A church, some carols…and Skempton

Leave a reply

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…).

Ask or tell ? Relating to a choir

Leave a reply

A series looking at the art of the choral conductor.Conducting

How should  a conductor relate to their choir: should they ask them to create a sound in the manner they conduct, or tell them ? Should they invite a response from the choir, or should they demand it ?

The days of the dictatorial conductor are long gone; no more the total authority of a Karajan, or the sheer force of a Solti, famously nick-named the ‘Screaming Skull.’

Ensemble musicians need to feel that they are being developed, even in a large-scale ensemble like an orchestra or a choir. A conductor who imposes his will by brooking no arguments can make his musicians feel that they are being given no room to develop themselves if they are simply forced to play in the manner someone else dictates. Musicians at La Scala famously rejected Maestro Muti on the grounds that, although he is a world-class conductor, they felt they weren’t being given the ability to develop as players: they were simply doing what they were told all the time.

A conductor should always bear in mind that conducting is an ensemble event: you need the singers or players to perform not just for you, but with you.

The best compliment I ever received as a student conductor at university was from someone who remarked that, in directing a group of musicians, the way I brought them in was in a manner that invited them to play, rather than told them ‘right, you’re coming in NOW!’ This has really stuck in my mind, and I think is perhaps a technique that should be remembered: ask your singers to give of their best, rather than tell them they have to be giving it.

As a conductor, I feel my job is done when the choir can perform without my standing in front of them at all. They have the confidence, the experience, and the trust in one another to perform almost without being directed. On these occasions, my job is simply to remind them of what we’ve rehearsed – dynamics, phrasing, etc. – and cajole them into doing what they know they can already do.

Let them fly, and they’ll take you with them into greater heights than ever they would have, had you been driving them along instead. Ask them.

The Austro-German Connection: Brahms and Bruckner

Leave a reply

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

1 Reply

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 singersThe 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…

Trust me, I’m a conductor

1 Reply

A series looking at the art of the choral conductor.

It’s hard, as an ensemble musician, to trust a conductor; you know and trust your own abilities, you know how a piece goes if you’ve performed it before, you’ve learnt it if you haven’t, and you also know that the success of your performance is now dependent on the person standing up in front of everyone. If they get it wrong and you all fall apart, then you personally will look silly, even if you were where you were supposed to be, playing what you were supposed to be playing.

ConductingThe rehearsal process is about establishing trust between performer and conductor; going in to those first rehearsals, as a conductor, you already have to know the pieces inside out. It’s a very scary moment: everything you do at that first meeting will define the whole process to come: how well you handle the group socially as well as musically; how you establish your musical authority in such a way as to convince the group that you know what you’re doing; how you communicate your ideas and intentions in such a way as to allow them to understand. There’s no time to be learning the pieces on the hoof, as it were, whilst trying to use rehearsal time effectively.

As with standing in front of a class of children or a group of students in a lecture theatre in the first term, part of the initial process is helping the group learn how to learn. The way in which you impart your ideas at the beginning needs to be done in such a way as to help them realise “Ah, right: that’s the way I will pick up information; that’s the way in which I’m going to be asked to produce results.” As you continue to develop your rehearsals over the ensuing weeks, you will be reinforcing this process: the sooner you can help them understand how you work and how you will ask things of them and how they can demonstrate them, the sooner they will start to respond.

All of this goes towards establishing trust, a crucial factor in the working relationships in rehearsal and performance. If you cannot convince the group that you know what you are doing, and that you have the means to guide them towards achieving the outcomes you want, they won’t place any trust in you: that lack of faith will destroy any chance of working together and producing a great performance.  That doesn’t mean imposing your authority: in fact, trying to do so will actually be as counter-productive as not being any good at your job in the first place.

I’ve sat or stood in front of conductors who have shown me, within the first five minutes, that they either don’t know the piece or that they don’t know how to rehearse; sometimes, that they don’t actually know how to conduct either. It doesn’t take long to come to this conclusion – as musicians, we work with a variety of other people, and have to assess and adapt pretty quickly – and once it’s set in, it can be very hard to shift.

How do you convince your choir that you know what you are doing, and how do you get results out of them in a positive manner ?

That’s for the next post.

Poulenc and Victoria: sunlit music

4 Replies

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…

Cecilian Choir

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

Leave a reply

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.

Advent by Candlelight: forthcoming concert

Leave a reply

Advent posterThe first concert commitment in the Chamber Choir’s diary is now only six weeks away, and is a new addition to the Concert Diary for the department.

We are delighted to be launching the Advent season for St. Mildred’s Church on Stour Street, Canterbury this year, in a programme that includes popular seasonal music and readings.

We’ll be performing Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin, Tavener’s Today the Virgin, giving my carol A Babe is Born an outing before the Cathedral Carol Service the following week, as well as an array of traditional carols to welcome the beginning of the Advent period.

There will also be a selection of poetry and scriptural readings on the Advent theme, and the concert will be threaded through by the wonderful Advent antiphons. With the whole church lit by candlelight on this winter’s night, when the past, present and future will, for a short moment in words and song, come together, it promises to be a wonderful occasion

Tickets are now on sale: details on the What’s On calendar on-line here.

—

(Technorati code: GSMSF3HU6XUF ).

Bass Desires

Leave a reply

Fourth-year Drama student Dave Newell reports from the bass section.

2pm, Saturday 16th October 2010. A lecture theatre on The University of Kent Campus turns twenty six students mad, as they are heard to be singing “I’m a train!”.

One of the big problems with university choirs is the ever-changing membership; student lives usually last at the most four years, after which people graduate and thus void their entry requirements to join student choirs. From a chorister’s point of view, this means that friendships between choir members are often short-lived, and at only two-hour rehearsal a week (squeezed into the busy schedule of not doing much and sitting…;-)) can take some time to begin. This however is not the case at The University of Kent Chamber Choir.

Alastair Hume

King's man: Alastair Hume

Early in October every year the choir welcomes Alastair Hume, ex-King’s Singer counter-tenor, for a fun-filled day of singing. It was this day, in my first year, when I really began to feel a part of the choir, and four years on, things have changed little. The first few rehearsals are, as I am sure Dan (our director) will corroborate, some of the most important of the whole year, not only because it is crucial to get off to a flying start on learning the repertoire, but also because the choir must feel like a choir to sing like one, to sit together and blend, rather than sounding like a lot of people singing.

Alastair’s day certainly fulfils both of these criteria. This year we focussed on three pieces:  Hark, All ye lovely Saints Above by Weelkes, Gibbons’ O Clap your Hands and I’m a Train originally by Albert Hammond, but later covered by Al’s own King’s Singers, and it was the latter we practised. These were interspersed with much laughter and banter and it must be said that the pieces were sung with… let’s say varying levels of success, but all were thoroughly enjoyed. The Weelkes is one which is to go into the choir’s line-up for a concert in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral in February, and “I’m a Train” is to be performed in November as part of a Kent Music Society showcase.

WorkshopThis is all well and good, but the true success of the day is surely bringing the choir together. In the middle of the day we have a picnic, organised this year by Nicola Ingram, which adds to the charm of the day, gets the choir used to each other and used to singing together.

This being my last year I would like to extend my personal thanks to Alastair, whose workshops are great fun. I will never forget Seaside Rendezvous, The Humpty Dumpty Jazz or your startling array of pretty stonking trousers.

David Newell, 1st Bass, University of Kent Chamber Choir 2007-2011.

The eyes have it: the conductor’s arsenal

Leave a reply

A series looking at the art of the choral conductor.

As remarked in the previous post, the conductor’s job is made difficult by the fact that, of all the performers, you are the only one unable to make a sound. All those exhortations you’ve given in rehearsals, all those encouragements you’ve uttered, all those points you’ve flagged up as looming up ahead whilst in mid-phrase – you can’t do any of that in performance.

ConductingSo, what have you got as a conductor ?

Your hands are the most obvious tools: at their most functional, the right-hand articulates the beat, the left-hand gestures to bring people in. The left-hand has an additional role, in also crafting the nature of the sound. But the expression comes in the beat as well, in the manner in which the right hand beats the time. Depending on how you give the beat with the right hand, the resultant sound will be different: a brisk beat will engender a crisp sound in the performers, a gentle beat will elicit a more languid sound and so on. The left hand adds an additional dimension to the shaping of the sound, and can also be used to guide the unfolding phrase, leading the singers through a sustained phrase, or drawing them together for sudden silences; opening wide for greater forte or closing gently for a delicate pianissimo.

The conductor’s eyes are a particularly effective tool of communication; you use them to glance at a voice-part to alert them to the fact that they are coming in shortly, and look directly at performers when they come in; they can also express the nature of the sound you’re expecting – a fierce glare for a dramatic moment, half-closed eyes for a moment of profound beauty, and so on. I recall once playing the piano in a contemporary music ensemble, and waiting to come in; at the moment I was due to play, the conductor’s gaze struck me like a blow and the conducting hand shot out like a rocket towards me: I played the chord with perhaps more percussive force than in rehearsal, which was just the effect he wanted in the performance.

The conductor’s face is  also important, and is perhaps the least voluntarily controlled yet most responsive aspect; as you are moved by what you are conducting, so your face can’t help but respond to the emotional nature of the moment.

Here’s an example of Leonard Bernstein conducting with nothing but his eyebrows, almost: from 3′ 46” onwards, in the encore, he gives the orchestra complete freedom, and gestures only with his face: and how exuberantly the orchestra responds.

You might not be able to make a sound, as a conductor, but you can certainly articulate, through your eyes, your hands and your face, what sound you want everyone else to be making!

In the next post, I’ll be looking at establishing a rapport with the choir in those early rehearsals.