Low Notes 9
By David Ward
October 2017. This is the latest in an erratic series of newsletters about the choir that will include information about what we are singing plus irrelevant ramblings and observations from the back row of the basses.
Welcome to another choir season and I hope you made constructive use of your Tuesday evenings during our glorious summer. And a special welcome to our new members: we hope you will enjoy what we do and how we do it. There are now enough basses to start a Rugby League team.
It’s a shame we lost a week because the work on the Arts Centre was not complete; and since the Christmas concert is a week earlier than usual, the pressure is on. The Saint-Saens Christmas Canatata seems manageable even if the score is not the most perfect specimen: why stick the English words immediately under the stave rather than the Latin? I’ve already lost count of the times I’ve started in Latin, turned a page and continued in English and then Latglish because my eye had flicked to the wrong place.
Donald’s score, by contrast, is large and clear. These things matter to ropey singers like me who need things to be simple and straightforward. But it’s a joy to have another go at Tollite Hostias, which shows signs of become one of our party pieces.
The practical bits: the Christmas Concert will be at the Arts Centre on December 3 with Messiah For All following on December 12 at St Oswald’s.
Last week Donald mentioned a Radio 4 programme about singing that I had already spotted in my Radio Times; introduced by the baritone Roderick Williams, it set out to ask why we sing and what we get from singing. It began with a series of statements:
When we sing together, our hearts start to beat to beat together. We feel close to each other; we lose ourselves and at the same time gain a louder voice by joining ours with the people around us. We sing for love, we sing for sorrow and we sing for joy. We sing to summon communities and to change the world. We sing for solidarity.
I’ve not yet been aware of our soprano, alto, tenor and bass hearts beating as one and I’m not sure that changing the world is within the power of the Bollington Festival Choir. But much of the rest I can go along with, although I’m not convinced by philosopher Roger Scruton’s comment that the sound of a choir in four parts is “a fundamental atavistic experience”.
The programme raised questions that I have been asking myself for ages – the basic ones: why do we do this? what do get out of it? what does it do for us? Someone mentioned the “magical experience” of singing your own part while hearing the other parts around you, something that isn’t always possible in a large group of singers.
But I know that sensation. I felt it not long after my voice had broken and a dozen of us in a crummy north London grammar school were being taught to sing in harmony: two tenor lines, two bass lines. The music was rubbish – an arrangement of Pedro the Fisherman – but I can remember the thrill of managing to hang on to my own line while being aware of the other three around me.
It can work with larger groups if you muddle up the voice lines. A bunch of us did it in the circular Cross Street chapel in Manchester when we stood round the walls next to anyone singing a vocal line that was not our own. Obviously you can only do that with a piece you know really well; more often than not, choir voice groups understandably huddle together for comfort and mutual support.
As for our choir, one of its special joys for me is that there are no auditions: we are a bunch of individuals, some with better voices and more developed music skills than others; but at every concert I sense that the choir’s collective achievement is greater than the sum of its parts. And you never know when the collective achievement is going to range far beyond what any of us thought was possible.
Singing, the Radio 4 programme added, tells us a story about what makes us human, about how and why the individual and the group “stand together and stand apart”.
You can catch the programme of iPlayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0952str
I’d very much like to know why you sing and what singing does for you. If you’d like to share your thoughts for inclusion (anonymously if you prefer) in the next newsletter, please collar me during a tea break or email me at david@davidwardassociates.co.uk
That’s enough pondering; back to that wretched Saint-Saens score…
David