Category Archives: In rehearsal

Tonight, tonight…

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How soon the Crypt concert comes around; it hardly seems a year since we were preparing for last year’s performance, and yet the wheel has turned once more, and here we are looking ahead to tonight’s concert.

I’m particularly excited about tonight, as a British composer Paul Patterson will be present in the audience, to hear the Chamber Choir sing his wonderfully serene Salvum Fac Populum Tuum Domine. It’s always nerve-wracking when the composer arrives to hear you perform his piece, but it’s a great privilege for us to have such a colossal figure on the British musical landscape coming to hear the Choir. I hope he approves of what we are doing with his music…

scoresThis morning’s critical pre-performance tasks have already been achieved: see offspring off to school, iron concert-shirt, polish shoes, leap around on Twitter to promote tonight’s concert; now I can sit with the music and work through the scores, until heading towards the crypt for this afternoon’s rehearsal. The first moment we sing in the Crypt on the Friday afternoon is always a memorable moment, particularly for those members of the Choir who haven’t sung there before; the rich, sonorous acoustics take your sound and echo it around for several seconds. We’re very excited at the prospect of launching the opening of Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque into that historic space.

Of course, the most challenging part of the rehearsal will be organising formation and processing in and out with sufficient dignity, bowing all at the same time, deciding in which hand we hold the folders (and sometimes, which way up; no detail left unobserved…). The music has been learnt; the logistics of operating in the venue, however, we’ll be picking up this afternoon.

Right, enough procrastination; the scores are waiting in a highly accusatory manner. See you after the concert.

Commitment, commitment, commitment…

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With only two weeks until our opening concert of this term, last night’s rehearsal was all about developing an ensemble sound. As I said to the Choir, we need to start sounding less like eighteen singers standing around the edge of a wall, each putting our own individual sound forward, and more like a unified singing entity.

The key to unlocking this is, and always has been about, listening; listening to one another, to other voice-parts, to the harmonic landscape of a work. The voices need to be aware not only of others singing the same part (standing in mixed-formation really makes this essential), but also of how their line relates to other lines around them – moving in similar motion, working against, responding to or picking up from a line already in progress, and understanding how their line relates to everything else.

lux_coverThe moment of epiphany came during Whitacre’s ravishing Lux Aurumque; flying now without piano support, we launched into those colourful opening chords; it was fine, but wasn’t really working properly; the notes were in place, but the colours weren’t coming. ‘Listen,’ I said – ‘now really listen to one another – watch someone who comes in when you do – listen to another part and work your dissonance against theirs. Be aware of everyone around you, and commit to the sound.’

Commitment is the other crucial factor, particularly in those contemporary works we’re performing that rely on a firm embracing of a tangential tonal language, rich in dissonance, often without resolution. Those added-notes and chromatic relationships really need to beat against one another – you have to really stand your ground and commit to your note, and if everyone else does the same, the colours can really start to scintillate.

So we stopped, and began again. And the effect was immediate. There was a fullness to the sound, and the harmonic landscape was transformed; suddenly, those cluster-chords were working. As we sang on, you could see some real astonishment lighting up the faces of those who were ‘getting it’ – this is what it’s meant to sound like.

And the knock-on effect was such that the same core commitment to the sound emerged in the desolate yearnings of the Brahms songs as well. You need to learn your notes and watch the conductor, it’s true; but being prepared to commit fully to your line, to listen to others and understand how what you’re singing relates to what they are doing, means the music can really start to lift off the page and come to life.

We’re getting there…

 

Defeating the tyranny of the barline

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I often find that notation gets in the way of music. Granted, it’s an evolved communicative system that works to impart information from composer to performer, but sometimes it actually runs slightly counter to what the music actually feels as though it wants to do.

Feeling chicken...This has become particularly apparent in recent rehearsals as the Chamber Choir works on Lassus’ Chi Chi Li Chi, a cacophony of bantam-banter in a late sixteenth-century chicken-shed, written well before the modern standard system of notation. Stepping deftly between different metres, full of rhythmic interplay, the notation actually works against the sense of flexibility and vitality which lurks at the heart of this outrageous piece. We’ve had to re-bar certain sections and write different stresses into the scores, in order to overcome the tyranny of regularity imposed by barlines.

It’s hard; as musicians, we’re so well-trained to observe bar-lines and time-signatures in our subservience to the printed score that we can find it difficult to ignore them, in order to allow the natural rhythmic language of a piece to come through. But, as I keep reminding the singers, notation is only a means to an end: the music lives not on the printed page, but in the moment of delivery, in the white-heat of off-the-page performance. Lots of work still to do, but it seems to be working. (Well, I’ll let you know after our all-day rehearsal this Saturday…).

Dashing Away with a cluckity-cluck

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This year’s student conductor, Matt Bamford, reflects on recent rehearsals.

With only eight more weeks until our annual concert in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, our programme is really beginning to come together and the ensemble sound develop.

Reflecting on our first two rehearsals after the Christmas break fills me with great excitement. It was really difficult to predict how the first rehearsal back would go, with the choir not having sung together as a full group since the University Carol Service at the beginning of December. On top of this, much of the Crypt repertoire had not been rehearsed since late November and so returning to it could have been like starting from scratch again.

Matt finish...

Matt finish…

The first piece that we looked at was Chilcott’s arrangement of Steal Away; a very colourful piece that is driven by supported breathing and the motion of the sustained pedal notes in the male parts. To this end, we began the warm-up by lying on the floor and doing some very long breathing exercises. The idea of lying down to do this is that it encourages you to breathe from your diaphragm and directly from there rather than your chest. The sound of the ensemble had stuck from before our long break, and the colourful chords really pierce the great acoustics of the Colyer-Fergusson hall where we rehearse.In complete contrast to the tranquil Steal Away we have also spent time rehearsing Rutter’s arrangement of Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron and Lassus’s playful Rooster-Fight Chi Chi Li Chi. Dashing Away is deceptively difficult in terms of rhythm, and we spent much of last night pulling the first three verses apart making sure that each part had the confidence to attack each rhythmic phrase. After debate over whether to sing “Dash-ing” or “Da- shing” and making sure we don’t sing on the beat during syncopated sections, we began to bring the piece up to performance pace, which filled me with lots of excitement. It is such a playful piece!

We made more progress with Chi Chi Li Chi which can only be described as a piece like no other that I have performed before. Telling the story of a Rooster-Fight through singing and other vocal noises (come along to the Crypt and you will understand more…) is great fun, but also very challenging. There are constant meter changes and the opening section has a rather lethargic feel to it.

As we are now beginning to rely on the piano much less, we can begin to pull pieces apart and the choir are really growing in confidence. We have an all day workshop ahead of us, which will be another opportunity to bond as a choir and to develop the unique sound that we are already producing.

Eight weeks, and counting!

Matt Bamford

Brave new world

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The Cecilian Choir has always been something of a playground for experimenting with contemporary choral music, and this term we’ve been finding our feet with a selection of modern pieces that really challenges us.

Ubi caritas, in a setting by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, is full of exotic harmonies, still retaining something of its original plainchant ancestry at the start before blossoming into luminous colours as the piece begins to unfold;

 

Alongside this, the Choir is drawing out the rich dissonances in Latvian composer Arturs Maskat’s Lugums Naktij (Prayer to the Night); additionally, we’ve recently begun working on Indian Prayer at Evening, the third of ‘Three Native American Songs’ by the young British composer, Toby Nelms, with swinging, prairie-filled open-fifths and a suitably dusky tonal palette. We started our contemporary odyssey with the Hymn to the Dormition of the Mother of God by the late Sir John Tavener back in October, which will add an element of tribute to the choir’s concert in April.

This choir excels at picking up new music, and for next term I’ve lined up some pieces by Howard Skempton as well. The backbone of the programme is something rather less modern – movements from Hassler’s Missa super Dixit Maria, written somewhat earlier in 1599, and a piece I’ve wanted to do for a long while; the intention is to weave the contemporary pieces amongst the movements of the mass.

Before then, the Choir will be performing a clutch of carols at next Wednesday’s end of term, festive ‘Watch This Space’ event on the foyer-stage. But it’s in the contemporary music that the choir is particularly strong; next term’s concert will be a treat.

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Some carols and some lessons

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There was an eager sense of anticipation at last night’s rehearsal, as we gathered in the church of St Damian & St Cosmus, in Blean, for our last evening rehearsal ahead of Friday’s Advent concert. At last, we were taking the repertoire for the concert and running it in its entirety, including all the readings, in the space in which we’ll be actually be performing.

The church itself glowed with a gentle light as we all drove down the country lane towards it in the darkness. Spilling out into the crisp, chill November night, you could sense the excitement growing, coupled with a real sense of the Advent season’s imminent arrival. Gathering in the church to lay out the chairs took some time, as we gave crucial consideration to key ideas – could we stand throughout the whole concert ? If we sat and stood again, could we do so without looking ragged ? And why is the Carols for Choir compendium so darn heavy ?

It’s become apparent that Deck The Hall is something of a showpiece for this year’s Choir, the best we deliver best, so this was the first piece we sang, in order to set a benchmark for our standard of performance; then we launched into the first Advent antiphon, and we were off.

Matt rehearsing the Chamber Choir

Matt rehearsing the Chamber Choir

As Matt took his turns to conduct each of the carols he is directing in the concert, I took the opportunity to stand at the back of the church and listen. I learned immediately that all those hours spent working on ensemble, on clarity of diction, on getting the consonants in the right place and on the right beat, had paid off: the ensemble was terrific. When a group is performing as one, the effect is electrifying. Moving between music and poems, the magic of the combination of music and spoken word began to blossom, and one could see a dawning sense on some of the singers’ faces that the programme was coming together.

blean_choir_rehearsal2

Mid-rehearsal break

At the end of the run-through we took an interval, and Matt and I took stock; he was equally as excited as I was that things were really starting to come off the page. There had been a few moments where the antiphons hadn’t quite gone in the right direction or had seemed to drag, and we used the second half of the rehearsal to try to limber up the plainchant, instilling a greater sense of freedom to capture the ebb and flow of the phrases. Some of the intonation in a few carols needed checking, and Matt went over how some of his pieces will begin – beats given, note pitched – in order to get them to start with greater commitment. The most challenging part of the entire evening occurred next, when we practiced lining up in pairs and processing on, and how to sit and stand. As one of the sopranos pointed out, one needs to sit attentively during the readings; the Choir is still on view behind the reader, and needs to look engaged rather than shuffling through their music to find the next piece, or gazing off in some private reverie.

Ten minutes after the rehearsal finished, everyone had collected their belongings scattered amongst the pews and left. At ten o’clock on a November night, I found myself standing outside the darkened church beneath the stars – there is no street-lighting in this part of Blean, and the darkness descends swiftly, rendering the night-sky clear – reflecting on the previous three hours. We’d taken a good step forward, now starting to get caught up in the momentum of the programme and following its various narratives through music and readings; the key will be to maintain this through until the concert on Friday evening.

Advent is nigh.

In the Mix: singing in mixed-voice formation

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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

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.

First step to Christmas, re-thinking repertoire and a chicken fight

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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

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.

Advent_antiphonsAnd 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…

A moment of frisson with Whitacre

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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

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

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…

Finding our (choral) feet

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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.

Exciting to be here as it starts to unfold…