Opportunities to sing, i.e., to communicate!

I am on leave from my university appointment this year, and one of the many pleasures this time away from my regular teaching and admin duties has afforded me has been to take on a number of interesting singing gigs.  In the Fall, my good friend Richard Sparks, music director of Pro Coro here in Edmonton, asked if I could join them as an extra singer for a concert of Haydn Harmoniemesse and Vaughan Williams Mass in G.  I also joined the choir for a repeat performance of the Rachmaninoff Vespers in Calgary in September, having sung it with them last Good Friday.  In October, it was a concert with Voicescapes, a wonderful collective of singers in Calgary, performing two of the double choir motets of Bach one-on-a-part (Singet dem Herrn, Fürchte dich nicht), as well as (for the first time) Buxtehude's very moving work Membra Jesu Nostri.  This past February I sang with a fine group of vocal and instrumental soloists here at the University, assembled and directed by my colleague Jolaine Kerley, in a program of madrigals selected from Monteverdi's Books V-VIII, under the title "Songs of Love and War".  Also in February, Richard Sparks called again about subbing for a bass in a concert Pro Coro was giving with British guest conductor Simon Carrington: the program which included the Byrd Mass for Four Voices, Britten's A.M.D.G., and a selection of sacred and folk-inspired works by Walton, Dove, McMillan and several others, was without doubt one of the most challenging and yet gratifying programs I've sung in years.  Last week, opportunity arose to sing the Fauré Requiem solos with another Edmonton choir, Chorale St. Jean, directed by former student and now colleague Prof. Laurier Fagnan.  Then, this morning, the solo quartet (Choir II) in Allegri's Miserere for a Palm Sunday service at Holy Trinity Anglican, where the music director is another former grad student, John Brough.  As I look to the remaining months of this sabbatical year, I am planning another ensemble concert for May, in which a group of 6-8 of us will perform repertoire from the English Renaissance, including works by Tallis, Mundy and Byrd. 

All of these opportunities have been wonderful gifts of music-making for me, and if there's a small tinge of regret associated with this activity, it is the knowledge that my focus on conducting and, more recently, the bottomless vortex of administrative duties had prevented me from considering more opportunities to sing.  It has reminded me anew of the extraordinary challenge that surrounds the discipline of singing: the personal responsibility to bring one's fullest vocal capabilities to any passage; to be constantly aware of lateral ensemble concerns (balance, tuning, phrase structure, unified sense of diction, et al); and perhaps, most of all, the imperative to communicate with your audience as a singer.  Perhaps no one has reinforced the importance of communication for me more than Simon Carrington during his Pro Coro rehearsals.  In one particularly difficult period in our rehearsal of the Britten, which is surely one of the most challenging works in the rep for singers, I remember well Carrington's comment...."as a singer, one needs to approach every rehearsal as though one is giving a performance in that rehearsal, and communicate accordingly".  

Learning to communicate with every phrase one sings - what a concept!  It might seem so basic as to be obvious, but I am sure we have all experienced the mundane as well as the refreshing and inspiring, both in our own singing and the singing we have heard from others, so we do recognize the difference immediately.  The powerful effect of such engaged and enlivened performances can shake one to the core if one is lucky enough to be present when it happens! This was most aptly demonstrated for me by a number of university choirs at this year's national convention of the American Choral Directors Association in Oklahoma City.  Many of the best performances were delivered for memory, enabling visual communication and highly refined ensemble awareness within the group, but there were also some groups whose use of music (the British Early Music group Alamire comes to mind) did not compromise their ability to communicate their passion for the music they were presenting.  The key in all of these performances was surely that the group, through the leadership provided from the podium, had considered the potential communicative impact of every line and phrase - a process that can take great amounts of time but can nevertheless be life-changing for our singers if we ourselves take the time to deliver the message in a cogent and well-thought out plan of attack.