Choral Workshops in Poznań, Poland

Tags

anuna, canticum gaudium, choral singers, esteli gomez, Jacek Sykulski, Poznan Boys Choir

I had a day off. This was an unexpected one thanks to the unnatural flight scheduling of Ryanair, so I chose to do as little as was physically possible. Coffee, go to the park with my friend Magda Siadek and then more coffee. Magda and I walked around the beautiful city of Poznań, visting the park with its moving cemetery. She educated me to the richness and turmoil of Polish history, and brought to life the city and its people in a way that I often don’t experience when I travel to a place only for a day or so.

Magda and me in Citadel Park, Poznan

The day before had been very special. Usually when I give workshops or masterclasses they are either technical singing classes or deal with the interpretation of my music. Rarely do they encompass both areas of my work simultaneously. The session lasted five hours. The attendees at the Academy of Music in Poznań were made up of children and adults – all of them accomplished choral singers. In total there were to be in excess of one hundred young singers attending the workshop.They came from a number of choral groups, but I had specifically been invited by the world-renowned Poznań Boys’ Choir, who had  conducted by my friend Jacek Sykulski. They are easily one of the world’s best boychoirs. Here they are singing my arrangement of “St. Nicholas

I had seen the boys perform the day before at the Gala Concert for the First International Early Music Vocal Competition  Canticum Gaudium, and had been hugely impressed by their sound – visceral and strong, with a sheen of confidence that I was very unfamiliar with, particularly in their performance of my own piece “Media Vita”. I was very much looking forward to working with them. Jacek and I had been corresponding for at least a decade. He is an excellent composer, and we discovered many unexpected connections, including one to the American vocal group The Free Design [I have written about them in an earlier article] that was more than slightly disconcerting for both of us. You can read more about him here.

With Jarek Otoka, Łukasz Matusik and Jacek, pic by Tomasz Semmler

Jacek had chosen two of my pieces for the workshop – “Pie Jesu” and “Heia Viri”.  “Heia Viri” is not an easy piece to sing. It has an alternating 10/8, 4/4, 7/8 rhythmic pattern, which many choirs find pretty daunting. Jacek conducted this piece, giving precise entries and eliciting quite a dynamic reaction from the singers. After a while I asked him to stop conducting and to leave them to continue undirected. We listened to the singers dealing with the complex rhythmic structures without guidance. They started to listen to each other. To be precise, the adults did. What the children did was most illuminating. I clearly remember three little boys in the front row thumping each other as they sang “Heia Viri”. This in itself is to be expected with boys anywhere, but not while negotiating alternating complex choral rhythms unconducted. Another boy was rapidly beating his music against his arm which he had rolled up into a weapon. This in itself isn’t unusual, but he was beating rapidly in a different rhythmic pattern to any that I had written. Children don’t need to listen, or analyse – they just sing it as it is. At what precise moment is it that we lose large chunks of our natural common-sense when singing in choirs?

Just listening…

…and laughing. Pics T Semmler

Then there was “Pie Jesu” which begins with a suspended 4^th that resolves onto a 3^rd in the second bar in an F major tonality. I gave the notes of the opening chord at 11.15am. An hour later we sang  “Heia Viri”, which is in D flat, returning to “Pie Jesu” for the last hour of the workshop that ended at 3pm. What was somewhat revelatory was the simple fact that I blew the notes on my pitch-pipe only once for both pieces and I didn’t let the singers re-tune prior to singing. The assembled choirs were able to pitch the opening of both songs each time we restarted without any assistance. They held the F tonality perfectly in tune for at least four hours. What are keys and notes? Just ethereal ideas really. I’ve tried this trick all over the world, and it never ceases to amaze me how lazy we are about things like this as choral singers.

Just remember you guys who the boss is here…

Working with Andrzej & Witold Lewicki of Lumen

I also had the pleasure to work with Estelí Gomez, winner of the Canticum Gaudium competition the day before. Estelí sang Hildegard of Bingen while I pointed out to the choirs what she was doing, and, rather more importantly, not doing as she sang. Still hands, correct body position, natural movement – all of these things had contributed to her victory the day before, and she was obviously radiating so much joy when she sang for us that I know many of the children in particular gained much from her natural contribution to the session.

I got the chance to work with the adult singers of the Academy Choir and some members of the ensemble Lumen. Much of what I had to say to them revolved around postural issues and movement, but throughout these parts of the session I was struck by how open to new, and often quite physical ideas all of them were. I was humbled also to hear that many of them were pretty familiar with my music and when I got home I even came across this lovely rendition of my arrangement of the Irish medieval song “Miserere Miseris” recorded by Lumen – there are some truly beautiful voices in this group.

It irritates me to hear the choral industry, and singers themselves, fawning over conductors of professional choral groups as if they were some kind of magical beings. In most cases, I can assure you, they are not. Some of them are even, dare I say it, not particularly good. I personally believe that any decent conductor who is adequately musical, charismatic and confident can achieve wonderful things when put in front of a brilliant choir. The true heroes of choral music are those directors who live their art. Who obsess, who eat and breathe it. Who sacrifice and bleed for it. People like Jacek. Sometimes their passion can get in the way of what they are trying to do, as their job does not simply entail turning up with the choir smiling sweetly at them and reaping the rewards of the preparatory work of others. It is hands-on, committed and demands huge personal sacrifice and much of their limited energy is burnt up with the mundane rather than the magical.

The aim of my sessions is to reduce the amount of unnecessary energy that choirs, but particularly conductors expend. The greatest flaw of the conductor is to do too much for the singers. In order for choirs to be more proactive they need to understand better the physicality of their own performance and how that relates to those around them. This is pretty much how Anúna works – “all for one and one for all” as the old saying goes. Most choirs want to function this way, but appear to have lost their way somewhat and have stopped using common sense in relation to the necessities of performance. Hopefully this very special session was as illuminating for the singers as it was for me. I had a brilliant time. I learnt so much from Jacek and the singers, and I feel a close bond now between us. I hope to return again as soon as I can. Thank you Jacek and Joanna.

On Choral Music in Worship

Tags

anuna, michael mcglynn

I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. My parents endeavoured to give me every opportunity to be exposed to a vast range of music, strongly encouraging our explorations, be they rock or classical music. In school the main exposure to singing was musical drama in the form of Gilbert and Sullivan with a few hymns in unison at every church service. It is understandable, therefore, that when my first exposure to sacred choral music at last arrived at age nineteen in University College Dublin Chamber Choir, it was like being hit with a mallet on the head.

I clearly remember my first rehearsal. We sang two songs, “Christus Factus Est” by Anerio and “O Sacrum Convivium” by Messiaen. Suddenly much was made clear to me. Maybe this was why people still spoke fondly of the extinct Latin Mass, with its remote and mysterious ceremony? It also helped explain to me why services were structured as they are. Music wasn’t simply a chance for the congregation to sing together, rather it was a series of sonic sign-posts angled towards illumination of the underlying spiritual truth of the service.

The Latin language, with its soft and non-percussive sound, had a natural affinity to the music that it was carried by. Later I discovered the music of Tallis, Gibbons and Byrd, being struck by the beauty of the harmonic language and the mellifluous use of the less-musical English language. Simple, direct statements of belief were woven into a powerful lattice of spiritual affirmation. Exposure to more recent music written for the Church today plainly showed that composers were acutely aware of their musical ancestry and quite capable of working within the practical constraints of service structures and the capabilities of the performing groups that they composed for. Indeed, the love of singing contemporary music among the better choral groups was a great pleasure to behold, even if much of the music demanded skills that were just on the edge of what the singers were capable of.

With respect to my Roman Catholic upbringing, I had rarely understood how the odd hymn here or there and the simplistic one-line responses and calls in the vernacular could compare to the carefully constructed musical structures that I participated in while singing in my first Church of Ireland services.  It irritated me that much of what was musically beautiful in the pre-Vatican II church had simply been consigned to performance repertoire, rarely heard within its originally conceived context.

Sometimes I felt like a starved man who eats as much as possible very quickly, deputising and singing at the two major Church of Ireland Cathedrals in Dublin, St. Patrick’s and Christ Church Cathedrals as often as I could. I sang for free at weddings, funerals, services – anything I was asked to do simply to experience this music in the context of its original conception.

By this time I was beginning to compose on a regular basis. Although the main thrust of my composition was towards the development of a new form of Irish choral music, I was consistently drawn to spiritual texts. Two early efforts I wrote for competitions organised for use in the Church of Ireland service were “Codhlaim go Súan I’d Chroí” (I Sleep Softly in Your Heart) and the anthem “Come Let us Sing” the former for a competition to find an anthem in the Irish language and the latter a setting of a more traditional Church text. This work eventually gave rise to my “Celtic Mass”, a combination of texts in Latin and Irish on diverse texts. Latterly my spiritual output has included the four “Tenebrae Responsories”, a “Missa Brevis” for St David’s Cathedral in Wales and a diverse collection of individual sacred works that include my “Agnus Dei” which was commissioned by the American choir Chanticleer in 2006 for their five-composer project “And on Earth, Peace: a Chanticleer Mass”.

Despite it being nearly thirty years since I was so profoundly influenced by this music, it continues to be a part of my life. I attend regularly at Saint Bartholomew’s Church in Dublin which has a fine and ambitious musical programme. I believe that the power generated by community singing of good quality has a ripple effect on the entirety of society. This music and literature has survived because it is simultaneously functional and art. It is important to bear in mind that composers who have written this music for over a millennium have done so with a desire to articulate their own spiritual ideas while transmitting genuine and heart-felt insight to a congregation. I now realise why this music has influenced and affected me the way it has. Choral music in worship can bring congregation, singer and composer together in a unique and wonderful way. The power of this should never be underestimated.

This article appears in the magazine Soundboard, Winter 2011