sjf1967

In successive Christmases at Winchester we had 'the shepherds visit the manager' and 'blessed is the fruit of thy worm, Jesus'.

Thanks headcase - it's an entirely irrational hatred of mine

You've set my mind at rest, MM. I'm not divulging which of the above symptoms might apply....S

Excellent idea for a new thread MM - I'll pitch in first with Widor 5. Not just the Toccata - it's those lame central movements. You'd derive more benefit from filing your socks in order of purchase date. I also have a blind spot when it comes to Mendelssohn in general - but the G major Prelude and Fugue is aural Mogadon. Oh, and the Eben Moto Ostinato. Your turn...why do you hate the Mulet?

Great story MM - it appeared in the Book of Heroic Failures a few years back. Thanks for reminding me of it. I think (but might be wrong) that the famous pianist (who actually turned pages) was Cortot and the famous violinist (who ended up playing the piano) was Joachim. Joachim owed the student pianist's father a favour, so booked the Salle Gaveau in Paris for the occasion - he only agreed to play himself when the father pressed him to perform to boost non existent ticket sales. Cortot just happened to be in the audience and volunteered for page turning when Joachim got nervous and asked for a volunteer.

pncd - He is indeed a fine chap - how many Deans would say to the Lay Clerks on a wet February Monday 'Gentlemen, there are few unalloyed pleasures in being a Dean but your singing is one of them'? He especially likes Bach, as it happens, but enjoys most things as far as I can tell - a recent favourite was the Bruhns e minor. He is most concerned to be seen supporting and appreciating the music in all its facets - he quite often drifts in a listens to boys rehearse before Evensong, and once or twice came over to school to watch morning chorister practices. We are very keen to keep him! He also berated the congregation on a Sunday morning for failing to come to Evensong during the week 'how do you think that makes the choir feel?' I had no idea we had met - I hope I was friendly...that 32' is rather lethal, but you can't tell from the console. S

Andrew - be sure to find me at the next COA to claim your prize-winning-story pint.

There isn't a document as such, alas; the item was a cassette produced by someone who used to tape all the R3 Evensongs and extracted the snippets we'd all rather forget. These got put on to a tape for the consumption of a closed circle, which got endlessly copied and passed on with strict injunctions not to pass it to anyone else etc. I only got to hear about it because I knew someone etc etc. I don't know whether there has been a recent issue but I remember hearing a good couple of dozen howlers - maybe there are fewer howlers these days.....a paritcular favourite was an extended 'after you' moment from a live Daily Service in which the organist and announcer attempted respectively to play and announce the final hymn. Not once but about 5 times, each time followed by silence during which each waited for the other to get on with it. But nothing tops the Winchester sermon, alas not broadcast, in which a visiting Diocesan Bishop preaching on the subject of bravery described a terrifying scene in which a would be attacker 'rushed towards a group of terrified victims, brandishing his enormous chopper'....disarray of epic proportions followed, most of the choir some of the clergy and even some of the congregation reduced to a state of audilbe palsy. Those were the days.

Hi pncd - The Guildford clergy are amazing in this regard (and many others) I have to say - the Dean sits at the front of the Nave to listen to the Sunday Evensong voluntary and shushes the people near him who try to talk, then applauds loudly at its conclusion. A rare specimen I fear. We also have an excellent Precentor in Dr N Thistlethwaite. The music department is actually rather good fun with those two around. The stories I could tell (but won't)..... I didn't mean to make myself look heroic in relating that little story about the broadcast, by the way - it really was a 'there but for the grace of god' moment'. If my luck had gone the other way and I had had a bad landing I might have made it on to that compilation of Choral Evensong disasters that circulates every few years....

''First of all "custom & practice" during the baroque period. Generally speaking, it seems that there was a tradition which everyone knew and didn't need to write down or particularly specify. It was just "the way things were done." MM - I wonder if that is not the opposite of the actual situation? Theorists codified existing widespread performance tradition, surely, rather than leaving things out of their treatises because everyone knew about the procedures anyway? Does that mean, for example, that the use of inegales (recorded with some degree of consistency by all sorts of people, as you know) was incredibly unusual? By the reasoning you outlined, if it had been a widespread practice no one would have needed to write it all down....

The Forbes is wonderful - double choir with a free organ toccata against it which has to coalesce with the choir, or into more strictly measured rhythm on its own, at strictly predetermined points - I seem to remember 8 a sudden against 5 against 3 in the Nunc after 4 pages of frenzied aleatory flapping. That broadcast was the cause of my most heart stopping moment ever - pushing the Tutti piston in the middle of a frenzied organ solo outburst which contained nmerous essential rhythmic and pitch cues for the following choir entry and playing what was supposed to be a fanfare onthe Bombarde Reeds(!) to discover that the tutti piston had stopped working. Grabbing a handful of stops is not easy at Ch Ch as you know - it felt like a month before I got the chord down but on the playback it was the merest hesitation. My life flashed before me. Thank God I don't have to do the accompaniment thing every day anymore! Back to the plot. I used to go in most nights for a couple of hours, and most days too - probably about 6-7 hours a day altogether, and I used to practice everything - hymns, the lot, certainly for the first year. The Vox H is a funny stop - we hardly ever used it and it was a b%^&*r to keep in tune. Good for comedy effects though. A Basson-Hautbois would be better, yes. Bombarde Reeds - occasional tutti use was the main employment for them.They're not as brash as they seem upstairs, but the pedal can seem a bit light when they are coupled to the GO in the big tutti. We used the 16' quite often as a GO 16 reed via the IV-II coupler. I can't remember whether there was a IV-P coupler - I have a distant memory of using the 16 to bolster the pedal reeds, but I could be wrong. We had a Dean during my time there whose wife hated the organ - said Dean used to stand under the organ gallery (of all places) to talk to departing punters. He forbade loud voluntaries because he couldn't chat against them, so I played the Eucharist congregation out to a 12 bar piece of Tallis on the Sw 8 flute and left the loft before he had his surplice off. Fewer problems with volume after that.

It's lovely, isn't it? In my time at Ch Ch for the BBC we did Tippett St John (after I had been there about a month); Forbes Aedis Christi Mag and Nunc; Parry Hear my Words; one or two big Howells; and a huge commissioned piece of Francis Pott. I lost weight, at least.

I think he came to dislike the main theme - in an interview about the piece he said 'it doesn't matter how good the sauce is if the meat is poor' or words to that effect...

I think you're absolutely right Andrew. We have found that boys who were trebles in July and showing no signs of changing at the end of Year 8 go very rapidly once they are in an older secondary school environment - whether it's peer pressure or something else i don't know, but we've seen it quite a bit.

There's also a theory that hormones are being ingested in the food supply and that this may be having an effect - but this is strictly one for the biologists I think.

Lots of science - the average age for voice change (which happens in distinct stages which can be widely or closely spaced) has dropped by about 2 years since the 1950s. It used to be about 14.5; it's now 12.5. I can't find the exact source or figures but could find out if anyone really wants to know - there has certainly been some pretty serious medical research done on the issue and there's no doubt that the age HAS dropped. I also found another interesting statistic - that a susbtantial proportion of non singing children have some sort of voice disorder (huskiness, nodules etc) - proportionally fewer children who sing suffer from the same problems. No one notices the ones who don't sing because it's not really an issue and the problems, unless they are really serious, usually resolve themselves.

You're right Graham - the Prelude is superb. I remember DGW playing a heavily cut version of the Toccata in a live R3 recital from the Bridgewater Hall a couple of years ago - it wasn't only the ending but substantial amounts of the middle that went missing in action. I nearly fell off the sofa when I heard it - it was very well played but wasn't convincing at all. I have spent a fair bit of time around the Duruflé organ works in the last few years but have never come across this cut - does any know more about it? There are some interesting articulation and registration variants in the any different editions of the Sicilienne too.

It's a straight concave if I remember correctly Colin (it's about 10 years since I played it), which is slightly to left of normal positioning - so things don't align between manuals and pedals quite as you expect. Once you're used to it it's fine and really very comfortable but until you are used to it...hmm. Added to the hairtrigger swell touch and the total absence of acoustic in the building it made for some nervous moments at 3.55 pm on a Wednesday when the BBC were in town...

Playing them four times?

The smiley says no. Janet Graham is a GREAT piece - Kevin Bowyer has recorded it and the two companion pieces). But be warned - it won't cheer anyone up...

Richard - this is getting a bit heated I think, which is rather a shame. The underlying assumption behind everything you have said so far seems to be that what those who seek a different sound from you are damaging voices, and that they do it because they don't know any better or can't be bothered. The reason I am asking questions here about what you do is because I have heard your choristers sing and have read your published denunciations of just about every cathedral choir trainer currently in the profession. I am definitely not on a 'learning curve' here; my choir would not be able to function singing 7 services a week if I did not know what I was doing and why I do it. We're not in the business of damaging voices, and have had two early breaks in the last 5 years out of about 15 -20 boys- quite a good average I think. They were both tall chaps and are now singing as basses with some distinction and no sign of damage whatsoever. The whole business of the earlier onset of puberty is another huge issue. (You are also by implication questioning the competence of quite a few voice professionals who work hard training boys in cathedrals, but that might also be another issue I suspect). There's no need to be baffled or amused by honest curiosity; I suppose what I was hoping for from this thread was a detailed insight into how you, Richard Astridge, achieve what you think of as the ideal chorister sound - after all, you're an endangered species by your own account! You have a good range of adjectives to chracterise what you dislike; 'brittle' 'reedy', 'thin' 'acrid' 'precious' and 'silly' in one posting alone - but that doesn't constitute a training method. You are totally free to dislike any sound; but you seem to suggest that everyone who trains choristers nowadays is an incompetent voice wrecker because you disagree with them. On your more specific points - I can't tell you what George Malcolm's technique was because I didn't see it in action personally and I wouldn't presume to speculate - I 'm not sure that I have ever held it up here as an ideal sound, although I do admire some of its qualities, and I'm not alone in that (Britten seemed to quite like it!). I don't know anyone who trains boys to do what you list as the various diction faults in your other postings, and unless you have the courage of your convictions and name a particular choir you really dislike the sound of it's hard to see how we might take that discussion further. 'Ee' isn't a 'head' vowel - it's the result of a tongue position and has nothing whatever to do with register. It can be sung in any register. Consonants can give tone - m, n, v, j, z for starters - others are of course voiced. That Mozart performance is remarkable, yes - but how can a choir get more 'continental' than the Tolzer Knabenchor? It epitomises the very method of training that you say wrecks voices - but there he is singing (not quite) effortless top Fs...so what's going on? A sound further removed from Ernest Lough it is pretty hard to imagine. If you want passion from your singing - Westminster Cathedral Victoria Requiem gets my vote! Best wishes S

I use the Janet Graham Toccata for the same purposes...

Vox - yes, vibrato in the proper sense comes naturally. In the three cathedral choirs with which I've been associated some boys developed it and some didn't - the ones who didn't were still singing healthily. If it's natural vibrato then it shouldn't need too much reining in. On your other point - chest voice is perfectly OK, yes, and is perfectly natural - it's what you do when you speak. It's getting the transition from thick fold to thin fold vibration ('chest' to head') that's the trick. If you try to force the thicker speech quality beyond a certain point your vocal folds will adopt the line of least resistance and only the outer mucosa - not the body of the folds themselves - will vibrate, which results in that hooty breathy sound with no dynamic range you get from many children in the upper register. That transition can't be managed in isolation from other aspects of technique - like any other aspect of singing it's a continuum in which posture and breath management and many other elements play a crucial part. Would you agree, Richard?

Thanks Richard - I've got quite a few exceptional choral recordings too, from the last 20 years or so- maybe we could swap.....Best S