Robin was a treble, Hel was an alto. In the Allegri, I was in the semi-chorus with Ella (?), Margaret Duthie, & Stephen Power, hidden behind the altar. My friend Stuart was a ringer, adding some heft to the bass line. A cat emerged from the middle of the choir during the Gibbons (see photos). And one of the tenors (not in photos) finished the concert lying on a slab at the back of the church awaiting an ambulance.

Tracks in alphabetical order (if anyone has the programme I shall rearrange these!):

Allegri: Misere Mei

Bairstow: Let all mortal flesh keep silence

Bassano: Dic Nobis, Maria

Duthie: Song of the Nuns of Chester

Gibbons: O clap your hands

Mendelssohn: Lift thine eyes, from Elijah

Parry: My soul, there is a country

Parry: Never weather-beaten sail

Parry: There is an old belief

Rhienberger: Abendlied

Sheppard: In manus tuas

Stanford: Justorum animae

Stanford: Coelos ascendit hodie

Stanford: Beati quorum via

Wood: Hail, gladdening light

Photos

We have a new Dean called Paul Shackerley

Who’s renowned for the way he spectacularly

Offended everyone

By saying “sin is fun”

Though he claims that he didn’t mean it actually

First up was the Abbey, on Tuesday. We arrived at about 16:40 and were ushered into places about 6 feet from the Cantoris trebles’ east end. We were furnished with full guides to the music being performed at the choral services for the week – much appreciated.

The choir sang an introit in the nave: Humphrey Clucas (b 1941) Delight thou in the Lord: and he shall give thee thy heart’s desire. This was intriguing, the sound floating in from an unseen choir, but we couldn’t really hear the piece.

When the choir entered the quire, it became apparent there was no O’Donnell in charge, and some research later suggested it was sub-organist Daniel Cook in charge, with organ scholar Peter Holder at the keyboards. Morley’s preces & responses were despatched with efficiency, but without lifting my soul. Psalms 142 and 143 showed how confident the treble line were in reaching for the end of a phrase, something that scares the crap out of the Brecon front row, and were carried through with beautiful diction if a lack of emotion. The Dec trebles were totally dominated by the blond head chorister, who’s performance of the evening was impeccable. We could barely hear the others, and Robin pointed out to me that one of them barely moved his mouth while singing (at which I held my tongue). The impressive and difficult Wise canticles, which I had not heard before and which featured many verses of solo parts, exposed some nervous or under-prepared trebles, and revealed some lay vicars who were just not quite as toned as I was expecting (my expectations were ludicrously high!). There was one very poignant moment where a senior treble crucified a couple of bars of solo, singing the whole thing a semitone flat, and the tiny one next to him immediately looked at him with wide-eyed astonishment and possibly fear. The early music was all accompanied by a chamber organ, positioned in the middle, however everything was back-to-front… the organ was facing East, the conductor West, yet Can and Dec were on their usual sides – perhaps a Westminster thing?

Finally, Purcell’s O Lord God of Hosts was lovely, with only minor wobbles. Robin echoed my feelings that the conducting was hard to follow, but that’s mainly about what you get used to.

Overall I gave them 7 out of 10 for this one, but sensed they could do a lot better.

Then to St Paul’s on Wednesday, where we were treated to a programme well known to us in Brecon.

It transpired that the service was being filmed by the BBC, and most of the congregation were seated out of the way in the nave beneath the main dome. With a little persistence we managed to gain admission to the quire, and were seated about 20 yards from the East end of the choir stalls. This didn’t afford quite the same forensic experience as at Westminster, particularly given the acoustic at St Paul’s (if the Abbey has a three second echo, St Paul’s has a six), but it was perhaps a better position for appreciating the choir as a whole.

Proceedings began with an introit – Tallis O nata lux, again performed in the nave. This was well executed, but with the monstrous echo it had become a bit mushy by the time it reached us.

Ayleward’s preces and responses sounded not unlike they do in Brecon, though the confidence and unity of the St Paul’s treble line was starting to impress. Psalms 137 & 138 were fine, though the words were less clear than at the Abbey – perhaps the acoustic and our extra distance. I couldn’t tell who was doing the arm-waving – Andrew Carwood or one of his assistants/subs – but the style of it during the psalms was most peculiar: a kind of pumping action with the elbows, forearms vertical. I know it’s all about what you get used to in rehearsals, and the proof of the pudding is in the listening, but Robin and I found the conducting on both evenings hard to interpret; “not nearly as good as Mr Duthie”, opined the wee man.

The Purcell in G minor canticles were particularly interesting to hear, as we do them regularly in Brecon and I have done the semi-chorus verses a couple of times. I think it’s fair to say we always find them a bit challenging (e.g. the skippy “he hath scattered…” bits) especially since Dan and Lowri graduated from the top line. St Paul’s rendition was impressive and nearly faultless, apart from a wobbly treble solo section in the Nunc. The anthem was more Purcell: O God, thou art my God – lovely. Perhaps I found the bass line vibrato a bit heavy for Purcell, but that’s probably just me. Eight out of ten overall.

And so to the Millennium Bridge and the boat, capturing this reflection of us and St Paul’s on the way…

Overall we all felt St Paul’s nicked it chorally, and Robin preferred the architecture as well (twinkly ceilings). We certainly learned a thing or two to take back to Brecon. Yet neither occasion quite matched what I experienced in Chichester a couple of weeks ago, where I was genuinely inspired by the tiny pristine choir and intimate setting.

Dear Crispin (or other choral scholar’s name as appropriate)

With any luck, you’ve been having so far a delightful and perhaps profitable vac. May it last as long as poss. Perhaps you’ve caught sight of a book, but maybe it was a mirage. If it occurs too often, it’s best to ask someone if you’re in a library. If they say not, better take a couple of aspirins and put your feet up for a week.

Years ago we all had a laugh when a library turned out to be a mirage. They’d excavated one of those desert dunes in the infertile crescent which turn out to be the remains of large cities, and had come across a complete horde of clay tablets with cuneiform writing,- the library of some pre-diluvian monarch. Some appeared to have secondary markings in each line, immediately taken to be one of the earliest instances of musical notation. The tablets were sent to be cleaned – which should have meant very dainty dusting down with a fine soft paint-brush  of the type used for painting miniature portraits,– but the batch fell into the care of one of those buxom young helpers (female) of no archaeological training, who are better off terrorizing shire horses with a curry-comb. This enterprising young creature promptly put the clay tablets into a bucket of water and gave them a good scrub with her wire-brush normally used for scrubbing her bedroll. Very soon she had a bucket of amorphous clay dumplings & a quantity of prehistoric sludge. And so nobody will ever know what was top of the pops at Tell-Asmar in 2900 B.C. Nor indeed will we ever have to sing a P.A.T. arrangement of the same at an Annual Gathering!

When I reached my Hampshire pleasure-drome, my first chore was to train the giant hogweeds to chase the neighbours’ cats and not me. My two-stroke motor flail was useful in trimming much of my jungle down to knee or shin height. Two dozen young oaks have seeded themselves on my “lawn”, and more in the paddock-like areas. I disturbed countless frogs, voles, bees’ nests (bumble) and such-like. When at last some clearance was complete, I planted a gorgeous array of little blue campanulas. By next morning nothing of them above ground remained to be seen. I assumed it was the local magpies, which in the past I have seen pecking blue-hydrangea flowers to shreds. So I planted more of the campanulas & surrounded them with a protective wire netting covering. To no purpose. The plants had been eaten up entirely. It could not be the various beetles which abound or the larva of the cranefly, since these are carnivores. So I put on my best orange wellies (usually kept for organ-scholars to borrow for pedal-practice) and went to the garden-centre, returning with a bootful of slug-pellets. Next morning, areas of my garden looked like Ypres after an offensive. It seems the slugs had emerged from their lairs by the myriad. They evidently enjoyed the pellets, for after but a nibble they were seemingly struck by an ecstasy so intense they came to a quietus a foot or two away and awaited the next stage of their Kame or Kismet. There were two distinct types,- sleek black ones about an inch or inch-&-a-half long, and a larger tawny-coloured corrugated monster, between 5 and 6 inches in full length when streaking towards some desirable delicacy, and about the thickness of a good large courgette – an inch diameter perhaps. As with butterflies where often the same species differentiates males & females by colour & size (and scent, which we cannot detect), I took it that the black slugs were perhaps the females (“I am black, but comely” – Song of Solomon) and the brown battlers were the males. So I took to making a tour of the garden at twilight and discovered I am host to millions of these marauding molluscs. They aren’t sluggish at all, but move at a rate of knots when given incentive. One large fellow (I observed) having sampled a pellet went on several inches producing a frothy wake like a full-speed power-boat, and then suddenly he split open stem to stern like an old-fashioned sausage in the frying pan, disgorging a quantity of yellow ichor, grey mucus, and much purulent liquescence. Then he lay singularly doggo. “What a tease!” I thought. “I’ll go and get my cross-bow and see if a shot across the bows doesn’t set him on the bolt again.” But I seem to be out of bolts. So I returned with a torch & a canister of salt, and continued my rounds. Coming round a corner by the sweet-peas I suddenly came upon two of the brown fellows attempting to have sex together. “Lawks!” quoth I – what will the neighbours think if I appear to be countenancing homoeo-erotic deviancies in the animal kingdom?” So I covered their (the slugs) confusion with a dash of salt. They liked it a lot, and were still lying on their backs there next morning in blissful meditation, surrounded, alas, by a good deal of ugly lymphatic foam,- “night-soil” I suppose. So I rang up Prof Wigglesworth the redoubtable entomologist & learned that the black & brown are separate varieties, each with their own black males & females or brown males & females. Amen! So that is a relief to know.

I would like to tell you more about Hampshire’s wild-life (which doesn’t mean the juvenile-delinquency & adult-abuse,- but the rarities of the New Forest, like “Rufus’s Stone” – he only had one; or the large spiders in the woods on Old Beacon Hill which live by hunting shrew-mice and the chicks of small birds, and whose mandibles will give your bicycle-tyre a nasty puncture if it annoys them; or our two village witches of the late 17th cent, one bad, one good.) [The black hag put evil spells on people, but the white witch took them off. (Privately, I think they ran a racket. The white one paid the black one to impose the magic which she (the white one) counteracted, receiving a suitable fee from satisfied customers. Meanwhile the black one received presents to avert her possible disposition to cast a spell against you, and the white one received equal considerations to maintain her readiness to help in need, and indeed her resistance to any temptation to turn black too & do you a harm. That’s my theory.

Have you ever seen a spell cast? Well in Europe it is cast, or thrown,- usually by one hand from a position in the air at arm’s-length over the head. The hand is brought down powerfully as if throwing an object (such as an egg or squib or stone) at the feet of the person standing before you about 6-feet away from you. It is a violent gesture, sometimes done several times, counting aloud or in silence, and preceded by the relevant imprecation (or cursing prayer), and sometimes (but not always) followed by some conclusive phrase like “so mote it be”. It is very frightening to witness; and it must be devastating to be the object of the curse. You can be in no doubt at all that you have been cursed, a sensation highly demoralising for a start.]

But I must move on to the purpose of this letter which is to remind you of a few dates.

1. 30 September and 1 October 1988
2. 8 October 1988

First: 30 Sept (Friday): Extra Annual Gathering of Old Boys with Commem Service first. We’ll try to do the same programme exactly as at the last An. Gath. Could we please meet in Chapel at 3 p.m. See details on next sheet.

Next: 1 Oct (Saturday): Master’s installation preceded by Evensong, which means Responses, Mag + Nunc setting, and possibly two anthems. See next sheet.

Finally: 8 Oct (Saturday): 3 p.m. We start Marathon of practice for Term.

Friday 30 Sept 88

3.00 p.m. Rehearsal of material for the day & if possible the morrow. [Psalm 150. Smart: Te Deum. Wood: Heaven. Hymns 165, 379. Silentium. Precamini. Grace. Peace be with you. Tomkins: O yes has any seen a lad? Reger: Abshied. Pearsall: Let us all go maying. Carmen Caianum.]

6.30 p.m. Commem Service.

7.15 for 7.30 p.m. Annual Gathering Dinner & After Dinner Musics

Saturday 1 Oct 88

11.00 a.m. - 12.15 p.m. Rehearsal. [Responses: Smith SATB version. Psalm: 119 vv33-40. Chant 155. (provisionally:) Mag & Nunc: Wood in E flat no 1. Anthems: Byrd: Sing joyfully; Stanford: Ye choirs of new Jerusalem.]

6.30 p.m. Magisterial Installation Service & Ceremony

7.20 p.m. Dinner in Hall.

I hope I am expecting the attendance at the above events.

Please let me know as soon as possible if you are unable to attend. Don’t arrive out of breath (or out of practice).

The following meals if taken in Hall will be at College expense: Fri 30 Sept: Lunch,[Dinner]: Sat 1 Oct: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner; Sun 2 Oct: Breakfast.

Travel expenses from-home-&-back, if necessary, will be refunded.

There will not be reimbursement for those who having travelled to Cambridge opt to stay on right through into Term.

There will be no charge for accommodation in College for the nights 30 Sept, 1 Oct.

It cannot be guaranteed that you will be able to occupy for this week-end the room assigned to you for the ensuing Term.

University Term (the period I believe covered by your room-rent) starts on 1 Oct 88.

Dress for Annual Gathering as usual is D.J. suit + black tie, or feminine equivalent; + surplice for service; + gown for dinner.

--------~~~--------

The time-table for the ‘Marathon’ is on the next sheet; and on the sheet after that are the additional dates in which we are involved. Some of you may wonder what is supposed to be going on, on 9 Dec,- I wonder too.

The basic fact is that I reach next summer the age at which I perforce retire from my University Lectureship. It is an appropriate moment for me to relinquish my various College offices. Hence this is the last Long Vac summons any of you will get from me. The College is therefore busying itself as to finding a successor for me, and have a appointed a committee. This Committee evidently thinks (poor dears) that taking choir-practices is a salient feature of a Precentor’s duties! Whoever they get (if anyone), you yourselves will have had the experience of working with a real live composer of real live music, even if you haven’t enjoyed it as an experience or witnessed any of his more significant output!

--------~~~--------

That seems to be everything that we need to say at this stage.

À bientôt,

yours

Peter T.

The Dean and his wife like to dine

on communion wafers and wine;

when it’s time for dessert

they rearrange her skirt

and together sing Hymn 69.

Anon, 10th March 2013

The Minor Canon of Swansea

has decided to leave Aberhonddu

he's going to the Rhondda

where the people are rather

more fond of a priest in a onesie