Tag Archives: Chamber Choir

Music divine: the Crypt Concert

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And so, after all the hard work, the Crypt Concert came on Friday in a myriad shimmering sounds and colours.

Gathering for the rehearsal in the Crypt in the afternoon, we started by singing not the first piece in the programme, but the mesmerising opening phrases of Lauridsen’s O nata lux; I’d been promising the Choir that singing in the richly resonant acoustics of the Cathedral’s Norman crypt would be worth the wait, and I wanted the group’s first musical steps in the crypt to be memorable.

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Purple patch

As soon as we’d released the first eight chords into the space, there was infectious grinning blossoming all around the singers; this was what we’d come for. The slow unfurling of the piece’s rich harmonic colour was an especial treat in the surroundings of the crypt, and we could allow time aplenty for the colours of the chords to breathe in the space before moving onto the next phrase.

All that afternoon, we tested the acoustics to the limit with the repertoire for the evening, working out just how quietly we could sing, how diligent we had to be in articulating the consonants, how to close the vowels and resonate on ‘m’s and ‘n’s in order to hear that final hum work its way around the space. There was a palpable air of excitement building throughout the afternoon – we were absolutely ready, and looking forward to the concert. Experimenting with singing Dawn at the back of the crypt, the choice was made actually to sing it in situ rather than gathering behind the audience, as the acoustics worked better.

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Percussionist Carina Evans rehearsing the ‘Forgotten Children’s Songs’

The evening concert went like a dream – from the vibrant opening of Pitoni’s Cantate Domino, through the evocative textures of the two solo marimba pieces from percussionist Carina Evans, through the lithe works conducted by second-year student Emma Murton, culminating in the final ‘Hai!’ of the robust final Dance from the Forgotten Children’s Songs, the musicians were on top form, and gave of their very best.

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In fine form

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The ladies of the alto section

So my deepest thanks to all the performers, who have worked tirelessly over the past few months; it was a truly memorable concert, and you rose to the occasion magnificently.

Now on to the new repertoire…

The day’s last sigh: final rehearsal before the concert

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Next time the Chamber Choir meets to rehearse for Friday night’s concert in the Cathedral Crypt, we’ll be in – the Cathedral Crypt.

Last night was our final rehearsal before Friday, and I have to say, it went like a dream. We sang through the entire programme, and Carina also performed the two pieces for solo marimba which she will be playing as part of the concert, to get a grasp of the geography and scale of the programme, to get a feel for the flow of the pieces and how they stand in relation to one another.

The Choir was in top form; intonation spot-on, pitch reliable and constant; there’s a wonderful unity to the ensemble now (as I said, the Choir is working like an accordion, breathing and relaxing together throughout the pieces) that means we are really feeling the works as a combined group. There’s lots of scope for us to be flexible according to the atmosphere on the night in the Crypt, to be able to respond to the richly-resonant acoustics, to dwell on particular chords, to push through individual phrases, and to linger as the final notes recede.

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In final rehearsal

The new mixed-formation ensemble line-up has really taken hold, with the overall sound much richer (and blending better) as a result – a bold decision taken two weeks ago has really paid dividends, and yielded a much more sonorous and mature sound. As a few of the members observed, we’ve started to enjoy ourselves to the point where the ppp passages aren’t perhaps quite so ppp as they were before – a sign of how much we’ve relaxed into singing, but something to make sure we’re mindful of when we perform on the night.

We’re ready to go: see you on Friday…

Challenging the boundaries between sound and silence

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Last night’s rehearsal involved singing quietly. A lot of quiet singing. In fact, most of the session was spent exploring just how quietly we could sing some of the pieces in next week’s concert programme.

From the opening of Handel’s Hear Thou My Weeping, through to various passages of contrasting light and shade in Lauridsen’s O nata lux, and the entirety of Tavener’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer, last night was an exercise in seeing just how intimate a sound we could make.

Image: subrealism.blogspot

Image: subrealism.blogspot

The idea, particularly with the Tavener, which never moves away from pp throughout the whole piece, is to draw the audience to us, to make an intimate performance space into which the listener has to lean, in order to be involved. There are moments in the Lauridsen where the dynamics change quickly, and briefly – as I said to the Choir, it’s as though you are standing in a church on a cloud-darkened day, and suddenly, for a brief moment, the sun appears from behind a cloud and comes streaming through a stained-glass window, filling the space with colour. These transient moments of contrast, where radiant colour suddenly blossoms in a passage that crescendos and then diminuendos swiftly, are what give the Lauridsen piece its life.

Sustained pp singing is the cornerstone of Tavener’s The Lord’s Prayer, too; the dynamic remains unchanged through the piece, a quiet meditation on the prayer that, in its contemplative serenity, actually does what music can often do – transcend time, for a while, and take the listener into a very different realm. We hope to blur the distinction between the music and the silence surrounding it, creating a hiatus where it will be unclear whether the piece has actually finished, drawing out the moment of listening. It will be a lovely, intimate way in which to close the first half of the concert.

So, listen hard a week on Friday, if you’re coming to the concert; you might just hear the Choir singing very quietly indeed…

Radical changes and relinquishing control

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There were major changes made during the Chamber Choir’s all-day rehearsal over the weekend, brave decisions being taken, and lots of creative ideas – most of them, excitingly, from the Choir itself!

Throughout the day, I felt as though I was slowly relinquishing control of the group, as they started to operate more and more independently. Whilst this was ever so slightly alarming, not to mention unexpected, it was a good thing, a positive sign that, at last, the group is beginning to act and feel as one.

Percussion Scholar Carina Evans took time out from playing the Orchestra and  Concert Band to come along and play the percussion parts in the piece I’ve written for the concert, ‘Forgotten Children’s Songs;’ moving between marimba, triangle, bodhran and tambourine, the new textures added some real zip to the movements, especially the last one; the set has really come to life, and will be a vibrant way to bring the concert to a close.

Second-year Emma leading a warm-up

Second-year Emma leading a warm-up

There were problems with pitch during the early part of the rehearsal, with intonation not always very secure and pieces often ending up dropping a semitone by the end (which, when you’re delivering bottom D’s as a bass in Tavener’s setting of the Lord’s Prayer, can be quite a challenge!) we changed our approach to key vowels to try to keep the pitch up; we thought about breathing; we changed our psychological approach to the shapes of phrases to think about intervals differently; and none of them yielded any significant change.

Then, from out of the blue, two of the ladies in the Choir suggested, for a change, we should stand in mixed formation, with each singer standing next to voices singing a different part, and see what happened. We duly shuffled around, and once arranged to make sure this was so, we started the piece again. Whilst this immediately resulted in a very different sound, it also meant (as everyone observed afterwards) that you could hear different parts that previously you couldn’t hear. The intonation was much improved, and now the group decided to stay in this formation for the remainder of the rehearsal. Singing in isolation from their own particular voice-part, suddenly everyone had to take charge of driving their individual line, with the resulting collective ensemble sound very much improved.

There was a great deal of fun to be had with extremes of dynamic contrast in the Hassler madrigal; we’ve decided to keep the dynamic changes throughout the verses spontaneous and unplanned on the night; it keeps everyone on their toes, and because we’re clearly having a lot of fun being mischievous with them, hopefully the audience will sense this too.

The Choir decided, by the end of the day, that they want to sing in the new formation on the night, a brave decision given that it’s less than two weeks until the performance and it means re-thinking all the pieces, including the three which we sang in the Gala concert in December. But it’s a measure of how much the group is growing in confidence, the fact that it wants to try new things and push itself further. There’s still work to do, now, in getting used to singing all of the pieces in the new line-up – and, as a conductor, I’ve got to re-think where and how to cue the voice-parts, given they are now scattered throughout the entire group; thanks, team! – but there’s a sense that the choir is really starting to fly now. We just have to trust each other and let go.

In performance mode

In performance mode

Find out more about the concert on the Choir’s ‘Wallwisher’ wall here, and details about the concert on our What’s On diary online here.

 

Changing shape in formation (and vowels)

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As I stood in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral during a meeting on Monday, ahead of the two concerts the University is holding at the Cathedral this term, it dawned on me just how close the Chamber Choir concert is – just over three weeks away.

Crypt-ic…

Rehearsals have taken on a new intensity this term, as we really start to make sure all the pieces are as good as those that we performed back in the gala concert in December. We’ve been pacing slowly through the rich and strange harmonic territory of Lauridsen’s evocative O nata lux, in which tuning is all-important – get in wrong, and the chords turn from lush to awkward. We are working hard, too, to get an increased flexibility in the plainchant sections of Hassler’s Ave maris stella, and have also been taking apart the vowel sounds in his madrigal, Tanzen und Springen. (With two native German speakers in the choir this year, it’s even more important that we get the pronunciation exactly right!) I’m assured by them both that there’s no echt Deutsch way of singing ‘Fa la la,’ but we have been tidying this up by replacing broad ‘ah’ vowels with ‘uh’ and singing more on the ‘l’ than the vowel itself – this seems to have worked, and creates a much tidier (and less Lady Grantham-esque!) shape to the sound.

We’ve also started to work in a slightly deeper horse-shoe formation, mimicking the space in which we’ll be singing, inside the pillars of the Cathedral’s Norman Crypt.

The Cecilian Choir is also preparing for its concert celebrating Britten in his centenary year, and this afternoon we’ll be putting the Ceremony of Carols together with the harp for the first time. Find out how we get on later…

Lift-off at last

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We’ve been talking in the Choir about That One Rehearsal, where it all comes together. It happened last year, a decisive moment when things turned a corner and the choir never looked back, and we’ve been feeling that a similar moment hasn’t yet happened this year; and we’ve been wanting it to. When will it come ? How can we make it occur ?

Last night’s rehearsal started with the three carols we will be singing in the Cathedral for the University Carol Service; some serious note-bashing of individual parts, building the verses section by section, following the lines and thinking about the text. We sang them through – ok, progress had been made, we were starting to get a feel for the carols, but nothing particularly exciting was happening with the music, with the ensemble sound.

In a spontaneous and completely un-premeditated moment, I now asked the Choir to stand to sing through the last of the carols, and said ”Right, let’s try it a little differently; sopranos, can you stand over there (pointing to where the tenors normally stand), basses, can you go there (where the altos usually are), altos, can you stand on the end on the left, and tenors, over where the basses usually sing.” We’ve customarily sung in a line, sopranos on the left, moving through the alto and tenor sections towards the right and ending with the basses on the right-hand end; but in order to try to make something happen here, we were now to stand in a new formation.

There was some shuffling around, we arranged ourselves in the new line-up, and sang through Vaughan Williams’ arrangement of ‘The Truth from Above.” The last chord died away, and there was something of an extended silence; we could, I think, all feel that something significant had just happened. The ensemble sound had changed completely. The balance was better; with the sopranos (who are normally the more dominant of the voices) now standing in the middle, the sound was no longer left-hand-heavy; the altos and tenors, now standing on either end, could now be heard more clearly, and because the basses were now also in the middle, everyone could now hear the bottom of the chords and tune to them better.

After a moment, I said ”Ok – how do you fancy singing through the three pieces for the Gala concert in the same formation, to see what happens ?” There was an excited nodding of heads, copies for the three relevant pieces were gathered, and we launched into them.

The effect was astounding. The ensemble sound was more confident, the intonation was improved, and (very importantly) the pitch didn’t drop throughout the entire set of pieces. We reached the climactic phrase at the end of ‘For the Music,’ and there was a moment’s hush followed by sponteneous clapping and whooping from the Choir. (I may even have done a whirl of sheer delight as well.) We had done it; we’d found Our Ensemble Sound, found a way of arranging the Choir in formation that produced the best result.

The rest of the rehearsal seemed to pass in a whirl, as we sailed through the remaining pieces I’d planned. Handel. BAM! Tavener. BAM! Hassler. (Well, ok, some more note-bashing was required for that one). But the prevailing mood was buoyant throughout the rest of the evening; the moment we’d been waiting for had finally happened, and all through an unplanned decision to mix things up there and then.

It just goes to show – the key is to keep changing, keep trying things out, and be experimental, flexible, until that moment comes when you draw a sound from the group unlike one you’ve heard from it before, and which everyone realises is what we’re striving for.

We have lift-off…

First choral rehearsals in the new hall

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And what a relief it’s been this week to get into the new concert-hall and sing (well, for the members of the Chamber Choir and Cecilian Choir to sing, that is…). The reverberant acoustics mean we can actually start working to develop the ensemble sound, as we can now hear ourselves as the chords rise into the rooflight. Rehearsing the plainsong which opens Britten’s Ceremony of Carols with the Cecilian Choir gave us the first chance to shape the lines, waiting at the ends of phrases for the sound to recede before beginning the next – something the former choir rehearsal room (the OTE) has never afforded.

The Chamber Choir get moody…

The Chamber Choir rehearsal on Tuesday evening overran by some considerable margin, as we all got slightly carried away with exploring the acoustics in the new space; we ended up finishing at about 9.55pm. But we were having too much fun… At one point, the Choir were stepping in stately procession around in a circle to get the one-in-a-bar feel of Hear Thou My Weeping, whilst Emma organised them into mixed formation to explore the creation of an overall sound in You Are The New Day. Exploring movement and space was never a possibility in the OTE; this year, it might just become de rigeur…

Great Britten from the Cecilian Choir

There was great sparkle about ‘Wolcum, Yule!’ as the Cecilian Choir rehearsed the first movement of the Britten, whilst we were able to start crafting the rise and fall of phrases in the opening plainsong.

It’s been a terrific first couple of rehearsals; the chance for the Chamber Choir to sing the pieces we’ll be performing in the Gala opening concert in December, in the very space we’ll be using, will no doubt do wonders for our confidence on the night.

It all starts here…

The week is still not over…

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It’s been a busy choral week this week, and it’s still not over; from Monday’s Chorus rehearsal of Carmina Burana, Tuesday’s Chamber Choir visit to Hassler, Lauridsen and Vaughan Williams, and Thursday’s Cecilian Choir in Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, there’s still tomorrow’s all-day Chamber Choir workshop yet to come.

Once each term, the Choir meets on a Saturday for an intensive session on key repertoire for the year; it’s also an opportunity for the group to combine socially early on in this, the first term – one of the basses has been diligently co-ordinating lunch by e-mail and Facebook throughout the week, organising who’ll be bringing what. Whilst there’s a lively social side to the day, it’s also about getting down to some serious rehearsing, focusing on developing the choir’s ensemble sound, getting to grips with tricky repertoire and really starting to push towards getting some of the music off the page and into performance mode.

Tomorrow will be long, hard work – but fun as well. (There’s even the promise of cake…). Watch this space to find out how we get on…

The trouble with learning the music

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It’s the week before Freshers’ Week, and I’ve spent the past few days getting to grips with the new repertoire for the coming year with the Chamber Choir. I still find this time of the year somewhat daunting, as I’ve written about previously here, but re-reading the post from last year has reminded me about the trick of learning pieces backwards; a vast stack of new pieces to get under the fingers can be quite intimidating.

Getting to grips with it all…

The trouble with learning all the music now is that I now want to start rehearsing it straight away; and yet there’s still the best part of three weeks before the newly-auditioned Chamber Choir will convene for the very first time. It’s frustrating; as I learn the music, I want to start putting ideas into practice, to start working on the trickier bits, but also to start getting those pieces about which I’m really excited off the page.

This year, both Emma (this year’s student conductor) and myself have our work cut out; the February concert falls a week earlier than it did last year, which means we’ll lose rehearsal time, and there’s the added commitment of a high-profile performance the second weekend in December, when the Chamber Choir will perform as part of the inaugural concerts for the new Colyer-Fergusson music building; which is followed on the Monday night by the Choir singing in the University Carol Service. Three performances in three day: phew.  We’ve talked through our plans for the first term, arranged the content of the first few weeks, and got ourselves organised for the start of term. And with my head now full of the notes, phrases, tonal landscapes and the languages in which to sing the new pieces, I want to start them all now.

I shall just have to be patient, and keep practicing the pieces at the piano until the first time we gather. Reading over the entries last year, remembering the way the Choir unfolded across the first few months, I’m starting to get excited again about the forthcoming choral year. Lots to look forward to; follow it all along with us on the blog here.

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.