week 2 - settling in

This week we spent some of the rehearsal consolidating and refining the work we’d done last week, as well as sight-singing our way a bit further into the longer pieces. Our conductor David had revised his arrangement of the Mystery Piece from last week, so we went for another recording of that. The Soprano 1s were ready for the entry we’d messed up last week, humming it to each other beforehand with meaningful glances. As it approached we nudged each other, leaned forward in our eagerness, took a collective breath …. and just as we were about to launch confidently into our note, David halted the rest of the choir and told us he’d cut that bit. Thwarted! But we would have been brilliant, I can assure you.

We also spent more time on the Frank Martin Mass, really trying to nail the style and phrasing. It’s such a beautiful piece that we must do it justice when we come to sing it in concert. Frank Martin was an ice hockey player for the Boston Bruins, or so I thought until I realised I’d clicked on the wrong Wikipedia link. In fact he was a Swiss composer with a long career spanning much of the 20th century. The Mass is one of his earlier compositions and shows his love of chromaticism and the influence of Bach, his favourite composer. In the 1930s, after the Mass was written, Martin began to incorporate Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique into his style, while retaining his sense of tonality. In fact, Wikipedia insists that his preference for lean textures and his habitual rhythmic vengeance are the furthest possible remove from Schoenberg’s hyperromanticism. I don’t think that’s true. I think being one of the few ambidextrous shooters in the national hockey league would have been a bit further away.