, and it comes alive…

Hail, Bright Cecilians!

And here are some of us: Reading Week and flu claimed the others.

A medieval summer, Bethlehem Down and dancing with Shakespeare

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Credit to the choir for this latest rehearsal: we worked through a lot of repertoire in a very short time.

Time to re-visit the Advent antiphons, and to capture some of that floating effortlessness that sounds so easy, but is hard to achieve; you can’t really conduct them too much lest you destroy the sense of freedom that they seem to occupy, so the choir have to trust one another to come in after the pauses and have confidence in the phrases; in other words, they have to know the music really well!

History on the page: Sumer is icumen in

From a wind-swept and rainy late October, we moved through the seasons to the approach of summer with Sumer is icumen in, with its lusty dance-rhythms and its rustic celebration of the turning of the season to herald the beginning of summer. We’re working on a medieaval English style of pronunciation – ‘Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cucu; growth sed and bloweth med and spring be wude nu.’ I firmly believe in performing ancient and modern music side by side, a terrific way of glimpsing the sounds of the past and sometimes showing that some modern music sounds as ancient as medieval manuscripts, whilst some ancient music can sound as modern as contemporary pieces. We’re working on creating a vibrant, lively sound – no ‘received pronunciation’ here! – to bring it to life. There are also sacred words to the song, ‘Perspice christicola,’ which we’ll perform later in the same February programme with a wholly different and more appropriate sensibility.

Thence to the last of the Vaughan Williams Shakespeare Songs, ‘Over hill, over dale,’ which in its 6/8 rhythm dances along over bush and briar; we worked at it slowly, and then sang it through at a rough mid-tempo pace – it’s nearly there, another rehearsal will have it dancing off the page. We also returned to the first half of ‘Full Fathom Five,’ and really worked to make the bell-peal imitations ‘ping’ off the page with a percussive start to each ‘ding.’ We also explored the rich chords clothing the word ‘strange,’ and immersed ourselves in the chords by prolonging them, to get used to the sound of the flattened sixths and added seconds and the way the notes beat against one another.

After the break, we entered the almost mystical landscape of Warlock’s Bethlehem Down, and it was here that the choir started to come together for the first time that evening. Something obviously clicked – several of the choir have sung the piece before, admittedly – but somehow the atmosphere created by the text and the harmonies Warlock spins around the words came straight off the page. We explored dynamic contrasts between verses, as well as between lines in the verses; the greatest challenge was to get rid of the bar-lines, and sustain the long phrases across the bars without breaking the line and losing the impetus.

A brief recap of the opening sections of the ‘Gloria’ from the Jackson Edinburgh Mass; difficult music, rhythmically challenging and harmonically, lots of cluster chords to get right.

We ended by singing Today The Virgin and A Babe is Born; lots of rhythmic drive needed for the Tavener, and a richer sound required, whilst A Babe is Born needs plenty of bounce and energy to help it dance along.

Some really good work here, particularly the Warlock: with all its meandering lines and harmonic twists, it came alive almost immediately and was a joy to work up. Next week ? Hopefully the carol books will have arrived, so we can prepare the more traditional carols for the Advent concert.

Hail, Bright Cecilians!

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The Cecilian Choir drew its first breath this week, launching into its programme of repertoire for the year and beginning with Tallis and Lassus.

Lassus’ Adoramus te, Christe is a very strange little motet: it moves harmonically into places where, tonally, the ear is expecting something else, and voice-parts occasionally introduce flats that steer the harmony into unusual corners. All of which makes for challenging sight-reading, but to which the choir rose with aplomb.

Tallis’ popular If Ye Love Me offers the opportunity for the singers to relish consonants and vowel-shapes, particularly on the words ‘love’ and ‘commandments.’

The choir has grown in size since last year, and we’ve changed the rehearsal layout and the space we occupy in Eliot College Hall, which allows a greater resonance; there was a point in the rehearsal at which the choir finished the Tallis anthem, and the final chord of F major suddenly rose into the roof and filled the entire hall: and the intonation was perfect as well.

A great start to the year, with lots more repertoire to look forward to, plus a few seasonal surprises. Stay tuned…

Let’s dance: rhythm in rehearsal three

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Our third rehearsal, and, without any conscious planning, it became apparent that rhythm was the key element to this week’s session. Each of the pieces the choir was rehearsing this week featured prominent dance rhythms or flexible time-signatures.

We began feeling our way through the ‘rich and strange’ sonorities of Vaughan Williams’ setting of Shakespeare’s Full Fathom Five, the first of his ‘Three Shakespeare Songs.’ We started by putting together the wonderful eleven-part chords on the word ‘strange’ at roughly the mid-point of the piece; not only is it my favourite moment, but it’s a way of showing the group what the key moment of the piece is that we’re heading for. The rhythmic feel to the piece is entirely flexible, moving in different fashion in each part at the same time: the altos are steadily tolling the crotchets, the sopranos moving in triplets across the half-bar, and the basses moving in triplets on every other beat. This creates a wonderfully loose sense of movement, not wholly dissimilar to the ebb and flow of the sea – the key element of the poem – and you really have to keep your head in order to make sure your part is moving correctly in time with everyone else.

Changing time-signatures also feature in the ‘Kyrie’ of Gabriel Jackson’s Edinburgh Mass, which we looked at next. It opens with a section that, although notated in different time-values, is endeavouring to capture the ebb and flow (again) of plainchant, the timelessness (in both senses) of monodic chant that seeks to escape the tyranny of the bar-line and a regular beat. The middle section, ‘Christe eleison,’ moves in contemplative homophony in the lower voices, before a sprightly closing section that again features different time-signatures before gradually subsiding back to the plainchant style of the opening. Some gloriously colourful chords in this movement: something of a challenge to the choir, especially the final section.

For the first time, we revisited repertoire we’d already looked at: I’ve felt it’s been important to give the choir a sense of the repertoire for the entire concert in February by moving through as much of it as possible in these early rehearsals, but it’s also time to start working in greater detail on music for the Advent concert at the start of December. We returned to my carol, A Babe is Born, in which dance rhythm is key; a lively 6/8 feel that changes from 1-2-3 / 4-5-6 to 1-2-3 / 1-2 / 1-2 / 1-2 / 1-2-3 in miniature hemiolas to keep the momentum and give life to the sense of expectation and excitement at the birth of the Christ-child.

Finally, we looked again at the Tavener Today the Virgin, in which dance rhythm is again the key element; the unison melody that moves between the voice-parts moves between duple and triple-feel rhythms, so the line really does dance. There was a sense that this piece is starting to lift off of the page ever so slightly: the choir are really starting to feel this piece and grasp its rhythmic vitality and tremendous energy, which bodes well for a fantastic performance…

In order to give the choir a sense of the collective sound they were making, we arranged ourselves in a horseshoe shape; normally arranged in rows, it’s difficult for the back rows to hear the front, and get a sense of how their line fits rhythmically and harmonically with everything else going on. We convened in the horseshoe shape for each of the last two pieces, and boy did it make a difference. Getting the choir to move around is an important part of rehearsals: a subject for a future post.

Masses of colour: Jackson and Skempton

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Two pieces lie at the heart of this year’s repertoire, and at the second rehearsal last week we looked at both: the wonderful colour of Gabriel Jackson’s Edinburgh Mass and The Cloths of Heaven by a composer who will come as no surprise to anyone who sang with the Chamber Choir two years ago: Howard Skempton. Skempton arrived onto the scene with almost majestic grandeur when his orchestral piece Lento was premiered at the Barbican in 1991 (repeated at this year’s BBC Proms with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov), and his choral piece shows the same effect of ‘profundity through simplicity.’ The Chamber Choir has previously sung his motet Beati quorum via, and the Cecilian Choir sang the Ave virgo sanctissima and Locus iste; I’m delighted to be able to continue our exploration of Skempton repertoire this year. He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven features Skempton’s trademark simplicity of musical language that nevertheless is deeply moving. Fabulous rich harmonies clothe (no pun intended) W.B Yeat’s evocative poem.

Published by OUP: the Edinburgh Mass

Gabriel Jackson’s Edinburgh Mass occupies a similar musical landscape to the Mass in G by Poulenc, and the Gloria begins with a terrifically affirmative gesture before a more contemplative passage for the text ‘et in terra pax hominibus.’ For me, this piece is like a stained-glass window: lit from behind, it glows with fantastic colour. The Gloria, sees rippling descending quavers passing downwards through the voices, like the pealing of bells, creating a wonderful shimmering texture. More about these two wonderfully evocative pieces as we work through them over the course of this term…

For the Advent concert, we started the antiphonal Hymn to the Virgin by Britten, a traditional seasonal favourite, written when Britten was just seventeen: it already shows a mature command of musical gesture, an assured harmonic palette and a quiet authority for such a youthful work.

About to begin on here is ‘Not drowning but waving.’ a regular column looking at aspects of the choral conductor’s art: expect the first article later this week.

Cantus Firmus: on song

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From the wealth of auditions over a two-day period, this year’s Chamber Choir has emerged, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the last. This year the Choir is larger than in previous years, so much so that we’ve had to change rehearsal venue from the Old Telephone Exchange to Grimond Lecture Theatre II.

The new team!

Over the first two rehearsals, we’ve begun exploring the repertoire for this year’s series of concert engagements, which has grown to include ‘Advent by Candlelight’ in St. Mildred’s Church in Canterbury in December, and a concert at St. Gregory’s, Wye – these alongside the customary performances in the University Carol Service at the end of term, and the Cathedral Crypt concert in February. A packed year indeed… (More details on our on-line events calendar here).

The theme for this year’s Crypt concert is music from England, Wales and Scotland, and in the first rehearsal we worked through motets by William Byrd and Sir John Tavener; for the Advent concert, we began singing some Advent antiphons from manuscripts dating from the four-stave notation system popular until the sixteenth century; this gives the choir the chance to read from historical notation and an added sense of the past to the music being sung. We also began working at a carol I’ve written for the December Carol Service, a setting of A Babe is Born, which employs open-fifth pedal chords to create a medieval atmosphere.

Also bursting back to life this term is the Cecilian Choir, formed from Scholars, students, staff and alumni. The Cecilian Choir was a new venture last year, and is back by popular demand: rehearsals begin next week, and we’ll be working towards a very exciting programme for performance in the Spring term, about which more will be revealed later…

It’s an exciting time: new musical students, new ensembles forming, and the beginning of this year’s musical journeys exploring old and new repertoire. As a conductor, first rehearsals are terrifying: will everyone turn up, will they get on with each other, will the balance of the voice-parts work, will they like the repertoire I’ve chosen, how quickly will they learn the music, and, perhaps most importantly – will they enjoy themselves and want to come back next week ?

You can follow the story of the choirs here, from first rehearsal to final performance; we’ll also be bringing you audio clips of the choirs in rehearsal and sneak previews of some of the pieces being performed this year. Stay tuned…

(And if you’ve a fond recollection or stories from your experience with the Chamber Choir in previous years, get in touch: we’ll be featuring them in a regular column here.)