Hoolies I have known ...

This startling photo was taken by Karen Brodie last Saturday as the participants in the Festal Evensong that had just celebrated 140 years of the Cathedral of The Isles poured out in a swish of red and gold onto the steps and stopped to pose. Small people to the front, they said, and some of us obliged. Far be it from me to lurk in the shadow of a mitre ...

It's been a long time since my first posing on these steps as part of an ecclesiastical extravaganza - the picture below was taken in the summer of 1973, when I have to say I felt as if I had a bit part in a Fellini film. It wasn't long after that that I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and another 6 months would see me uprooting myself from Glasgow and moving to Dunoon on the back of an invitation from the priest whose institution as priest-in-charge of Cumbrae as well as of Holy Trinity Dunoon was the occasion for that bit of finery. You can see that in those days we were soberly dressed in black (I think they were our MA gowns, and cassocks for the boys) whereas nowadays we are more Whoopie Goldbergish in red (donated by an American church). The red gowns used to have dreadful white polyester scarves, but we managed over time to lose these ...

And if you look closely at the two photos, you should recognise one constant - or rather, four constants: the four members of the St Maura Singers, a relatively new group back then; a somewhat older one now. Two men, two women. We (the women) were both pregnant in the first photo; decidedly not so last weekend. So it's been a while, and we've seen a great many hoolies in this lovely place.

There's nothing quite like a full house to boost the spirits; nothing quite like a good choir to sing with to make the spirits soar. I reckon I've been lucky to have my faith journey as well as a chunk of my musical life linked into the Cathedral on Cumbrae - or the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, or the Cathedral of The Isles, if you prefer - for it remains special, full of benevolent spirits and still numinous in the incense-remembering silence of an evening alone in the Butterfield building. I've shared it with musicians, with retreat groups, with a Cursillo weekend, with a preaching workshop, and simply with our friend Alastair who is the organist there. But no matter when I go or with whom, this is my place* - which may explain why I look so pleased with myself in Saturday's photo.

That said, it was a crazy weekend. Many of us who made up the choir had arrived on the Friday for dinner and had rehearsed until 10pm; the following day we began at 10am and went on till 1pm with a 15 minute break; the Evensong - an enormous sing - took up the afternoon; we rehearsed till 10pm in the evening. On Sunday, we began at 9.45am to practise for the Eucharist (a Mass setting we'd never seen before); when that was over and we'd grabbed a salad it was back to get ready for a concert at 3pm. I haven't worked so hard in years, and neither has my voice.

I attribute its surprising resilience to a summer spent singing along to Leonard Cohen, actually - it's fair ironed out the break around Middle C that used to cause me such bother, and in a summer of builders and no choir it's been good to have something to sing with. How long, O Lord ...?

A final thought: I have no idea what anyone not involved in this kind of thing makes of it. It's clearly formed a big part of my life, and I've had a lot of fun. But normal? I don't think so ...


*This is not strictly true, you understand: there are probably hundreds of people who'd say the same, but ...

Cross-Pollination

I haven't posted for a bit. It's not that I haven't been sitting at my desktop: far from it. But from being someone who rarely uses earphones (they were so uncomfortable) and hasn't listened to much of what might loosely be termed popular music since the age of 18 (a while, then) I've spent most of the time doing just these two things. I always did love a good love song, back in the day, and I've always preferred what might be termed music to slit your wrists to ... And now I've rediscovered both, and as Facebook friends will hardly have failed to realise, I've been listening to Leonard Cohen.

I specified a sort of cut-off date for my interest in pop; it coincided with the rise of the Beatles and my discovery of Palestrina and Byrd and these two geniuses shaped my musical tastes for the rest of my life, I thought. Yes, there were other passions - Tippet, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, to name the composers on some of my early LPs - but the music I loved to sing, and to sing along with, belonged to the Renaissance. I developed a voice as similar to the counter tenor as I could, and my reading abilities flourished as I sang in an octet (The New Consort of Voices, for anyone who was around Glasgow Uni circles in the late 60s/early 70s) and the quartet that still performs today with only a change in the soprano line, the St Maura Singers. We started a larger choir when we moved to Dunoon - The Hesperians, from the women of which group the current 8+1 choir was born. There was a church choir, intermittently - it tended to suffer from church politics and eventually vanished.

All this was made easier, of course, by the fact that I'd married a musician who works magic with choirs. But living with a musician also tends to influence some - not all - of the music played at home. Because of that influence, I've learned almost all I know. But because the current choir, 8+1, sings everything from Ah Robyn to Mamma Mia, there's been a shift in my earworm availability, and one of our repertoire got stuck that way: Leonard Cohen's Halleluia. And it was seeing a video on Facebook/YouTube of a live performance by him, a recent live performance, that started me on the online trawl for other songs of this performer who was in his mid-70s at the time the recordings were made - and that's what I've been singing along with for the last two months.

So what made me want to reflect on this? Here's a thing. For the whole of July until today, we've had work going on in our dining room. The painter finished only this morning. The floor is varnished, the room is clean - and empty. It has a wonderful acoustic. So yesterday the two of us, Mr B and I, sang and recorded St Magnus' Hymn - the two-part 12th Century piece that begins "nobilis, humilis...". And after the first go, when I was singing at my usual mezzo pitch and straining slightly on the high E, I went down an octave and immediately sounded - and felt - better. This is an area of my voice that I've been unhappy with recently; helping out on the second soprano part has led to the neglect of the lower end of my voice, with the break at Middle C becoming more troublesome than it has been since I was in my early 20s. But yesterday it was fine, with an equal resonance taking me down to F.

Why? Presumably because the ageing voice of Leonard Cohen means he now sings in his boots, and that's what I've been singing along with. I've not been belting it out, just crooning, but that gentle exercise has been enough to make the difference. I feel somehow vindicated - that I've not wasted the tradesmen-minding hours listening on headphones, but have done something my laziness has too often stopped me doing when I've not practised vocal exercises. And I've learned some cracking new songs ...

All we go down ...

I was at a funeral yesterday, not as a mourner but as a provider of music, one of a quartet singing the Kontakion for the Departed at the end of a service in the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. This was significant for me personally in one important feature: it was doing exactly that at my very first funeral in that same cathedral 42 years ago that convinced me of all that I now believe in, as a consequence of which I was confirmed 9 months later and as a further consequence of which I came to live in Dunoon. There were differences, of course - that first funeral was of a friend, it was a requiem mass, the coffin was between the choir stalls and therefore right on front of me.

So I'd actually have gone a long way to sing this music again in that place and with these same musicians. But another truth dawned on me yesterday as I sang, and after the plainsong Nunc Dimittis with which we finished. It was a truth about music - that kind of music, timeless and beautiful and still. For after all the words, the telling to God of the deceased's character (thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts ... ) and the hymns that were deemed suitable, this was the moment when it seemed to me that the otherness of death came close, that the life of the world was dimmed and the life of heaven opened, and the possibilities of eternity were real and endless.

And weeping o'er the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia.

I would like to think that this music will be present for my end.

Mamma Mia, or what happens when you run out of tenors ...

You have to laugh. All these years of singing - it's a good 50 years since I last sang in the Hillhead High School madrigal group, at the time the acme of my singing career - singing said madrigals, to say nothing of masses, introits and anthems, hymns, funeral sentences ... I won't go on. You get the picture. When I was in my early 20s my ambition was to sound like Alfred Deller, and I got pretty close, even if in the doing of it I sang sharp because I wasn't using my whole voice; when I sat Higher Music in S6 I was made to sing soprano and cope with Gretchen am Spinnrade, inter alia. Since then I have been a sort of alto in various ensembles, from the St Maura Singers (a quartet, still singing together) through the New Consort of Voices (a group formed in Glasgow University, in which I met Mr B and in which we both sang till we left Glasgow for the wild west) to the Hesperians. This last was a four-part choir that we formed within six months of our arrival in Dunoon - we put the word out in the school and contacts formed quite literally on the street, and one September evening we hired a room in the school and waited. Within 30 minutes we had sufficient voices to cover the parts, and six months later performed Vivaldi's Gloria in public.

Eventually we ran out of tenors. The Americans left Dunoon, and some of our men with them. Age took its toll on others. We disbanded the choir and concentrated on church music. And then, years later, we retired - and behold: the women who had been young newcomers in the last years of the Hesperians wanted to sing again, and 8+1 was formed. Eight women, one man. Now there are ten of us, and the name is merely that and no longer a description.

And all this history is to tell you why you have to laugh. Because 8+1 can and does tackle the kind of music which has been my life all these years - but that's not all we do. And it's because we do other stuff that two weeks ago we sang a set of songs from ABBA's Mamma Mia, with a backing track, at a Christmas Party in Benmore Gardens Gallery, and are still the talk of the steamie. (These days, the steamie is the supermarket, where yesterday I met the organiser of the event: "best ever", she said.) It was completely OTT, that performance, because the backing track (yes, we have a backing track) got stuck on "High" and Mr B couldn't get it down before the one-page intro finished with the result that this choir of women, only one of whom is under 40, had to belt out the songs as if we were in the movie. We had not a microphone among us, but we made a helluva sound and we loved every moment of it.

Worse is to follow. I had never been a fan of ABBA (too old) and I hate musicals. I had to learn these blooming songs from the sheet music while everyone else was singing them from past knowledge - and "Waterloo" on the page ain't easy, rhythmically speaking. But now I've got them - and I'm stuck with them. For the past month I find myself singing snatches of Abba as I walk round the shops or hike up a glen. I fill silences with sudden bursts of song. I am handed a copy of Carols for Choirs and sing "Thank you for the music". No wonder ABBA were/are so popular. I shall never be the same again.

Now - where's that copy of "A spotless rose..."?

A requiem for Philip II

As dawn breaks and church bells toll slowly all over Toledo, an elaborate funeral procession winds its way through the city's streets. Clad in black vestments of mourning, the Archbishop leads the procession, followed by the upper echelons of ecclesiastics and then the nobility, each in turn, according to his rank. The cortège stops at several pre-determined locations where the choir sings a responsory, each station representing a stage in the journey of the soul of the deceased towards eternal salvation. As the dignitaries enter the Cathedral, usually dark and sombre, they are overwhelmed by the light of thousands of candles covering the funeral monument, or catafalque, a vast construction as hight as the cathedral itself, engraved with Latin tributes in honour of the deceased. Silence descends upon the church, and the solemn invitatory Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis begins the Matins of the Dead.

On a wet Friday evening in Glasgow we experienced a wonderful performance of A Requiem for Philip II by Cristobal de Morales *(c.1500 - 1553) in the acoustically fantastic central hall of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The above comes from the programme note, and Paul McCreesh, directing the Gabrieli Consort, set the scene before the singing began. We were told the performance would last about 70 minutes without a break, and would be liturgical in feel. As you can see from the photo of the performers' waiting seats (and bottles of water!), taken from my seat, we were at the front, very close to the singers.

The seventy minutes passed without my noticing them. I have never been so immersed in a performance, so swept along on a tide of plainsong and polyphony that I never once looked at my watch. The singing was peerless - four countertenors, two tenors, four baritones, two basses and, doubling the bass part, the muted bajon (dulcian) - with solo groups and tutti ensembles, solo plainsong prayers and readings  and the full-bodied singing of the mass. I felt I was a part of it; it's the kind of music I love to sing and I felt every cadence, every nuance, every false relation in such a way that when it was finished I was exhausted in the same exhilarated way that I feel after singing myself. The moment when the singers turned and walked off the stage and away in a long, singing procession round two of the adjoining galleries was electrifying. I also realise how privileged I am in that my education and subsequent experience in choirs mean that I can understand Latin well enough to participate in what is being sung without constantly referring to the programme, and that I was sufficiently familiar with the words of the mass and the plainsong customarily used for, say, the Sursum Corda to be immersed in the liturgy and to delight in the resonant tones of the bass singing the priest's part.

I realise as I write this that I'm doing a very inadequate job of conveying a very special occasion. The sizeable audience, completely silent and still for the whole performance, didn't erupt in applause; rather this began slowly, gently, as people shook themselves from their absorption, and grew to a sustained crescendo as the choir returned for several bows, only dying when the conductor had disappeared down the stairs away from the hall. We hurtled down the road to the ferry in a whirl of exuberance with our heads full of polyphony and caught a ferry within an hour of the last notes being sung.

The kind of evening I don't get very often, the kind of music that makes me glad to be alive...

*You can hear bits of the performance here, as well as buy it!

Advent: waiting in the moment

Advent again. And every year, a little more suddenly than the preceding year, the same ritual tasks - that moment when you realise that it's time to forage in the forest (and we won't tell where) for just the right selection of greenery, from the delicate lace branches that droop below the candle wreath to the wonderful pink berries from the church grounds that were obviously designed by the Creator to complement the liturgical colours, the chilly morning in the empty church when fingers fumble with the secateurs and drop spiny leaves on the carpet. This year we added the cool scent of eucalyptus to the wreath for the pleasure of doing so, and the finished article was more ebulliently leafy than any of its predecessors. We wonder if anywhere else does it quite like this ... but we doubt it.*

Shortly after that I made my Christmas cake, thinking, as always, of the first time I did this, heavily pregnant and extremely sore after sitting down on black ice while shopping and deciding that I'd be happier standing, baking, than sitting and worrying. Stir up Sunday may no longer have its own collect - Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people ...  - but that's the day the fruit goes in the sherry, or the sherry in the fruit, and a week later the cake is made and drizzled with the left-over liquor. Later I shall turn my mind to puddings, brandy butter, cranberry sauce ...

And then there will be cards to think of. Is it inane still to send cards when I could greet so many people through Facebook and Twitter? Was it always daft to give them to friends we see all the time, or to the family we shall spend Christmas with? But I remember how I used to love writing the few cards I sent as a child, loved receiving them - and there's a part of me can't bear to give this up. I have dealt with presents for the grandchildren, and refuse to panic about their parents, let alone anyone else - present-giving should be a joy, not a worry.

Tonight, however, I shall be doing what I most enjoy: singing the music of the season, rehearsing carols for Christmas. And on Sunday I'm expecting to participate in a wonderful, quiet, dark, candle-lit Evensong, at which Mr B and I will sing with two friends, singing the music of the waiting and the longing that is Advent, repeating the glorious setting of my own words that is the Advent Song we premiered last year and which is now obviously reaching so many people on YouTube. I listen to it, and the wonder returns; I know that singing it will take me to a place that nothing else can.

Of all the seasons, this is the one to restore the mystery and awake the longing that can too often be submerged in the busyness of life - even church life. It's good to take time to wait in the moment.

*For the sharp-eyed and critical, I can report that by the time Advent Sunday came, the altar frontal was purple - a faded, pinky-purple, but definitely not red. Just saying ...

Peirles Paramour...A journey into our past

Fragment from text of document 

I've been singing again. Back to where, in a way, it all began - and the time when the text on the left was at once wondrously strange and increasingly familiar. If you sat Higher Music in Scotland in 1964, it may well seem familiar to you too - for that year one of our set works for study was a group of pieces from Musica Britannica Vol XV - Music of Scotland 1500-1700, edited by Kenneth Elliott. I have a clear memory of standing round the piano in the Music Room (Room 16) of Hillhead High School with a group of friends, singing our way through this particular song as best we could, the sight-reading of music and language taxing our brains and leading to much hilarity - before we started again, determined to get it right.

After I left school I met Kenneth Elliott at Glasgow University, not because I studied music (though I did, for one year, to make up the so-called "science" subject in an Arts degree) but because I sang with a small group who actually performed this music he'd spent so much work on. We were invited to his house for evenings of singing and wine; we stiffened the ranks of various University choirs as they struggled to meet his demands. I've been singing it, on and off, ever since.

And this is why, a couple of days ago, I found myself singing this music of a Scotland that few really know about - singing it with the St Maura Singers, the quartet that has been a thread through my life since the late 60s, rehearsing for a memorial concert for Kenneth Elliott which will take place in the original home of the St Mauras, The Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. We're doing a whole programme of this music, almost all of it for four voices, and one of the pieces is Support Your Servand - which in fact we've never performed. I was eighteen again, suddenly - and it was as if we were seeing it for the first time.

Read the words again. Read them aloud. How are you pronouncing them? How, gentle reader, will we pronounce them? This is a discussion we have every time we perform any of these pieces. Are the "oi" sounds as in "hoy!" or simply the modern "sore"? And we listen to recorded performances - much lauded - in which the accent is so ... Scottish? ancient? ... as to be incomprehensible, and we wonder if anyone in the audience will have a clue. And then we found what Kenneth himself had to say about it, and it was wonderful.

I would once again urge singers to pronounce the Scots texts as naturally as possible, without recourse to the extremes of local dialect: these text are related to the courtly tradition of Scots poetry, written by sophisticated Scots of burgh, song- or Grammar-school and university, in touch with, if not even part of castle and, ultimately, court culture, rather than the rustic precursors of bothy balladeers, kailyard confectioners or Doric dropouts.

I can hear Kenneth's voice here - and a degree of exasperation (I would once again urge..) Obviously he's had this conversation before. So we will not roll our 'r's more than normally, nor will we sound like The Corries on a culture trip. The music - in all its complexity or its deceptive simplicity - will speak as well as we can achieve. And despite all the people who have sung it since, we will know that we were there very early on in the performing of it.

And somewhere, I think Kenneth will be smiling.

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe ...

The kitchen is warm. No - it is actually unbearably hot. The erstwhile poet/musician, transformed for the nonce into Domestic Goddess, is hard at work. The oven is purring, for she has begun the day by roasting beetroot. There are still ominously red drips splattered over the white sink, as if Lady Macbeth had been washing her hands there, and sticky red blobs show where the cranberry sauce was poured, splashily, like a fine wine, into the warmed jars. (The DG was unhappy with the first batch, the cranberries having been over-long in the freezer, and has ditched it and made another lot.)

The heat is loaded with smells, individually rather wonderful, but together somewhat worrying. The burbling from the cooker-top indicates that it is time for the spiced prunes to come off the heat - star anise, honey smells - and it is time to find the preserving pan. Why, in the name of Christmas, the preserving pan? Well, the DG is very fussy about marmalade, and has just opened the last jar ... Ok, she uses tinned oranges, but there are a couple of red grapefruit to chop up (red again, and sticky) and careful calculations to be made about quantities of water, sugar ...

Why does she never write these things down? Why, indeed, did she not make the marmalade last week? Well may you ask. Could be the same penchant for distraction that has Mr B the musician back at the piano tinkering with an arrangement (don't ask) instead of getting to the church while it's still daylight for a spot of practice. He has already seduced the DG into running through a particularly challenging alto line (Tavener) for Midnight Mass - the other two singers are turning up tomorrow for the (only) rehearsal.

The DG finds herself thinking of Monty Python, as she shrieks at Mr B, currently in full composer/arranger/performer mode. 'Get up to the church!' (He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!) She tests the marmalade, which seems to wrinkle in a satisfactory fashion, slops it into more warmed jars, screws on the tops and leaves them to cool before attempting to wipe off the sticky bits. (More stickiness ...) The preserving pan is incandescent, and defiantly sticky. She fills it with hot suds and leaves it on the stove for when she feels stronger ... Oh God. The brandy butter ...

A friend asked me this morning how it came about that I felt I had so much to do when I was going away on Christmas Day. Quite apart from the fact that all I'm not cooking is the main course - and I always did that with a glass of champagne in my hand - I think part of the trouble is that just right now my head is full of poetry and music and I want to write and sing and .... and ....

Maybe I really need to be a student again. And 45 years younger.

But then I might have nothing to say.

See amid the winter ... ice

8+1 in Holy Trinity

What word do I choose? What word expresses the elation of this afternoon? For all that words are my business, I don't have one. Singing just about captured it, but we've sung our songs and drunk our mulled wine and for at least 90 Dunoon people the Christmas season has begun in joy.

The weather was perfect - lethally so. From cars colliding on the bridge in the morning's ice to the resulting worries that no-one would venture out and up our hill, we were prepared to sing our songs to a hardy few at this afternoon's carol service, but before we'd even begun our warmup they were piling in. Aged ladies on zimmers negotiated the carpark and tried to get said zimmers into a pew (no, Jeannie, leave it at the end and slide in on your bottom), children came and went in santa hats, family and friends arrived in number along with several people we'd never seen before.

8+1 led the singing - Andrew suggested that we were now nine, but I tend to think there's a logic there - and did a bit on their own as well, taking us from The Christ Child's Lullaby to the Calypso Carol without batting an eye. The babies, toddlers and assorted weans kept amazingly silent during the music. I handed over my reading to my pal, but found that I could sing after all, laryngitis or no, and began to enjoy myself. And one reader near the end of the service had us all feeling we'd heard the Christmas story for the very first time, such was the impact of his reading.

And then there was mulled wine, and folk braved the cold to use the Portaloo, standing like the Tardis just outside the church, and car keys were passed around as people tried to leave and cars were juggled in the icy car park. There were indeed over 90 people in Holy Trinity today, and it felt warm and special and joyous whatever the thermometer said.

Deo Gratias!

Accentuate the positive?

Chorus responds
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Been thinking about positives, perhaps to counter the foul day we've just had - rain and wind and low cloud hour after hour, though now there's a bright star mocking me as I look out before bed. But to the things that make life interesting, rewarding ...

Like the other night, when I went to Ayr to hear Voskresenije perform there. I have organised maybe as many as eight performances in Dunoon by this Russian choir, but this year I had to go elsewhere to hear them and to renew the friendship with the conductor that has built up over the years. So ... I am energised by live music, by interacting with people from other cultures, by the laughter that arises from imperfect understanding of another's language. And I enjoy bearhugs - big Russian ones.

What else makes a difference? I enjoy the company of clever people, people who have ideas, people who enjoy sharing them. I don't care if I've met them before - as long as the conversation begins, it is good. I love conversation.

Tomorrow brings another energising activity: a performance. I love singing, and tomorrow our female ensemble will perform in Dunoon and wow an unsuspecting audience with Songbird and other great songs. Adrenaline surges are good for the psyche.

And then there's a good book ... for I have always, as long as I can recall, been able to lose myself in fiction. And movies, with great sound.

All these can happen, and do, regardless of the weather. But I really could do with some sun, just to complete the picture. And less rain. J' attendrai ...

Traditional and effective

The photo accompanying this post records one of these satisfying grandmother moments. I'd been holding Anna (4 weeks old) in the hope that she would drift off to sleep, but she didn't appear to be able to settle. Perhaps her sister was too interesting, or she just didn't want to miss out, but she was tired and scratchy and it was obviously time for the Wise Woman to make a reappearance - and sing.

I've written of this before, when I was singing to that lively three-year-old in the background (can't help feeling it wouldn't work now, but I'll return to that). This time I sang another lullaby, Watts' Cradle Song, to an American (I think) tune arranged by Mr B for our women's choir, 8+1. The melody is in the alto range, and I've had it on the brain for the past few weeks. The words were somewhat random , as I'm hopeless at remembering them, but phrases like "here's no ox about thy bed" seemed suitably soothing, and after gazing intently at me as I sang, Anna's eyes drooped and in no time at all she was sound asleep. She was sitting in this upright position, too, so the sense of communication was very real - until she flopped. I continued singing quietly as I put her to bed, and that was that.

I can't stress how important I think this live singing is for young children. It's not the same when nursery rhymes, lullabies and so on are played on CDs or - worse - distorted by electronic toys. The vibration, the tailoring of volume to the moment, the possibility for variety - these all contribute to what is, after all, as old as the hills.

Incidentally, big sister still loves to sing - though she does give me a row for using the traditional words as the end of Mary had a baby. You can't please all the people all of the time ...

Singing grief

I was involved in one of our all-too-infrequent rehearsals with the St Maura Singers yesterday - an expanded SMS, with two extra singers to make it possible to sing some new music. It was salutary that we had to spend an hour on a new piece that lasts all of 3.50 minutes - the slightly jazzy, displaced rhythms of Mr B's beautiful setting of Nancy had experienced musicians fumbling for the groove (so to speak, in my jazzy sort of mood ...)

But what struck me yet again was the incomparable beauty of Tomkins' When David Heard. I sing first alto in this, and found myself, on the first run-through, almost unable to continue. David's reaction to the news of Absalom's death goes from from the heart-broken repetitions of Absalom my son, over and over, over and over, to the words every parent can recognise: would God I had died for thee. It starts simply, bleakly almost, but then becomes more insistent - and then we're back with Absalom, my son, quietly, dying into the final cadence, as if David has no more energy to express the grief that has overcome him.

As I grow older - or simply old - I find this harder and harder to sing with the detachment I was able to enjoy when I first encountered the piece in my 20s. And yet the music is ruined by gusty, emotional lines or operatic emoting - for it is the music itself that paints the words, and the music needs every ounce of concentration to let it speak. By the end of a performance I am exhausted, and yet it lasts only five minutes.

The performance I've linked to is a tad slow for my taste - just a fraction - but lets the music work. If you've never heard it, go and listen.

A fold in time

Really far too tired to blog this, but the moment will pass otherwise... Today's concert, Words & Music for Christmas, was an old formula that we devised some 25 years ago for the choir we had started when we came to Dunoon. The Hesperians was a mixed voice choir, about 15 voices strong, and when we began our Christmas events, always on the third Sunday in Advent, we packed the venue, with people up in the balcony that even then we suspected as being precarious. In 1996 we gave our final such concert and the choir ceased to exist, having run out of tenors.

This year the choir that is really the child of the Hesperians revived the format, and, in a folding of time, that was what we were involved in this afternoon. 8+1 is a female voice group - 8 women, 1 man (Mr B, the MD) - and for today we were augmented by a second bass to sing SATB pieces. The second altos have developed into convincing tenors, and the sound was magical in places; we also sang several pieces arranged for female voices. We actually achieved a sufficiently high standard to put a smile on Mr B's face - not a rueful grimace in sight today!

But the audience reflected the fact that there are so many more carol events in Dunoon these days. Gone the time when we were the only show of this type in town - and gone the children, our children, sitting solemnly in the front row with their grandparents, also long gone. We are the grandparents now - and our grandchildren are far away and probably don't realise that their grandparents don't know their place and are still up there performing. I kept looking up expecting to see feet swinging at the ends of legs too short to reach the floor, and seeing only a sea of grey heads.

But the adrenaline of performance still works its rejuvenating magic, even if we collapse in exhaustion afterwards, and the particular thrill of hearing our own work - Mr B's arrangements; a couple of my poems - performed in public is not easily beaten. The hall may be on the verge of demolition, the balcony long out of bounds because of rot; the choristers may suddenly have become 13 years older without really noticing - but today we performed our socks off, and showed how it can be done.

And if you've never heard The Christ Child's Lullaby arranged for solo voices (Gaelic and English), four part choir, piano and solo cello - you've missed yourself. 'Nuff said.

A study in parenthesis

Found myself pondering stress, retirement and singing over breakfast this foggy morning. As usual for as long as I can remember - certainly since I was 12 - this time of year is a whirl of activity which is nothing to do with buying presents and drinking mulled wine in Christmas Markets (if only!) and everything to do with Keeping Well (because of having to sing), Very Important Rehearsals (because the gig is tomorrow) and What Shall We Sing at Midnight?

Add to that the deadline for a job I've been doing (before the end of this week) and you have, as near as dammit, the situation I used to be in when I was working. Then, in addition to the singing (remember - singers are the biggest hypochondriacs in the flu season) we tended to have exam marking to finish and the school magazine to get out before the customers started skiving in the run-up to the hols. And when I was a pupil we had the school concert - huge in Hillhead High School in the 60s, and multiplied by 4 the year the St Andrew's Halls burned down and we had to put them on in the (very much smaller) school hall on four nights one hectic week - so were trailing home after 6pm on the foggy Glasgow evenings after two hours of extra-curricular orchestral rehearsal. The choir, I remember, was never allowed to interfere with the orchestra, and had to fit rehearsals in at lunch time.

So I have never, ever, known a peacefully domestic festive season - have never understood when people have said "Just as well you caught flu/the cold/winter vomiting/bubonic plague before Christmas" - because, for me, Christmas has always come as a great "whew!" that I made it all (or didn't, as this year: I still haven't reconciled myself to the cancellation of last week's carol service). In a way, this mirrors my retirement so far - and that's where this morning's ponderings came in. Were I to chuck it all, to confine my singing to the shower (sounded great this morning) and my church activities to the pew on a Sunday; to refuse any invitation to practise my professional skills in retirement - would I turn into a placid, relaxed pensioner with time to visit friends and take little mid-week breaks in interesting cities?

Or would I simply die of boredom?

Party time!

This (mercifully) blurred, phone-camera pic shows a kiddies' party in full swing. Actually, it's a first birthday party. The birthday boy's face is strangely lit, which may show another camera homing in for a flash shot, but what amuses me about this moment is the fact that the adults are all wearing the small animal masks, all singing like billy-oh to the lead of the Caterpillar Music lady, while the assembled tots do their best to crawl from the centre of the circle or look totally bemused at their hitherto perfectly sensible parents.

Perhaps it was the Cava, perhaps the excellence of the leadership, or perhaps the fact that Birthday Boy Alan, one year old today, actually maintained not only his cool but also a pleasant smile throughout the entire proceedings - whatever the reason, I found myself really enjoying this party. From the tot in the designer dress and glam black tights to the tiny baby, all of 4 weeks old, who slept impassively throughout, there were no wails, no frayed tempers, and no misdemeanours on the part of either kiddies or parents.

But I shall not readily forget the sight of Mr B struggling with the hand movements in Incy Wincy Spider. Maybe he should stick to providing the harmonies ...

Thought for the day

Now here's a thing. Take a small pisky church, inconveniently if picturesquely sited on a small hill at the very back of a seaside town (you've had this description before, but I need to re-emphasise certain features of the situation). Take a small but stable/growing slightly congregation which is in the limbo (known as interregnum by the optimistic and vacancy by the rest) caused by the translation of the former incumbent (not dead, merely departed). Take the gradual metamorphosis of some members of that congregation from pew-fodder to worship leader ...

So far so good. We like to see thoughtful and committed church folk taking responsibility for their patch, growing where they're planted and all that. But when the robed ones who on any one day are planted firmly in the holy end (Larkin's phrase, not mine) turn out to be two thirds of the people who actually (a) know the hymns and (b) can be heard behind the proverbial bus ticket ...

You get the picture. Today I felt I was a lone voice, singing away - and was, in actual fact, a lone voice in the post-communion hymn, despite the twenty or so folk behind me. But I enjoyed preaching about angels - maybe some of them had a wee song too.

Singing to God

Read this the other day and couldn't resist sharing it. It's from a commentary on the psalms by Augustine.

'Sing to God a new song, sing to him with joyful melody.' Each of us tries to discover how best to sing to God. We must sing to God, but we must sing well. God does not want his ears assaulted by our discordant voices. So sing well, my brothers and sisters, sing well!

If you were asked: 'Sing to please this musician,' you would not dare to do so without first having had some music lessons, because you would not want to offend such an expert in the art. An undiscerning listener does not notice the faults that an accomplished musician would point out to you. Who, then, offer to sing well for God, the great artist whose discrimination is faultless, whose attention notices the minutest detail, whose ear nothing escapes? When will you be able to offer him a perfect performance so that you will in no way displease such a supremely discerning listener?

Augustine goes on to tell us that in fact we should be bursting out with joyful song like harvesters in the fields, and I can't help feeling that this is a somewhat naive picture - can't help thinking of all these sore backs and aching muscles and the harvesters too exhausted to sing. But there are days when I think of poor God with his fingers in his ears.

Cosmically speaking, of course.

Barry the Gas and the Andrews Sisters

Verily I live a strange life at times. At the moment, Barry the Gas is banging around in the back bedroom, trying to weave various pipes through a maze of joists and strangely random pieces of wood which appear to be holding up something, we know not what. We have to stick around to be available for emergency decisions and making cups of tea, for Barry doesn't take lunch breaks - he just works like a man possessed. (Actually I still think of him as GasBoy, but he's growing in my estimation). And next door, in the study, Mr B and I are practising Robin Orr's Jubilate in C, for a gig in Cumbrae Cathedral on Sunday.

So here's your picture for today. Barry bangs, drills and runs up and downstairs. The new flue spouts interesting gouts of steam. Mr B plays fistfuls of notes on the keyboard and I wail, somewhat discordantly, as I get to grips with enharmonic changes and awkward entries. My preferred métier is music of the Renaissance, so the Orr does not come naturally, but I'm getting there. And his wee anthem They that put their trust in the Lord has a lovely alto part and I've got it sussed.

And now Mr B is playing the Andrews Sisters on his iMac and playing along with them - Chattanooga Choo-choo. That'll be for next session with the other choir. Truly, a varied life. The family that sings together .... (complete this sentence, if you like)

Psausages and Psalms - a BBQ with a difference

sausages. Bet you never thought of spelling sausages with an initial P, but it seemed quite the thing to do when coupling the psausages with psalms for last evening's bash at Holy Trinity church, Dunoon. When you take a fine musician, a fine evening, 5o or so sausages and a jolly group of people you have a recipe for success.

A singing workshop in the church saw a good proportion of the congregation learning three ways to sing psalms - plainsong, Anglican chant and plainsong with a refrain - as well as a couple of canticles, along with a bit of background history which began with the haunting sound of the earliest Jewish psalm singing realised for contemporary listeners and played on that most contemporary of instruments, the iPod. A considerable degree of unanimity of sound was achieved before the mass exit in the direction of the Rectory.

Here the Marthas had set up and lit two barbecues - who said this was man's work? - on the patio, where a non-singing Vestal had tended the flames till the workshop was over. By now they were classically white and glowing, and in no time at all, thanks to the prescience of the sausage-providers, there was a great quantity of suitably charred and well-cooked sausages - enough even for the chaps who felt they needed ...er... 4 of them.

The great secret to all this was actually fairly minimal preparation in advance. A few people earmarked for the vital components - sausages and the fabby rolls from Blacks the Baker, butter and relish - and the ample supply of wine which is a feature of gatherings at HT; the freedom to set out other things like salads and paper plates indoors; the big black bag for all the rubbish at the end - that was it. The BBQs kept the midges away far more effectively than when in the past we'd set up under the trees on the lawn, and their heat, reflected off the walls of the house, kept the patio warm well after sunset.

And when all had gone save the Vestal not-actually-virgins and the organist, the roof fund was £60 better off and it was hazily felt that perhaps we ought to do this again. Fun, huh?

Footnote: I have to report that the Ayrshire pork sausages from The Codfathers were just wonderful.
Postscript: There's a new link on the blogroll to a good site for meditation; the most recent is, coincidentally, on a psalm.

Out of the deep?

A quick post to show I'm still alive, as I set off in the rain for Cumbrae and Choral Evensong, for which we haven't yet begun to practise. Practise as a group, that is, for I've just been singing through my own alto parts with Mr B playing/singing bass. And the joy is that as we ran through Boyce's All the ends of the World I could hear in my head the wonderful suspensions, the resolved crunching moments in my own part, and felt that perhaps after all I was entering into my own Holy Week. And then there is the psalm - Out of the Deep - to that great dark setting by Walford Davies. I can't wait.

And yet I can't help reflecting how that whole week, as Jesus headed towards what he knew was to come, ordinary people were busily doing their thing all around him. Maybe the disciples felt stressed by the crowds, the fuss, the carry-on in the Temple, the approaching Passover. Busy, busy, busy. Just like the rest of us. But today I shall switch my life off and concentrate. Just got to travel there first.