Category Archives: In rehearsal

Closing time: last call

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There are now three days of Summer Music left, and the Chamber and Cecilian Choirs are prepped and ready for tomorrow night’s concert at St Mildred’s Church, Canterbury. For the Cecilian Choir, it will be the last time the Choir meets this year; for the Chamber Choir, it’s their penultimate performance, before a final flourish as part of the Music Society concert on Sunday afternoon.

This is, for me, probably the lowest point in the year; the sense that, after a year’s committed rehearsing and music-making, the Choirs are reaching the final moment, after which they’ll never exist again. By which, of course, I don’t mean that the University Chamber Choir and Cecilian Choir won’t appear again – they’ll be re-incarnated next year, after a flourish of auditions, and take on a new year’s worth of concert commitments. But it will be the last time the Choirs exist in their present form, with their current members. Some of the students are graduating in July; some are taking a year abroad as part of their studies; some are only here for a year.

That’s the trouble, not just with the choirs here at the University, but with all the ensemble music-making that goes on; after a year of working together, developing repertoire and a unity of ensemble, meeting new musicians and putting on concerts together, all that effort evaporates. Music, especially music performance, is a transient phenomenon: it exists in the white-heat of public performance, and afterwards ceases to exist. (Recorded performance somehow never quite capture the magic, the essence, the vibrancy of the live performing experiece, especially if it’s you involved in the performing). That’s a part of its appeal, certainly; striving for that perfect moment at which performer, music, listener and performance-space combine in one unforgettable moment, transcending all of these factors and becoming something unique, unrepeatable.  But it is something to regret too.

And it’s not just about the rehearsing; it’s a formative process, where developing the ensemble encompasses so much more than simply meeting once a week for note-bashing; it’s about the forging of friendships, the making of new friends, the sense of travelling together over the course of a year towards a shared outcome.

It’s a necessary part, I suppose, of working in a university: the ebb and flow as students arrive and graduate three or four years later. This time of the year is always something of a low; the rationale part of me remembers the heady furore of interviews and auditions that occurs in September and the exciting possibility afforded by all the different musical interests that arrive at the university at the start of each academic year. My job is to harness the potential for music-making at the start of each year and work to develop opportunities for it to be realised, for music-making  to take place; a musical animateur, if you will. It’s an exciting job; but comes with the commensurate regret each summer as the year draws to a close and some of the musicians prepare to leave.

It’s been a terrific year for music at Kent, and for the Choirs in particular. Hail and farewell to all those who are graduating or leaving for a year, and thank you also to eveyone who has been a part of it; it’s been a privilege and a very great deal of laughter along the way. You’ll be missed.

Final rehearsals are over

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That’s it: the final rehearsals are over. I feel strangely liberated: there’s nothing more to be done now until the day of the concert, Friday; the programmes have been printed, and there’s no more rehearsals until we’re able to stand in the Cathedral Crypt on Friday afternoon.

The group were in good form on Tuesday night, which saw us rehearsing in St Peter’s Church, Canterbury, where we will be giving a lunchtime concert at the end of March. The church very kindly agreed to allow us to rehearse there on Tuesday, which gave us the chance to rehearse Friday’s programme in a lovely, resonant acoustic: and, as you see from the photo, in full performance mode.

The main thing that comes across is how much the Choir is enjoying itself; they are a terrifically communicative bunch with which to work, and when they are enjoying singing (Dawn, for instance, or In stiller Nacht), it is really obvious. They emanate such an infectious enthusiasm, it’s impossible to resist.

There are a few sore throats and colds and coughs going around, so we’re hoping everyone recovers in time for the concert. The next time we meet, it will be to fill the ancient, Norman crypt with a hue of colours in the music for the programme. Morale is high: I think it’s fair to say that the group feels ready for the concert.

Watch this space…

Ready for Friday

Getting into performance mindset and ordering pizza

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An intense week of rehearsals last week – the usual Tuesday night session augmented with a Wednesday lunchtime slot – culminated in a Saturday all-day workshop. With a wary eye on the four o’clock rugby kick-off, we gathered in the usual rehearsal room on a frosty-bright Saturday morning at ten, with a full day of working ahead of us.

Chamber Choir: before...

The morning was given over to addressing particular pieces where notes are still not entirely sure;  I’ve found it a useful exercise to help voice-parts approach lines by playing the soprano and bass lines together, followed by the alto and tenor parts. This serves two purposes: when checking notes, the sopranos can relate their melody to the underlying bass notes, and then the alto and tenor parts can see where their harmonies lie; it also means that you don’t leave one voice-part languishing until the other three have worked through theirs, a sure way of losing concentration and focus.

This worked well, and as the morning developed, we began to become more sure-footed. At the mid-morning break, there was a general sense that we’d moved on. At this point, one of the altos rang out for pizza after checking what everyone would like. It’s become a tradition that everyone brings food and drink to share at lunchtime – organised earlier in the week by the choral-rep-cum-nutritional-officer, Matt – however, Lucy had been working so hard during the week (I’m sure that’s what she said, anyway) that there hadn’t been the time to go shopping; so at the break, an order was placed with the local pizza delivery service, and everyone could relax in the second part of the morning.

At lunchtime, I’d noticed that Eliot College Hall was free – usually in use by student societies or alive with drama rehearsals, Eliot Hall lay unusually quiet. As anyone who has been in the Choir before will recall, the usual rehearsal venue is small and has no acoustics whatsoever, and the opportunity to sing in a more resonant space was too good to miss. After lunch (pizzas successfully delivered, and with some very fine chocolate brownies from the kitchen of Choir Cakes and Confectionery Officer Emma), we therefore decamped to Eliot for the afternoon rehearsal, and here is where the day began to gather momentum.

This year, we’ve decided to adopt a more formal mode of concert dress: the ladies have chosen floor-length, formal black to match the all-black suits of the chaps, whilst everyone will be wearing purple scarves or ties. This stems from a sense that, the more formal and organised the group appears, the more the audience will trust it. Look the part, and even before you’ve sung a note, you’ve won the audience over. With this in mind, all the ladies elected to bring in their dresses and try them on, to check the uniformity. It struck me that this would be an excellent opportunity for the chaps to do the same (with suits, not dresses…) and we could run the entire programme in concert-mode.  I’ve noticed before that as soon as you dress for a performance, you stand and sing very differently. The afternoon therefore represented an opportunity to run the concert in the mindset of full performance: dressed, standing, and singing in higher gear – and, thanks to the hall being empty, a chance to do so in an acoustic more similar to that of the Cathedral Crypt.

We’re running the first two items in the programme without a break – plainchant for Matins into Barnum’s Dawn. As soon as the plainchant died away in the hall, and the first colours of dawn began to emerge, the effect was immediate. A change came over the group – we were in full performance gear, and the new acoustics meant we could really feel the music taking flight. A new vigour came over the group, a real sense of relishing the sound we were making.

Over lunch, Paris, one of the sopranos had suggested members of the choir should take turns individually in coming out of the group to stand in the middle of the hall, to hear the sound. (As Dan in the tenors wryly observed, ”that’ll be everyone out for Sleep, then!”). As they did so across the afternoon, most of them commented afterwards that they had noticed the sound was blending superbly; singing amongst the group, you could hear individual voices more easily, but halfway down the hall, the group sounded like a single entity. With Steph leading a finely-crafted run-through of the Sullivan, it was a highly useful opportunity for us all to really adopt the mindset of delivering a performance.

We finished dead on four o’clock – over at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, the whistle was blowing for the match to start, but also to signal the end for us of a very productive day. Driving home in the late winter afternoon towards the setting sun, I felt as though a minor landmark had been achieved. Well done, team: it all bodes well for the concert at the end of next week.

And after...

Changing our approach to Italian madrigals

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Conducting, for me, is a physical experience with something akin to playing the piano – if I can’t feel the music under my fingers as we’re working, either the Choir hasn’t quite learned the music yet, or I haven’t. There’s an almost tangible sense of playing the lines, pushing the chords through the air and grasping the fabric of the music to move the textural ebb and flow and to articulate the dynamic contrasts.

Last night was the first time that this has started to emerge, particularly in the challenging Italian pieces.As the Choir grows in confidence, it becomes more responsive to the emotional rise and fall of the music, and more flexible in its pacing. Aspects of this began to emerge as we rehearsed late into the night; filling the car with fuel on the way home, I stood on the garage forecourt in the chill night air and discovered it was after ten o’clock.

Monteverdi: how Russian ?

In a bid to get a more positive reading of the two challenging pieces in the programme, we changed our approach to the two madrigals dramatically. Rather than going for a ‘tip-toe’ approach to singing, influenced perhaps by the historically-informed practices of some other singing that mistakes authenticity for singing with a small sound,  that meant our pieces lacked confidence and commitment, we approached them as though they were Russian Orthodox pieces; the Monteverdi especially, we thought of as something from the Rachmaninov Vespers, with its deep tonic pedal notes and wide choral textures.

The difference was immediate: the sound was confident, the voices entered with more commitment, and sang more positively throughout the weaving textures.There was a more full-blooded sound, revelling in the evocative word-painting; the trick now will be to make sure we don’t indulge in it too much to the extent where we forget all the dynamic contrasts!

We worked as much without the piano as possible, and there is a developing sense that the pieces are starting to lift off the page; yes, there were a few moments where we turned an harmonic corner into a chord  more alarmingly dissonant than a composer might have intended, but we’re starting to find our feet; the more sustained closing passage at the end of the Monteverdi in particular had a lovely sound, and very fine intonation indeed.

Barnum’s Dawn is proving to be something of a showcase for the Choir, as we develop the dynamic range and really bring out the final ‘sunlit’ section with the eight-note aleatoric cluster in the upper voices.The Choir, I think, are aware of this as well: there’s a real sense of accomplishment when we finished the piece, a genuine sense that we’re creating something remarkable, that sees them smiling and nodding afterwards. It’s a shame, in a way, that the piece is the second item in the programme: the Choir’s signal performance, perhaps the nigh point of the concert,  will be right at the start. But you can’t move a piece called ‘Dawn’ to the end of a programme of music exploring the events of a single day, can you…

Chords out of context and Renaissance polyphony

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A busy choral week this week with both the Chamber and Cecilian Choir rehearsals.

As we get closer to the Crypt concert, the Chamber Choir rehearsals become progressively more involved, as we work to really make sure the intonation is good and that we can perform without the piano. There are moments when the choir really flies without the accompaniment – and then a few moments when we come to the ground with something of a bump… We’ve been taking particularly challenging progressions out of context, working to tune the motion between the chords effectively to ensure each voice-part knows the direction of the line. It’s especially challenging in the two Italian giants, the Lassus and the Monteverdi.

In contrast, Saint-Saëns’ Calme des Nuits is starting to develop a real sense of space, as we let particular chords build or dwell on the more static passages.

Renaissance master: de Victoria

In contrast, the Cecilian Choir rehearsal revelled in the glory of that masterpiece of the Renaissance period, two movements from Victoria’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium; we looked today at the ‘Sanctus’ for the first time, exploring sustaining the rich melismas right through until their very end. There’s a wonderful point where the sopranos are descending in stately fashion through the Aeolian mode whilst the other three voices are weaving their counterpoint underneath: a highly effective moment at the words ‘Dominus Deus.’ The ensuing ‘Hosanna’ moves to triple metre, and creates a positively dancing finish to the movement.

But no cake at the Chamber Choir rehearsal on Tuesday night: what’s happened to the Choir Cake Monitor’s due diligence ?!

Light and shade with the Cecilian Choir

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On the heels of the Chamber Choir earlier this week, the Cecilian Choir sprang back into rehearsals this afternoon, assembling to rehearse our programme for June.

The theme to this year’s programme uses movements from Victoria’s mass, O Magnum Mysterium, as a skeleton framework, which will be interspersed with other works, using the mass as the unifying thread. The programme will conclude not with Victoria’s setting of the motet, but Lauridsen’s meditative and enduringly popular incarnation.

The ‘Kyrie’ of the Mass opens with a single note, held suspended for four beats in isolation; the effect is that we don’t know what we’re hearing, which degree of the scale it is, or if it is even the tonic. The phrase descends a fifth for the second note, at which point the altos also enter, and we realise the opening note was in fact the dominant of the scale. The motionless nature of the opening contrasts with the gradual polyphonic build-up as the other voices enter and begin to weave their lines.

The Lauridsen setting requires some fine intonation, and whilst there are some beautiful colours, some of the movement between chords is not necessarily as linear as one might like – occasionally angular intervals creep in which sound lovely in context, but aren’t always going where one might expect. We explored several sonorities, practicing stepping between difficult chords to make sure we all knew where we were going.

The same is true of the last piece we rehearsed, Lauridsen’s deft, ephemeral En une seule fleur, which presents even more challenges in the same regard! Good fun, though; the programme will provide contrasting light and shade as we move from Italian polyphony to rich American colours and elsewhere.

And here’s a foretaste of the motet in a richly colourful performance from the choir of King’s, Cambridge.

Beginnings, endings: and cake

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It’s often said that the only parts of a concert programme an audience remembers are the start and the finish, and for a great concert, only the first and last pieces need to be good – anything that comes in the middle is forgotten. If this is true, then on the strength of last night’s rehearsal of pieces to open and close the programme, our concert in six weeks’ time is going to be brilliant.

LemonWith the Advent antiphons having worked so well in the concert last term, the February programme will open with a piece of plainchant for Matins and finish with one for Compline. Rehearsals resumed last night with the first of these, which will lead into the unfurling, evocative  colours of Barnum’s Dawn; the latter piece is really beginning to find its feet, and the aleatoric concluding section with the sopranos and altos each dwelling on a single, separate note evoking the hue of sunrise, is developing nicely. The plainchant takes some getting used to – reading off four staves rather than the latter tradition of five and working out where the Latin inflection leads certainly focuses the mind…

The main focus of last night was the two Italian Giants of the programme, Lassus’ O Sonno and Monteverdi’s Ecco mormorar l’onde. Two contrasting Renaissance pieces here, each challenging in their own way. Our main intent with the Monteverdi is to revel in the rich polyphonic writing – the piece has the lines weaving and tumbling over one another in its depiction of the murmuring waves, rustling foliage and gentle breezes – until the closing, homophonic section, which should then come as a relief.

Two English pieces followed, a piece new to the group in Dowland’s Awake, Sweet Love, and a revisiting of Vaughan Williams’ Rest. The key to the latter is maintaining a firm grasp of the dynamic range, and ensuring the full range of contrasting contrasts is explored.

Moving between standard and mixed formation, we concluded with the final work, our surprise encore, about which I can’t reveal too much here, except to say it’s an arrangement I’ve written of a pop tune that has the explore indulging its jazzier, do-wop style, in total contrast to everything else we’ll be singing. Persuading the group to adopt a more American swing-style approach proved no problem at all, and there was some swaying, finger-clicking and sugary harmonies with which to finish the concert.

The secret of all good rehearsals is planning, focus, and cake, it seems. During the half-way break, Emma brought forth a box of lemon cakes she had prepared for everyone – I’m not sure if there’s an accredited baking module as part of her degree, but she’s studying Drama, so you never know – which proved extremely popular. No wonder the second half of the rehearsal went so well, everyone’s blood-sugar levels were probably re-stocked. What’s for next week, then ?

Crossing borders: a cosmopolitan rehearsal

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Last night’s rehearsal had a distinctly cosmopolitan flavour, as the Choir looked at English, Scottish, American, German and Italian repertoire: we’re nothing if not international in our programme outlook!

Brahms’ In Stiller Nacht has really found its feet, and we’ve been developing the really pernickety aspects of the texture; the detached crotchets in phrases had us, as one, tip-toeing through the chords with a terrific sense of fragility.

We’ve been looking for landmarks in Monteverdi’s Ecco mormorar l’onde, for specific moments of coming together, cadence points, beginnings of phrases, to give the piece a geographical sense; with long, meandering lines, the danger is that the piece simply becomes a collection of voices singing through lines without any sense of direction. (Anyone who has sung one of Byrd’s four- or five-part Mass settings will have found this before). The trick is making sense of the lines, using the starts of phrases and the commencement of new ideas (both harmonically as well as in terms of the text) to give the piece some three-dimensionality – guiding the listener through the piece by highlighting particular moments.

Bennett’s O Sleep, fond fancy occupies a similar landscape to the same composer’s Weep, O Mine Eyes, and needs similar moulding to the Monteverdi. In contrast, Sir John Stephenson’s arrangement of the Scottish air, Oft in the stilly night, is a simpler, homophonic piece that came together very quickly.

Most of the rehearsal was taken up with defining the chordal progressions in Whitacre’s Sleep, particular the opulent third section where the harmonic language opens out, the texture broadens as the sopranos soar upwards; key to this is actually the bass-part, making sure the root of each chord has a solid foundation. We’re still experimenting with mixed-formation singing, and this piece will really test the integrity of the individual voices; in order for the colours to blossom, each singer needs to have confidence in their line, to enjoy the dissonances and added-note sonorities and commit to the colours of each chord.

We concluded with one of the carols for next week’s Cathedral Carol Service, the evocative opening verses of Once in Royal, which this year features soprano Marina Ivanova conjuring up the magic of Christmas in the solo opening verse, before the rich harmonies unfold in the a cappella second verse as the Choir enters. It promises to be a magical moment in the Cathedral…

And, as if there isn’t enough to be excited about, this morning I’ve raided our sheet-music archive for copies of Lauridsen’s deftly lyrical En une seule fleur for the Cecilian Choir’s rehearsal tomorrow. Can’t wait…

(Preview track via LastFM).

Winter Words: the Cecilian Choir in Purcell’s Frost Scene next week

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Cecilian Choir logoThe Cecilian Choir has once again blossomed this year, and in recent rehearsals has been working on being the Chorus of Cold People in the ‘Frost Scene’ from Purcell’s King Arthur. As is customary, the Choir is formed from members of the University community – staff, students and alumni – as a sister-choir to the Chamber Choir, as part of Kent’s flourishing musical life.

The choir will step out on stage this coming Monday in the Gulbenkian Theatre, along with the University Camerata, in the last of this term’s Lunchtime Concerts; they will be the chorus of cold revellers, whom Cupid will warm up into a lively bunch, rescued from the clutches of the  Cold Genius

We’ve also been looking at repertoire for a concert next year, which will include sections of Victoria’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium, supplemented by other works. More about this as rehearsals develop…

Here are most of the choir (plus a couple of rogue string-players!) in rehearsal in Eliot Hall. The concert is on Monday at 1.10pm in the Gulbenkian Theatre: more details on-line here.

Brrrrrrrr…