Music for Sunday 3 April

St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne.

This week marks the mid-point in Lent.  My Latin-rite friends will no doubt have been looking forward to this week, with the Laetare chant for the introit being just one of the delights of this Sunday -- along with pink (*ahem* ROSE) vestments.  The change of colour indicates that the rigours of the fast are lifted a little, and you can begin to see the end of the season lurking in the mists.

In Anglicanism, this Sunday has come to be known as Mothering Sunday.  Among the customs observed at this time is the baking, blessing and sharing of Simnel Cake, making a gift of flowers to women in the congregation, and generally touching base with one's mother.  In England, this Sunday is Mother's Day; in the antipodes we have to wait until May.

Other customs include making a visit to the cathedral, or mother church, of one's diocese.  If you only go once a year, it might as well be to evensong this week -- check out the music offerings in your local cathedral to see what's happening.  Then turn up and enjoy something of the experience, even if the lack of incense leaves you feeling less than satisfied, or the preaching too "mainline" for your liking.

But back to the parish pump...

Readings for the week are linked here.  The psalm setting is a home-cooked affair.

The service setting at St George's will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  At All Saints the setting will be plainsong, led by the choir.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: O for a thousand tongues to sing [210, tune 425]
Sequence: The king of love my shepherd is [145]
Offertory: Just as I am, without one plea [584 i]
Communion: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound [129]

Spelling mistake of the week

It was once said that the Bourbons dragged themselves back to claim the throne in France having remembered everything and learned nothing.  Of course, most of us now think of whiskey when Bourbon comes into the conversation.

This gem comes from a guide to All Saints, Bodalla, NSW.

Is anyone thinking at Fairfax?

A disturbing revelation from today's edition of The Age:

Former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone writes regularly for The Age.

Vanstone's article today was 1,000 words of supercilious nonsense.  Last week's effort was simply offensive to anyone who values clear thinking.  Of all the poor choices of columnists to invite as regular contributors to the opinion pages of The Age, this is surely scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel indeed.  Things were better when the harpy-in-residence was Catherine Deveny.  For all her post-everything ranting, at least she had a basic consistency, and through that, credibility.  Her redeeming feature was the capacity to engage and entertain, even when you disagreed with every sentiment she poured forth.  Vanstone is a serial offender on the one cardinal sin that counts most highly in public life.  Her writing is dull, boring, inconsistent and brazenly incoherent.  Two things come to mind from this: the Queen of Hearts (another large-ish lady) who could believe ten incompatible things before breakfast, and that old saying about remaining silent while being thought a fool.

The Age has been undertaking a slow generational turnover of opinion columnists.  Kenneth Davidson has gone down to once-a-month after thirty years as a weekly presence.  Tony Wright, Shaun Carney and Katherine Murphy have assumed greater prominence in the last couple of years, and Michelle Grattan continues to offer her witty and incisive commentary on federal politics in columns long and short.  Tim Colebatch easily remains the most readable economics reporter in the country.  These are highly credible people whose writing exudes an authority that makes The Age worth reading.  Go and see the list of columnists to see why the choice of Vanstone as a regular columnist is really perverse and -- sad to say -- ultimately repellent to thoughtful readers.

Perhaps this is the signal for thinking people to give up any residual pretense at interest in the print media if this is the mark of editorial decision-making on The Age.  If it is going to publish pseudo-sociological hogwash from members of Institute for Public Affairs and the vacuous ramblings of ex-Tory ministers such as Vanstone and Peter Costello (just one of these categories would be more than enough), then clearly it's time to start reading something else.  If their presence is an effort at self-regulation to introduce some notion of editorial impartiality, then it's a foolish way of going about it.  Given that Bernard Keane has shown Julie Bishop to have committed plagiarism on at least one occasion -- or is it now two or three times? -- a corrupt notion of fairness and balance clearly prevails on the conservative side of politics.  Bishop keeps a blog for Fairfax.  Far be it from me to suggest that this might be a problem, but the question is begged: surely having a known plagiarist on the books puts a taint on their editorial judgment.  With these sorts of people hijacking the opinion fora, why should The Age be trusted to offer credible and balanced reporting of important issues in the news pages?

The simple answer is in the circulation numbers.  They are plummeting because of cheap drivel like this.  The Age actively forfeits any claim to be a serious media player when it publishes the sad and ideological outpourings of post-power politicians.  What a pity nobody on the Fairfax board seems to see it.

The explanation trap

Sometimes there are weeks when I wonder if any of the technical advice I drip-feed to my choristers has made it through.  One of the areas where this can be particularly troublesome is maintaining energy in the vocal tone.  If you have a group of singers who are inwardly or outwardly moaning about how hard their day has been, this will be evident in the sound they make.

This is a situation which calls for a simple remedial intervention.  This will involve breaking the rehearsal briefly to focus on connecting up the foundations -- breath management and tone placement.

I've tried many solutions to this.  One of the least successful is barking at choristers to breathe properly.  I tried it once, and never again.  A marginally more successful approach is a three- to five-minute sequence of questions to get the choristers to tell me what goes into producing one good note.  This approach has its limits -- you can come across as hectoring and pedantic.  Not to mention wasting precious rehearsal time with unnecessary talking.  Choir directors should be highly sensitive about talking -- especially as they're the most prone to serial offending on this front.  More about this below the jump.

So the criteria for this remedial intervention are (a) that it gives the choristers confidence while encouraging better focus on the task, (b) is oriented to the action of singing, and (c) avoids the necessity to talk in a detailed way about vocal technique.  One solution that answers this is to try a simple series of images.  The one I've found most useful has two steps, as follows.

1. Tell your choristers to stand proud and breathe right down to their toes, so deeply that they tingle.  Do this a couple of times to make sure they're really placing the breath nice and deep.  They should end up standing taller and squarer.
2. Now tell the choristers they're about to shoot the sound out from their raised eyebrows.  Try singing a short phrase a couple of times to reinforce this -- it will probably take that much to get the sound to really brighten out.  Extend this out to half a hymn tune, making sure that they keep their toes tingling while singing as accurately as possible.

If this routine is firmly established, you should find that the tone becomes much brighter as things proceed.  Tuning and intonation should also improve, as the choristers will have a clearer sense of the pitch they're singing.  Ask if anyone notices the difference between now and three minutes ago -- if they don't, they're probably pulling your leg.

Music for Sunday 27 March

Readings are linked here, and the psalm setting can be found here.  The choristers are having their first outing as cantors this week, a gratifying step to see them taking.

The service setting at St George's will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  The setting at All Saints will be plainsong, led by the choir.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Lord Jesus, think on me [546]
Sequence: I heard the voice of Jesus say [585]
Offertory: Jesus, lover of my soul [211]
Communion: Here we adore you, hidden Saviour, Lord [500]

Something for the second week in Lent

Thomas Tallis is one of those figures that you meet early in your career as a choral singer.  His anthem, If ye love Me, has long been a standard of choirs all over the world.  His motet for 40 voices, Spem in Alium, is one of the monumental achievements of the sixteenth century.  His place in English music history was sealed when he persuaded Elizabeth I to grant him a patent in 1575 to print and publish music using the newly-invented moveable type technology.  This monopoly was operated in partnership with William Byrd -- a situation which recalls the position of opera in France in the following century, when Louis XIV gave Lully the monopoly on opera in Paris, frustrating the stage ambitions of contemporaries such as Clerambault.

Tallis and Byrd live in a kind of mythological half-light for many musicians.  We are familiar with the story told by choir directors all over the world that Byrd's masses for three and four voices were 'almost certainly' composed for clandestine performance at services in recusant households.  Of course, this myth falls apart on so many grounds it's very easy to see why it persists: it's a beautiful romance, even if it doesn't hold water as history.  Another element of the mythical fog is the conflicting narratives that accompanied the revival of their music in the early-twentieth century, but complicated particularly by Roman Catholic musicians appropriating Tallis's Latin church music as part of a wider project of integrating Catholicism with English identity.  Tallis was better-known as a composer of Anglican music, and one of the great promoters of the alternative history was Richard Terry, a convert from Anglo-Catholicism who later became organist at Westminster Cathedral.  Reception studies elsewhere deal more comprehensively with this issue, including one recent publication that I consider essential reading if you really want to come to grips with Tallis.  On this issue of denominational claim and counter-claim, it is interesting to observe that If ye love me was chosen for the service at Westminster Abbey during the Papal visit to Britain last September.

Tallis's life spanned a remarkable set of swings and roundabouts in the sixteenth century.  His fortunes were very much affected by the changing ground of the English reformation, and he can be counted as one of the key figures in developing a vernacular choral style to meet the changing liturgical needs this entailed.  My first encounter with his Latin music was the remarkable motet for the first Sunday in Lent, In Jejunio et fletu.  The astringent texture gives a description of fasting and mourning like nothing else I can think of to express the season.

You can find a score and translation for this piece here.

Tallis's contribution to keyboard music is superficially light on when compared with his choral music.  Fewer than twenty pieces, mostly short settings of antiphons or hymn verses, survive.  Yet here we find the same qualities that make Tallis's choral music so compelling -- astringent textures, the ability to move with freedom in a small space, contrapuntal inventiveness and that sheer sense of enough being said.

Today I have a small sample of Tallis's keyboard pieces to share.  The first is a setting of the office hymn, Ecce tempus idoneum.  For the sake of making things clearer, I've included the plainchant with the organ settings to create a sense of alternatim performance.  This means that the organ replaces verses 2 and 4 of the hymn, with the melody given to create the effect of the remaining verses being sung.  Listen to it here.

And for all the false-relation freaks out there, Ex more docti mistico should just about satisfy you.

Vacuous nonsense from an unsavoury relic

You really have to wonder about editorial standards at The Age these days.  The paper edition continues to provide a good set of comic strips, word games and the latest doings of the Governor.  It's sad to admit that my interest in this once-mighty broadsheet has been reduced to a single page.  Online, it looks like Who Weekly.

I enjoy The Age in part because I don't hate myself enough to read The Australian and because I find the Financial Review mildly incomprehensible -- it's not an everyday paper, although it's always entertaining to see Mark Latham's latest outpouring.  Herald Sun is a term of high abuse in my lexicon, slightly below Boltean.

It was a little disturbing to pick up the paper today to find a rather sad and confused rant from Amanda Vanstone.  The thrust of the article is that the HECS repayment impost should cut in at a lower rate -- it's currently set at $45,000.  But we don't get that argument until the last five sentences.

Vanstone's writing is a throwback to an unsavoury time.  As education minister during the early years of my studies, I owe her much for not having pushed too successfully on voluntary student unionism, slashing university budgets down to zero and many other things which I won't mention here.  Vanstone's elevation to the diplomatic service was a prize well-earned.  She combined delivering least-worst policy outcomes in a portfolio that was a key abuse-point in the constellation of hatred figures held up and routinely pummeled by John Howard & Co. with enthusiastically joining in the general fights, dismissing any thinking person as a chardonnay-swilling lefto pinky codswallop.

Poor Amanda rambles through her article today in the same vacuous key.  Her themes can be summarised as follows:

• University is a middle-class thing, which doesn't really express our idea about being an egalitarian society very well.
• Graduates enjoy better outcomes in terms of professional esteem, staying clear of criminal activities, better health and higher income.
• We now have an exaggerated sense of the importance of university, such that some young people start by defining their aspirations in negative terms -- "I'm not going to university."
• Vanstone once tried flashing her student ID at a man in Rome.  He saw the hotel she was staying in and decided she didn't need a concession.  She didn't ride in his buggy.
• Vanstone recently met a Filipina woman who was working in Rome to ensure her children had better opportunities.
• An educated population is a good thing, and the investment is justified.
• For these reasons, university graduates should pay back their HECS debt sooner.

It's a shame the point of the article comes after such a long digression.  Could it be that the sub editors on The Age had to deal with some truly atrocious copy?  Or was it submitted to them by mistake?

I think this is the key quote:

If you value wealth over skill or decency or any number of other virtuous qualities, you must expect that those who get the ticket that sends them down the wealthier path, namely a degree, feel as though they are pretty special.

Let's gloss this quote for a second.  In a society that only pays attention to money, anyone to does something to get more of it is up themselves.  Ergo, university graduates are up themselves.  Cut them down a peg or two by making them pay their debts before they're earning enough money to keep themselves.

Why is this canker about university graduates being up themselves allowed to roll around in the hallowed columns of The Age?

Think about the writer for a moment.  Vanstone herself has degrees in Arts, Laws, and Marketing, and at least two of these from a sandstone university, no less.  As a former university student, you would expect Vanstone to be a little more appreciative of the free higher education she enjoyed as a result of reforms under the Whitlam government, and to be a mite more sympathetic to those of us who have been weighed down with a substantial debt as a result of her efforts in government.  It is an embarassing fact that the Howard government was populated largely by these compromised freeloading ingrates.  They were up themselves, and continue to be up themselves, to an athletic level.  How shall we cut them down a peg or two?

Bashing up university people is so easy it's sad to watch a practitioner at work.  Critiquing middle class attitudes is more challenging, especially when you do it from inside the ultimate middle class occupation, as an ex-lawyer, picture framer, and former politician.

This would have been interesting to see, but instead Vanstone treats us to the reheated remains of something she prepared earlier.  Bashing up graduates.

You strong woman you.

Music for Sunday 20 March

Readings for the week are linked here, and the psalm setting can be found here.

The service setting at St George's will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  At All Saints the service setting will be plainsong, led by the choir.  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Christ, whose glory fills the skies [212]
Sequence: How good, Lord, to be here [234]
Offertory: Dear Father, Lord of humankind [598]
Communion: Here we adore you, hidden Saviour, Lord [500]

Something else to share

I was listening to the ABC yesterday morning when I heard the song below.

The performer is Nina Simone.  This version is just her and a piano.  There are other recordings on the web with other instruments added into the mix, but those versions seem a little bit too fancy for my ears.  The stripped-down version has so much more power.

I'd suggest you hit play and minimise the window -- the images in the video are very confronting if you want to focus on the content of the song.

In preparing this little show-and-tell I ran across an old BBC interview for HARDtalk between Tim Sebastian and Nina Simone.  Sebastian asked what Simone sought to do through her music, and the response was quite stunning.  Here's my transcription of the first part of the interview below:

TS: Tell me about music as a political weapon

NS: Oh now, that's a hard one. As a political weapon, it has helped me for thirty years defend the rights of American blacks and third-world people all over the world, to defend them with protest songs, and it helps to change the world.

TS: When you get up on the stage and you sing, what's in your mind -- just the singing?

NS: No, to move the audience.  To make them conscious of what has been done to my people around the world.

TS: So you sing from anger?

NS: No, I sing from intelligence.  I sing from letting them know that I know who they are, and what they have done to my people around the world, and that's not anger.  Anger has its place.  Anger has fire. And fire moves things.  But I sing from intelligence, I don't want them to think that I don't know who they are darling.

TS: Who are they?

NS: They are the white people around the world, with the exception of Nelson Mandella, whom I met this year.

Watch it all here:

Music for getting Lent under way

One of the texts you can't miss at this time of the year is Psalm 51, whether you hear it sung to the Allegri setting, or surround yourself with other music, such as Bach's passion settings.  It's one of those sign posts for the season.

This text has evoked many different responses from musicians, because it expresses some very deep emotion.  I remember being hauled over the coals by a very fissiparous soprano who felt degraded to be singing about being conceived and carried in sin (well, the translation was a little vivid!).  It is a psalm that seems to prod us very firmly into a personal response.

The chorale setting I'm sharing with you today is an organ transcription by J.S. Bach of a movement from a cantata of Dietrich (or Diderich) Buxtehude, where a chorale based on Psalm 51 formed one of the movements.  The melody is presented in the soprano in a solo stop, with an accompaniment of pulsing chords.  The text and translation is as follows:

Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott,
nach deiner großn Barmherzigkeit.
Wasch ab, mach rein mein Missethat,
ich kenn mein Sünd und ist mir leid.
Allein ich dir gesündigt hab,
das ist wider mich stetiglich;
das Bös vor dir mag nicht bestahn,
du bleibst gerecht, ob urtheilst mich.

Have mercy, Lord, my sin forgive;
For Thy long-suffering is great!
O cleanse and make me fit to live,
My sore offence do thou abate
With shame do I my fault confess,
Gainst Thee alone, Lord, have I sinned.
Thou art the source of righteousness,
And I the sinner just condemned.

You can hear the organ chorale HERE.  The recording was made at the Immaculate Conception Church in Hawthorn a couple of weeks ago.  For your interest, this was the registration:

Great: Open Diapason No. 2
Swell: Open Diapason, Stopped Diapason
Pedal: Bourdon, Swell to Pedal

Bach was a musician who learnt from almost everything that touched him.  His visit to Buxtehude is seen as a critical event in Bach's development, although I tend to regard it as the culmination of a period of his imbibing the northern style.  It's interesting to note that Bach transcribed a lot of music for the organ which also reflected the stylistic influences he was exploring at a given time.  Thus, we get the concerto transcriptions from when he was mastering Italianate style.  We get an aria from one of Couperin's viol suites which points to French influence.  Then we find responses to these styles in the organ music: for the French we get the Fantasy in G (Piece d'Orgue), the c-minor fantasia, and various chorale settings, such as An Wasserflussen Babylon from the 18 Chorales.  For the Italian we have the "Dorian" Toccata, and the F-major Fantasia, which combine concerto writing in the first movement with Stile Antico techniques for the fugues.  It's all very Monteverdi-esque, composing to satisfy the tastes of Venice and Rome.

So finding Bach transcribing music by Buxtehude is probably not a big surprise.  Perhaps a more interesting aspect of this is how it worked out in Bach's setting of the same text in the St Matthew Passion.  The aria, Erbarme Dich, has some affinities with the organ chorale.  You have the pulsing bass, restrained harmony, setting the melody in the upper voice (it simply couldn't have been a tenor or bass aria), and an obbligato line that floats off above the whole texture.

In the dramaturgy of the St Matthew Passion, this aria comes at an important turning point.  Peter has just made his third denial and the cock crows.  The point of the aria is Peter's realization that he has failed to stand by Jesus, having earlier declared that he would travel to the ends of the earth before denying his lord.  In an opera, this would have been the cavatina -- the song where the hero or some other important character pours out their grief at being ineffectual to prevent disaster, or lamenting their part in some outrageous betrayal.  (If you don't know the biblical text, you can find it here, or you can see the libretto in German and English for the whole piece here.)

So, to complement the organ setting, here's a heartrending performance by Andreas Scholl.

When walking

People do many things while walking in the street -- for instance, chatting on the phone, drinking, eating, fiddling with their hair, and so on.

I am often to be found striding in the wilds of Toorak Road while glued to a book.  It causes no end of comments.  I've been asked several times in the last month how I avoid bumping into things.  The answer is that I use peripheral vision, and I do look up at the end of each sentence.  It's a good exercise that helps comprehension.  I also tend to stop at cross roads, and generally keep aware of my surroundings.  I'm less likely to read while walking somewhere unfamiliar.

The advantage is that keeping a steady gait helps to give rhythm to one's reading, so I try to walk at just below a normal pace.  My normal pace is quick in comparison to most people.  I also try to keep to the side of the footpath, so people wanting to pass can do so.  It's not hard to do.  The downside is that some of my worst near-misses have been with cafe furniture.  Such incursions in public spaces are really the height of commercial arrogance.

Reading and walking is a habit I've had since I was quite young.  Survival skills get their ultimate test on a narrow footpath, as I discovered rather catastrophically at the age of 14, when I collided with a signpost on the way to a piano lesson.  I wasn't hurt, and as far as I know, there haven't been any negative consequences.

There are some situations where the walk-plus-reading routine doesn't work.  Navigating corridors in large buildings is one of these.  Walking in a crowd, likewise.  Dealing with one of those pedestrian traffic jams that happen in confined spaces is definitely one you enter without your nose in a book.

Some activity-plus-walking activities irritate me.  The king of these would surely be texting.  A person can be moving along at a reasonable pace until they receive a message which requires an instant response.  They slow to a near-crawl, usually without moving to the left so that people can pass.

Apparently there is an iPhone app that allows you to see in front of you through the phone's camera.  I think this is a little silly because it simply encourages bad manners.  It would be better if the app stopped the screen working for three seconds in every ten to make you look ahead.  Seeing the world through a phone camera seems like a poor substitute for actually looking.

Today I was caught in a cluster of people in a narrow corridor where the pace was being set by a young lady who was tapping away on her iPhone.  The corridor was wide enough for people to pass her, but for some reason no-one did.

Eventually, I got to a point where I could pass, but the tractor-beam thing set in.  I moved right, she moved right.  I moved further to the left, bingo!, she anticipated.  After another failed attempt at passing, I said, "Excuse me, please."  The head rose from the little screen for a befuddled reply, "Sorry?"  I said, "Do you know there are people behind you?  It's very inconsiderate not to let them pass."  She shifted out of the way, and I went on my way.  Her attention shifted back to the phone, and the crowd locked step behind her...

There are two ways of looking at encounters like this.  Here's one:

....and here's another -- reflecting the mindset!

Yet another argument against nuclear

One of the certainties of Australian politics is the periodic re-emergence of a debate about introducing nuclear power generation.  This argument emerges in the context of other contentions around uranium, such as selling it to countries which haven't signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  The major planks in the Australian argument are safety -- including NIMBY anxiety -- and safety of our resources when sold to other countries.

There is a portion of the business community here that would welcome the opportunity to develop nuclear power.  One should always be skeptical about executives on the make.  The prospect of commercial glory tends to be tarnished instantly when the question of where the industry would be located.  The best option would be somewhere out the back of nowhere, but even that would be in someone's backyard.  The other problem is have an ideological thing in the political parties about the rightness of the market -- in this case, it's actually worked against establishing a nuclear industry, which would require massive government subsidies to establish and maintain. For once, free-market absolutism has actually produced a result most of us would like to see continue.

The main panic about nuclear in the international scene is the apocalyptic scenario of some "terrorist" or "rogue state" coming into possession of enriched uranium.  Ostensibly the fear is that it would be used to make a dirty bomb.

Nuclear security is a serious issue.  The residue of spent fuel rods has an extensive half-life of some thousands of years -- many times the lifetime of an ordinary human being.  The legacy of the last three generations is a highly toxic substance that could yet bring life on this planet to an end.

There is another side to the argument, and one that is frequently ignored.  It has been brought into focus by events in Japan over the last 24 hours.

The biggest threat to nuclear security is climate change and seismic activity.

Whether or not we associate the two, the common factor is that they are natural forces which we are not in a position to control at present.  Climate change contains a large number of variables depending on how the industrialised part of the world manages its carbon emissions, but it too is a natural process -- albeit one that is accelerated by human activity.

Australia is one of the major countries in the world with the most to loose from significant climate change.  We are likely to see an increase in aridity; we have already seen a long drought followed by destructive rains and flooding.  Building nuclear power plants would be a very risky thing to do under these circumstances.  There are a host of other reasons why not to do it, but I think we need to be realistic about the nature of our changing climatic conditions.

So, to look at the issue more ironically, here's a little blast from the past.

Prompt -|- Cause

An earthquake occurred off the eastern coast of Japan today.  Given the large amount of seismic activity in various parts of the Pacific Plate, one wonders whether today's disaster might be related to the earthquake in Christchurch a couple of weeks ago.

While we can only look on recent events around the Pacific Plate with sadness and shock, there is one small occasion for levity in the coverage in the Age:

A massive surge of water has caused swathes of devastation across Japan, after an 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck off shore, prompting a four-metre tsunami.

What an odd choice of word!  Surely the earthquake caused or unleashed (to allow for fourth estate hyperbole) the tsunami?  Or did the water surge pre-exist the shock?

Let's not get too metaphysical about it.  Blunders like this cause me to conclude that some sub-editors and journalists must be a tiny bit illiterate...

Getting into the head voice

In an earlier post I mentioned that it can be difficult helping young choristers to find their head voices.  Part of the reason for my difficulty is unalterable -- being a guy and all -- but there is also some influence from the sound world in which children live these days.  If your choristers have a non-western background, the chances of their being exposed positively to classical singing technique are pretty slim, and you really do have your work cut out.

Singing is both a physical and an aesthetic thing.  Most children 'get' the physical side, as they have a strong body awareness.  The aesthetic side is a whole can of worms, which it is the choir director's task to unravel into a comprehensible whole.

A while ago I did some representation work for a youth choir, going out to schools and conducting voice trials.  Some of these very long days (one school had 54 classes, of which I visited 29...), but I learned a lot about the sound world most children live in.  It's one where singing the national anthem is left to a hired soloist, or where the standard music is out-of-date pop hymnody (the latter in Catholic schools).  Most children probably enjoy music best when it's on their own terms, and that's where they emulate the sounds they hear through the television, internet videos, radio and so on.  It's very rare for this music to call on the head voice, compared to the public music culture of a generation or two ago, where the local church and suburban choral society formed a staple of live music from week to week.  These institutions have retreated somewhat, leaving young people without a sound on which to model their own singing.

Modern pop music is highly physical, in the very limited stylized sense of it essentially being a form of expressionist theatre, but the vocal production is based on the intimate availability of a microphone.  This is a legitimate style of production, but it has limited application: after a while even the softest pop whisperer develops a more brassy sound, and this is achieved mostly by clavicular breathing (a strict no-no in bel canto).  In pop the breathing is done from the top of the chest, and the favored sound tends to be a bit soft around the edges, even when it's at the brassier and.  Most children come into youth choirs from this aesthetic.  Not only children: many adults come into choirs having acquired a lifetime of bad habits singing along with the radio.

So, how do you get them into their head voice?

One technique I've found is based on Twinkle, twinkle, little star, which can also be used for singing the alphabet.  It doesn't matter which words you use, as long as the singers are comfortable.

Get the choristers to sing the song once (start around D or E flat), aiming for a nice open sound where each line can be sung on a single breath.  This may take a couple of goes, but once you've got plummy vowels you're ready to move on.

In the next step, get them to sing as if the sound is coming from their eye sockets.  Low notes come from just above the eyeball, with higher notes coming from further up the forehead.  Get them to sing with their fingers lightly touching the tops of their eye sockets to feel the resonance.

The next step is to get the choristers to move one hand forward through each phrase, while the other remains on the face to feel the vibration.  Swap hands with each phrase.  At the end of each time, modulate up half a step as far as you can without the top range going to water.

You need to be careful with this drill.  The song is very well-known, and will get very ho-hum if done frequently.  Some teenagers get self-conscious about singing nursery rhymes.  Familiarity might breed bad habits: once children get disengaged, the sound will deteriorate on account of lack of attention to good technique.  It might be well to build a repertoire of resonance songs so that the principle isn't sacrificed to routine.

A sign of the times

Music for Sunday 13 March

Readings for the week are listed here, and the psalm setting is here.

Things get a little complicated across the parish for the next few weeks with different service settings in use in different places.  At St George's, the setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  At All Saints the setting will be plainsong.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: He who would true valour see [561]
Sequence: Forty days and forty nights [591]
Offertory: O happy band of pilgrims
Communion: Now is the healing time decreed [tune: 131]

At All Saints, the congregation will be joining in singing the Lord's Prayer using the setting of John Merbecke adapted to the modern words.

During communion the choir will sing the following anthem:

Lead me, Lord -- S.S. Wesley

You know things are bad when....

Music for the start of Lent

Today is Shrove Tuesday, traditionally given over to pancakes and confession.  In certain parts of the world, the weekend-long party of Mardi-Gras will be winding down today.

Lent is a season with many colours, and this can be found in a lot of organ music dwelling on lenten themes.  Over the next few weeks I will endeavour to bring some of this music to you here.

Today I've prepared a performance of Durch Adams Fall, a chorale discussing the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  The setting is by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the great Dutch organist of the seventeenth century.

Sweelinck was in a rather enviable position.  The reformation had swept through Amsterdam with a fair amount of strength, and among the many things removed from worship was the organ.  However, organs were not destroyed because they were owned by the city, who did not wish to loose them.  As organist of the New Church, Sweelinck was called on to play the organ at times other than during church services, a pattern which calls to mind the modern concert.

For this reason, Sweelinck's music explores a range of genres, with a particular emphasis on variations of chorale melodies, popular songs and dance tunes.  His chorale variations provided inspiration to many other composers; his use of a large variety of figuration and motifs demonstrate his fertile imagination and commanding keyboard technique.

The piece I'm presenting today sets the chorale in two versus, or variations.  The style is imitative, with each line of the chorale melody providing a series of themes to explore.

Here is the melody with the German text, translated below.

Through Adam’s fall human nature
and character is completely corrupted,
the same poison has been inherited by us,
so that we would not be able to recover health
without comfort from God, who has redeemed us
from the great harm
that was done when the serpent overcame Eve
and led her to bring God’s wrath upon herself.

To see the rest of the chorale text, go here.

This performance was recorded at the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, Hawthorn, last weekend.  For your interest, the registrations are as follows:

Verse 1: Gt -- Open Diapason No. 2, Gt/Ped
Verse 2: Gt -- Clarabella, Principal, Flute, Gt/Ped.

The track is HERE.  It is optimized for listening through earphones, so it may not sound the best through speakers.

Music for Ash Wednesday

Mass with hymns and imposition of Ashes will be celebrated at St George's, Reservoir, 7pm Wednesday 9 March.

Readings are linked here, and the psalm setting here.

The service setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Mass, with the Kyrie replaced by a plainchant setting.  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Have mercy on us, living Lord [31]
Sequence: O for a heart to praise my God [568, tune: 575]
Offertory: Now is the healing time decreed [tune: 131]
Communion: Who would true valour see [561]

Why does everything grand have to end up as a museum?

Earlier in the week Michael Shmith had a piece in the Age where he questioned the lack of public access to Government House in the Domain.  The essence of his article can be boiled down to the following points:

• The governor no longer occupies the important social role he once did (secondary point: it's not clear whether the offices of the state governors have any real purpose at all).
• The official residence is a perk, in which the governor exists in splendid isolation.
• It is a public building with fine gardens, therefore the public should have access to it.
• Rather than continue the existing merry-go-round of occasional open days, the best use of Government House is to turn it into a museum, like that good man Bob Carr did in NSW.

Normally I admire Michael Shmith's writing, and often enjoy his perspective.  But I really do disagree with his thinking about Government House.

Public buildings gain their power and their value by doing the things they were built to do.  The ways in which we do those things might change, and it is fair to expect that the building will change with them.  But when change is introduced in ways that run counter to the shape of the building, it meddles with how that building expresses its purpose.

Government House gains its power by the fact that it is a place where someone lives.  It is not clear what a museum in that space might contribute to our collective self-understanding.  To turn it into a some kind of function centre would be an entire debasement of a grand building.

Moreover, there are plenty of other museums in the area: you are only a short stroll from the National Gallery, the Treasury Building at the top of Collins St, the Immigration Museum in Flinders St, the National Observatory, the Pollywoodside, the Shrine of Remembrance, not to mention various libraries and so on.  You are in comfortable walking distance of practically every major museum and gallery in the inner-city.  What could a museum in the present Government House complex possibly achieve to complement these things?

Moreover, there are other places nearby that require opening up for public access far more urgently.  For instance, there are whole tracts of Flinders St Station which remain abandoned.  There are several buildings at that end of the city which could be turned into spaces that really benefited the public by being used to start renewing Swanston St in the block between Flinders and Collins Streets.

Perhaps there is another way of looking at the question.  What if the State Government were to decide that opening Government House on a more permanent basis is an important objective?  How could they do it without loosing the importance of it being a lived-in space?

My mind goes to some overseas examples.  Buckingham Palace remains active as a royal residence, and opens to the public regularly.  The same goes for Windsor Castle, St James's Palace, Edinburgh Castle, and Holyrood House.  One of the attractions about Buckingham Palace is that the Queen lives there.  You get to see behind the facade -- truly a privileged place for a mere tourist to penetrate.  One gladly waits in the queue, pays the entry price and tours the galleries because you are entering what remains fundamentally a lived-in space.  This is facilitated by the fact that the Royal Apartments are clearly separate from the main public areas of the Palace.

Perhaps this might be a better solution for opening Government House more frequently.  The governor's private apartments are separate from the state rooms, which are the areas of the house most people would be interested to see.

One final point.  Bob Carr's argument in favour of moving the governor of NSW out of the official residence was that the office had to be rescued from obscurity in the form of pomp and ceremony. It's an argument that doesn't really hold much water for me, because it's basically an ordinance of self-denial on a social scale.  One wonders if Carr would have put a stop to the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace simply because we have CCTV and mobile phones now.  Pomp and ceremony is at least 50% of why we have governors at all.  Reducing the office to a well-dressed man or woman is really an admission that you struggle to see its relevance.

I wouldn't really be taking advice from Bob Carr, given the amount of water that's under the bridge from his time as Premier of NSW.  The problem with philosopher-kings was diagnosed by Plato: they think well but rule badly.

A wallow for Friday

A couple of pieces from Tewkesbury Abbey.  Life somehow seems fresher after a spot of high Edwardian music.  Enjoy!

Something for the remix

Proving that nothing is too low for the Liberal Party, here is a massive abuse of Parliamentary Privilege in the Senate.  It does little to disprove Paul Keating's dismissal of the red chamber as unrepresentative swill.

My ideas for this video follow below.

There's a lot of unintended poetry here.  Lots of incantation -- were the content not so sad and childish, Senator Fisher could well be contributing to a new school of thrash poetry in this country.  What an abhorrent wallowing in self-pity, although that more or less sums up the way the Liberals are conducting themselves these days.  What would Menzies say?

Since the words in this spray were clearly chosen to emphasize rhythm and sonority, would someone kindly turn it into a techno track with a mesmerizing bass?

Could some choreographer take the second half of the rant to come up with a few new moves for the dance clubs?

Is there an enterprising drag queen out there waiting for a new character?  Here's the one you've been waiting for.  Stardom awaits you.

Perhaps a grunge band could take the words as they stand and turn them into a paean of modern ennui?

There's lots of scope to make a Pauline Pantsdown-style remix so that the good Senator ends up saying something comprehensible.  Let's hope Triple-J is ready to give it plenty of play.

Whoever suggested this might be a good thing to do in public should be returned forthwith to Fox News.

Senator, if you're looking for better advice, do contact me and I'd be glad to send you my CV.

After the dead end

One of the most sensible things the Age has published in a while.  I have to say I really enjoy Katharine Murphy's writing very much.

Politics need not bore the pants off everyone, but it should also have the wisdom and the restraint to respect some basic responsibilities: try to deal with facts, play the issue not the person, avoid bottom-feeding and keep the analogies more or less on the planet.
It has to live with, but doesn't have to pander to, the 24/7 cycle. It does not have to conduct a sloganeering and misleading discourse. It does not have to be so cynical and reductionist that it treats the voters like mugs.

... 

Everyone needs to think a bit more carefully before they open their mouth.

Read the rest here.

The choir director's bookshelf

Directing a choir is one of those tasks for which no amount of study and training can really prepare you.  The whole enterprise is built around people, and in any group you get competing demands and fluctuating support.  In choirs you are often dealing with people who feel uncertain about their abilities.  It is difficult for someone early in their career as a choir director to exude the sort of authority that can dispel uncertainty and fear.  Learning how to lead choirs is as unscientific a business as any human endeavour can possibly be.

I am an extremely bookish type.  In many ways I have read my way into various methods and styles of teaching in choirs.  My church work is based on the assumption that the parish choir is fundamentally a missionary outfit.  Any halfway decent choir is always looking for new members, and what I do is informed by the notion of the choir being an intentional community.  This community is built around the shared task of singing for public worship from week to week, for which each member is equipped in a culture marked by encouragement and education.  Sometimes this is the only systematic music education a person might receive.

Today I'm going to take a break from practical exercises and take a step back to list some of the resources that have shaped my thinking and doing.  Everything here is on my bookshelf, and most of it ranks in my list of indispensable reading.  These are books I refer to at least once or twice per year, many much more frequently.  Lists like this are highly subjective, so you might regard this as a snapshot of how I connect my musicianship with the rest of the work of being a choir director.  Books are listed in no particular order within the categories below.

Choir Training Techniques 
The Structure of Singing -- Richard Miller
Kick-Start Your Choir -- Mike Brewer
Fine-Tune Your Choir -- M. Brewer
Sound Beginnings: Music Teaching at Key Stages 1 & 2 -- Richard Frostick
Singing in Tune -- Nancy Telfer
Singing High Pitches with Ease -- N. Telfer
Immediately Practical Tips for Choir Directors -- John Bertalot
Pragmatic Choral Procedures -- R.A. Hammar
The Alexander Principle -- Wilfred Barlow
The Musician's Body -- Jaume Rosset i Llobet & George Odam
On Studying Singing -- Sergius Kagan
The Cambridge Companion to Singing -- John Potter (ed)
That's a Good Question: How to Teach by Asking Questions -- Marienne Uszler
Time Flies: How to Make the Best Use of Teaching Time -- M. Uszler
Beginners Book Of Chant: Simple Guide For Parishes Schools & Communities -- A Benedictine Monk

Teaching Sight Singing 
Five Wheels to Successful Sight-Singing -- John Bertalot
Teaching Adults to Sight-Sing -- J. Bertalot
Successful Sight Singing (2 vols) -- Nancy Telfer
Voice for Life (Trainer's Book & various level workbooks) -- Royal School of Church Music
Elementary Training -- Paul Hindemith
Modus Vetus -- Lars Edlund
Handbook of Musical Games -- Ger Storms (To be used with strict restraint!)
Sing Legato -- Kenneth Jennings (the interval songs are fantastic)
Preposterous Vocalises -- Josefa Heifetz

Leadership Skills for the Choir Director
How to be a Successful Choir Director -- John Bertalot
Warm-Ups! -- Mike Brewer
Conducting Technique for Beginners and Professionals -- Brock McElheran
When Sheep Attack -- D.R. Maynard
Defusing Disruptive Behavior in the Classroom -- Geoff Colvin
Preaching to the Choir: the Care and Nurture of the Church Choir -- Wayne L. Wold
Things They NEVER Taught You in Choral Methods -- N.S. Jorgenson & C. Pfeiler

General Books on Music 
A Performer's Guide to Baroque Music -- Robert Donnington
A History of Western Music (5 vols) -- Richard Taruskin
The Classical Style-- Charles Rosen
Piano Notes -- C. Rosen
Essays in Musical Analysis (6 vols) -- Donald Tovey
Romantic Music -- Leon Plantinga
A History of Western Music -- Grout & Palisca
Complete and Utter History of Classical Music -- Stephen Fry
Performance Practice: Music Before 1600 -- Howard M. Brown & Stanley Sadie (eds)
The Historical Performance of Music: An Introduction -- Colin Lawson & Robin Stowell
English Choral Practice, 1400-1650 -- John Morehen (ed)
The Style of Palestrina and the Dissonance -- Knud Jepperson

History and Theory of Church Music
Parish Music -- Lionel Dakers 
Going to Church: A User's Guide -- John Pritchard
Worship as a Revelation -- L.A. Hemming
Mission-Shaped Spirituality -- Susan Hope
Mission-Shaped Parish -- Paul Bayes, Tim Sledge et al
Twentieth Century Church Music -- Erik Routley
Victorian Cathedral Music in Theory and Practice -- W.J. Gatens
Why Catholics Can't Sing -- Thomas Day
Australian Soul -- Gary Bouma
Gregorian Chant -- Willi Apel
Music in Educational Thought and Practice -- Bernarr Rainbow
Words, Music and the Church -- Erik Routley

Useful Relics to Acquire
These books are long out of print, but worth scouting for in second-hand bookshops.  If nothing else they provide a good amount of entertainment laced with occasional flashes of profundity.

Choralia: a Handy Book for Parochial Precentors and Choirmasters -- James Baden Powell
The Complete Organist -- Harvey Grace
A Present for the Vicar -- P.M. Barry
Organ Playing, its Technique and Expression-- A. Eaglefield Hull
The Standard Course of Lessons and Exercises in the Tonic Sol-fa Method -- John Curwen
A Manual of English Church Music -- George Gardner & S.H. Nicholson (eds)
A Manual of Plainsong for Divine Service -- H.B. Briggs & W.H. Frere (eds); J.H. Arnold (rev)
Playing a Church Organ -- Marmaduke P. Conway
This Music Business: from Nero to Wienerschnitzel -- S.J. Peskett
Plainsong Accompaniment -- J.H. Arnold

Another dead-end comment

What with all the froth and foam coming from the federal Liberal Party at the moment, it is hard to know where one might begin in assembling a gallery of shame.

At the moment, Sophie Mirabella has shown some signs of changing the dynamics of the debate over emissions trading, although she managed to play the person rather than the matter at hand today.  Rather than likening the Prime Minister to Hitler (a pretty standard tactic for poor Sophie), she's brought the same fallacy up-to-date by making the comparison one between Gillard and Gaddafi.  It has the ring of alliterative authenticity, if nothing else.

As things stand, the Liberals are unelectable solely on the strength of the ick-factor raised by the pretty open bigotry on display by some members of the shadow cabinet.  They didn't win anything near a majority of votes in the election last year; it is testimony to their campaign that they won nearly half the seats on a pretty mediocre primary vote.  The Howard era casts a very long shadow over the party, and it is vital to exorcise it if they are ever to be viewed as a credible alternative to the present government.  So much of the racial discourse going on in the party concerns groups of people who are well-represented in the citizenry, and sets up the ground for an ongoing slander based on the immigrant origins of certain groups.  I would have thought that a couple of centuries of immigration being the normal way of things would have put pay to that, but clearly not.

And Mr Rabbit continues to smooth things over, making excuses for these latest rhetorical outrages.  He winks and nods, tuts gently while reinforcing the message.  Then another of his members comes out with something slightly more over the top and the whole routine starts again.  He is a man who acknowledges no boundaries in public behaviour -- one must ask where his whip is.  By comparison, the standard of public engagement on the Labor side has improved considerably since the beginning of the year.  If the Liberals would make similar efforts we might actually have something passing for public debate.  Instead, we get dead-end excuses while the Marvellous Sophie shows us how low things might yet go.

Music for Sunday 6 March

Readings for the week are listed here.  The parish follows the Common Lectionary, so anyone coming for a spot of Transfiguration will have to wait a couple of weeks.

The setting will be Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  The choir will sing the new setting of the Lord's Prayer during communion; the congregation will begin to sing it from next Sunday.

At the end of Mass there will be a short ceremonial putting away of the alleluia.  For this, the choir will sing:

Alleluia -- Anon. rondellus from Barcelona, 12 C

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Christ, whose glory fills the skies [212]
For the Psalm: In you, O Lord, I found refuge [19]
Sequence: Master, speak, thy servant heareth [597]
Offertory: Guide me, O thou great Redeemer [569]
Communion: You we praise, high priest and victim [525]

Odd answers

Ages ago I was rehearsing a song with a childrens choir, where the lyrics included a list of fish -- with a mild punchline about the pirhana.  As things go, a couple of the boys got a little bit obsessed over a few weeks with the omnivorous habits of this little breed of fish, and took to speculating how long one would survive upon landing in the midst of a school of them (they learnt the collective noun with a slight air of shock -- "you mean fish really go to school???")

The term went on, and the concert passed, and a new round of material arrived.  Among other things, this new program included a song referring to a maharaja.  I mentioned that a maharaja is like something between a very grand prince and a king, and that they tended to keep a very large establishment.  The choristers understood the idea of a king being accompanied by a queen, and a prince by a princess, a duke by a duchess.  Moving the title field out a little, we discovered that a Sultan's wife was a Sultana, and in India, men of middle-class and higher status were called Sahib and their wives Memsahib.  They were a little confounded by an earl's consort being a countess, but that particular gag had more-or-less run its course by then.

But with children there's always another punchline waiting in the wings, ready to leave you speechless.

One of the fish-obsessed boys raised his hand and asked what a maharaja's consort was called.  A bit flummoxed, I threw the question open to anyone who wished to answer it.

Up shot a flurry of hands, with answers ranging from princess and countess to "Mrs Maharaja," and a couple of other slightly odd-but-credible-sounding possibilities.

Then the another boy's hand went up.

"Isn't a maharaja's wife a pirhana?" he said...

Looking from different ends of the, er, telescope

Twentieth century music is fascinating for many reasons.  One of these is the tension found between seeking deterministic systems whereby the role of the composer becomes more an issue of transcription, and the rise of electronic music, typically viewed as a means of having 'free' music.

One of the composers whose music really explores both extremes of this tension is Olivier Messiaen.  His seeking of highly-ordered systems rested on his religious convictions, and was a means to express a deeply mystical view of the world.  To understand Messiaen is to enter a world where the only things that really matter are the liturgy of the Church, Gregorian Chant, and birdsong.  It should come as no surprise that Messiaen's only stage work was a vast telling of the life of St Francis of Assisi, where the ondes-martinot, a primitive electronic 'free music' machine of which Messiaen was a noted exponent, plays a prominent role.  His other major orchestral work, Turangalîla-Symphonie, also includes the ondes whooping and wallowing away in the sound fabric.

Organists often find Messiaen's scores unsettling and difficult to approach.  He was a highly virtuosic player, and reigned in the tribune of the Parisian church, La Trinite.  There he played for several masses and the Office on Sundays, calling on a vast repertoire which extended from the works of Bach to his own improvisations, which drew on Messiaen's own musical language, the modes of limited transposition.  His scores reflect this immersion of highly developed technique in the liturgy.

One of the things that strikes you on opening Messiaen's music is the amount of extra-musical material, in the form of essays outlining the musical ideas, quotations from the Bible, Missal and various other sources, and the constant labeling of items within the score, drawing attention to transcriptions of bird calls and rhythmic elements.  So this points in another direction, of Messiaen's other life-work, teaching composition and analysis at the Paris Conservatoire.  I often wonder at the extent to which Messiaen's work as a teacher impinged on his composition, given the comprehensive explanation and labeling present right from the earliest works, increasing in quantity and detail as he matured.

One of the interpretation challenges is to bring this analytically aware music to life.  It is hard to avoid the feeling of being forced into Messiaen's system of symbols, scales, hybrid chords and bird calls: it is a highly determined system with rules and exceptions that only Messiaen could ultimately explain.  It's difficult to imagine a more rigidly-organized system apart from some of John Cage's edgier random music pieces, where the only random element was the flipping of a coin -- and even that was subject to an assumption about the probability of landing up with heads twice in a row.

With all this in mind, I've got a little bit of Messiaen to share today.  It's the final movement from La Nativite du Seigneur, a toccata titled Dieu Parmi Nous (God with us).  The suite was published in 1936, and contains nine movements depicting or meditating on the events of the nativity, with movements describing the mother and child, the shepherds, wise men, and angels whizzing madly about.  Other movements take a more explicitly music-doing-theology approach, meditating on the Word, the children of God, and Jesus's acceptance of earthly sorrow.

This movement is prefaced by a quotation made up from from the Gospels of John and Luke (translated very crudely here):

Word of the communicant, the Virgin of the whole Church: the one who created me sits in my tent, the Word became flesh and dwells in me. My soul glorifies the Savior, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

Here is Olivier Latry performing the piece in a concert from a few years ago.

Sometimes it's good to hear the same piece from different angles.  One of the obvious ways is to hear more than one performer, but that can get a little tedious after a while.  Another way to develop a different perspective is to hear a transcription for some other instrument.  This is something I received a while ago.  It's very different, but utterly amazing.