The Author: He's a She

Welcome to readers joining from the Straits Times. I would like to point out that, contrary to the impression given by the article, I am in fact female! Not sure why the ST assumes someone gushing about Lan Shui is a guy but there you go...

FYI: I am a permanent resident of Singapore having lived here 13+ years. I vaguely recall growing up in some place extremely cold on the other side of the planet.

This particular blog just covers music related topics and isn't updated regularly. The other blogs listed opposite are a bit more up to date chock full of brain numbing facts and observations...

Noteworthy Composer for Choir

Noteworthy Composer for Choir

This blog entry details how I use Noteworthy Composer ("NC") as a tool for choral practice. To learn more about Noteworthy Composer, visit their website here.

NC is a simple program that lets you "compose" music on a computer by typing in notes using your computer keyboard. It also has the ability to open midi files and extract the music in those files into a score!!!

What a lot of people don't know is that a midi file may be composed of many tracks – one for each instrument or voice. When software such as NC is used to open the file, the tracks can be separated into different staves.

For instance, this is the result of opening a midi for "Be Not Afraid" from Mendelssohn's Elijah:

Cool eh?! The first four staves are for the four vocal parts. The 5th line is for the drum beat and the last line is the tempo track.

Now that NC has loaded the midi, you can change the file: you can change the instruments used in play back, you can change the length of the notes, you can change the pitch, the dynamics... the list goes on. At times I've been keen enough to type in the entire piano accompaniment to a choral piece which originally only had the vocal parts programmed in! (This takes a long time and I don't recommend it!)

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For the most part, I use NC to do the following:

• Change the notes when (1) the midi file has an error or (2) the score I'm working with has somehow been modified from the original.
• Practice singing along with the piece until I am very familiar with my notes
• Replaying particular passages which I find particularly difficult (because you can stop and start at any place in the music, you can focus on difficult sections during practice - fab)
• Turning off my vocal part and singing along with the other vocal parts (ie once I think I know it, I turn off the soprano line and sing that while the other three parts play).

Weaknesses:

• adjustments to tempo and dynamics are rudimentary. This is a basic tool for getting a grip with the notes - not with the music.
• Although it is a simple program, there is a learning curve to get used to how to amend files. I've used several professional composition programs and this is by far the easiest
• Getting a copy of the program is difficult because they only send it out by CD – it's not available over the net

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I find the midi files I want all over the net though recently I stumbled upon this site which is totally awesome for choral singing: CyberBass . The other great place for midis is Classical Archives.

Of course once you've amended the file you can save it back into midi format or save it as an NC file.

Notes about midis:

• You cannot play these on a CD player without converting them to wav format. You may have some software that lets you do that but it's unlikely. It is possible to use WinAmp to do this (play the midi to output WAV) but it is time consuming and who really wants to listen to a midi on a CD player?
• You usually cannot play midis on your MP3 player. Again you'd need to convert the midi to MP3 and this requires that you have the correct CODEC. If you don't know what that means then honestly me trying to explain how to do this will give you a headache! Go to Download.com and search on "midi to MP3".
• Midis are very basic files. Use them at your PC while singing along with your score. When you leave your PC, leave the midi behind and be sure to expose yourself to a real music version of the stuff you're working on so you don't end up sounding like a computer.

If you have questions, drop me an e-mail and I will update this note to answer FAQs.

Elijah Part 1: Demiurge 1 – Baal 0

Elijah Part 1: Demiurge 1 – Baal 0

The Creator God of the Old Testament, the Demiurge, was generally regarded by Gnostics as not the genuine ultimate God who is the source and "the depth" of reality. Since the God of the Old Testament is jealous, vengeful, judgmental, and undoubtedly masculine, [...].

Kelley L. Ross , Ph.D.

Enter the story of Elijah brought to life by the music of Mendelssohn as an oratorio. Elijah is an old testament prophet who takes on the king of Israel who is following a false God: Baal. The true God, not impressed by this idolatry, shows his character early on in the story:

For I the Lord your God, I am a jealous God
And I shall visit all the father's sins
On the children to the third and the fourth generations
Of them that hate me.

- Elijah, "Yet doth the Lord"

The people of Israel are sentenced to drought and Elijah goes into retreat. After three years in the wilderness, Elijah returns to take Ahab, the king of Israel, head on in a religious bake-off: You and your prophets prepare a bull for sacrifice. I'll do the same and we'll ask our respective gods to provide the light for the fire. Whichever god answers by fire will be declared the true god.

This contest appears mid-way through the first half of the performance and is the highlight of the story's action. Mendelssohn illustrates the excitement well with three successive choruses of the prophets of Baal calling to their god. Each cry gets more desperate but the only response is silence.

Then it's Elijah's turn and the Lord delivers: fire rains down. Now the crowd is positively panicked as they see they've been backing the wrong deity. The music takes on a frenetic tempo (the composer's directions literally say – "con fuoco" – "with fire"). When finally they realise that Jehovah is the true god, there is a beautiful exclamation from the chorus of "Our Lord is One God." It is touching.

But no sooner is this sentiment laid down, than the mood is interrupted by the bellowing announcement of Elijah:

"Take all the prophets of Baal and let not one of them escape you! Take them down to Kishon's brook and slay them everyone!"

Elijah, "Oh Though, who makest thine angels spirits"

There is little room for universal love and religious tolerance in the name of Jehovah.

The slaughter ensues. God, thus appeased, finally gives into Elijah's pleas for an end to the drought. When the rain arrives, the people thank God for his mercy, not mentioning of course that he's supposedly the one who brought the suffering in the first place. Part 1 thus draws to a happy close.

 

It is quite apparent that the creator god who visits humanity with the disaster of the flood is not identical with the "true God" [...]. Viewing the character of the deity of Genesis with a sober, critical eye, the Gnostics concluded that this God was neither good nor wise. He was envious, genocidal, unjust, and, moreover, had created a world full of bizarre and unpleasant things and conditions. In their visionary explorations of secret mysteries, the Gnostics felt that they had discovered that this deity was not the only God, as had been claimed, and that certainly there was a God above him.

Stephen Hoeller    

 

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Notes:

• Felix Mendelssohn: born Hamburg, 1809; died Leipzig, 1847 after a series of strokes.
• Elijah was written in English from an English translation of a German libretto. It was given its first performance in English on 26 August 1846 at the Birmingham Festival, conducted by Mendelssohn himself. Mendelssohn (who spoke fluent English) took great pains that the English version would be as accurate as possible.

Ode Post Mortem

Ode Post Mortem

SSC 25th ANNIVERSARY
BEETHOVEN'S CHORAL SYMPHONY

DATE
May 6, 2005

FEATURING
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Lim Yau conductor
Lim Yan piano
Tamara Matthews soprano
Graciela Araya mezzo-soprano
Paul Austin Kelly tenor
Johannes Mannov bass
Singapore Symphony Chorus
The Philharmonic Chamber Choir, Singapore
Singapore Bible College Chorale
Hallelujah Chorus

PROGRAMME
BEETHOVEN- Choral Fantasy (19')
BEETHOVEN- Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (65')

The first half of the concert was Beethoven's Fantasy for Piano and Chorus. This is a simple piece which anyone can enjoy on first hearing. Lim Yan, Lim Yau's nephew, was the pianist. He is a fairly young guy (presently doing his national service I'm told) but in rehearsals he came across as confident and easy going.

The Fantasy went well. In rehearsals everyone had a lot of fun playing this piece. The theme is initially set by the piano then carried around the orchestra. I found the performance of the woodwinds particularly charming. I was sitting right behind the clarinets, and when they doubled up with the bassoons, they really found a groove that lifted the whole ensemble. It was great and the audience went into the intermission looking happy.

In the intermission, Nella Hunkin, the principal cellist said in all sincerity, "The sopranos sounded great this time: they're weren't flat! I guess they were saving it for the performance!"

In the second half we performed Beethoven's 9th. I say half but the piece is 65 minutes compared to the mere 20 minutes of Fantasy. The 9th is actually a tough one to do for this kind of audience. Most people show up because (a) they know somebody in the choir and/or (b) they know a few bars of Ode to Joy - the 4th movement of the Symphony.

There's a solid 50 minutes of music before you get to Ode. The second movement of the 9th (scherzo) is also fairly recognizable but really all these people want to hear is the last movement. People bring their kids 'cus they figure it will be an easy one to wean them onto classical music with... NOT. If they're lucky, the kids will sleep through the first three movements and not get restless.

In addition to the chorus, Ode includes 4 soloists. The first to sing is the bass. Johannes Mannov was absolutely brilliant - he has fantastic projection and tone. He was very quickly joined by the male voices of the choir who echo his shouts of "Freude" - Joy. He then sings the familiar tune and is joined by the entire choir for the "refrain." The four soloists then take over and there is a bit of this soloists - choir - soloists for the rest of the piece. OK these are seriously abridged programme notes. But you get the idea.

It struck me that on several occasions, when the soloists were singing, they seemed to be slightly out of phase with the orchestra. The choir might have suffered the same problem but when you're singing at the back of the stage, it's not that easy to hear what the rest of the orchestra is doing.

The other soloists were not as brilliant as Mannov on the evening. This is a shame because in rehearsal, the soprano, Tamara Matthews, was fantastic. On her first night of rehearsal even Lim Yau was charmed enough to give her a big hug and I have NEVER seen him do that before in rehearsal ! The second night, however, her voice seemed to be going. Performance night I was told she was a bit weak and it sounded like she dropped her penultimate note in the run-up to the choir's finale.

By this point the choir had already had one major flub which I was later told nobody in the audience picked up on. For those in the know, the second time we have to sing "Alle Menchen", everyone was hesitant and the volume was seriously impaired. It was bizarre because the whole choir held back and we'd never made this mistake in rehearsal. I can only assume Lim Yau did something we didn't expect or perhaps didn't give us a cue he usually gives because the reaction of the choir was too uniform and instantaneous to explain it on random behavior within the choir.

Of course we're supposed to be able to come in without being totally reliant on him - but we're not a professional choir. I think we constantly surprise him on how dependant we are for his guidance. This comes down to lack of confidence on our part.

I've pointed out all the weaknesses of the performance but generally it went well. The audience didn't exactly go wild but I think that was less in reaction to our performance as to the fact they were tired after sitting through 70 minutes of classical music when really they just wanted 20 minutes of Ode to Joy.

Personally, I cannot express what a huge privilege it is to sing this piece with such a brilliant conductor and fantastic orchestra. To me this isn't simply about making music, it's about reaching for something higher.

 

Technorati Tags: music, sso, limyau, beethoven, choir

The Mechanics of Making Music

The Mechanics of Making Music

This Friday, May 6th, we (the choir) perform Beethoven's 9th as well as his Choral Fantasy. Last night was the first rehearsal held at the Esplanade (usually the SSC rehearses at the Victoria Concert Hall).

As usual, I arrived early in the hopes of catching the orchestra rehearsing. There is nothing more aurally exhilarating than listening to the SSO when you have the Esplanade to yourself. I've done it several times but it still makes my heart race.

I was the first to arrive and thus the first of the choir to discover that our security passes had been lost. The passes are pre-printed 8x5cm multicolor cards which you wear while backstage. A member of SSO admin was talking to the guard without much luck: the passes were gone and it was a public holiday so nobody was around to effect a proper search. I sat down to wait it out. A few other choir members drifted in and joined me.

Then Lim Yau arrived. I mentioned that the passes were lost, which I think he was aware of, but in typical fashion he didn't reply and walked straight through security with his SSO credentials. But something must have registered as a minute later he was back asking the guards to sort it out. LY was really the only one who could force some action: the situation needed a bit of fear factor to get the guards thinking creatively.

Eventually, he got them to agree to let us in based on the ID confirmation by an SSO staff member who would check our names off a list. We then got a sticker to identify ourselves (we looked like a tour group) and were allowed through.

When I got through to the concert hall, I discovered the orchestra wasn't rehearsing that evening. Instead, a group of "roadies" were tweaking the hall under the instructions of LY. The Esplanade has a lot of moving parts: a moveable ceiling, large doors near the roof, risers for the choir. There's a hell of a lot of hydraulics behind the pretty wood and watching it in action is quite cool.

Once that was settled, there was a fuss about the chairs. The first row of chairs had rubber feet. But the next three rows were wooden. Any time you sat down or stood up, there was a fairly loud grinding noise against the floor. It's probably something an audience wouldn't think about twice though it would sound horrible on a recording. Clearly it would be a distraction to the piece in progress - that is if you weren't already distracted by the fact 150 people just stood up.

LY was rather cranky about this as they (i.e. the Esplanade management) had supposedly promised to sort this out. And it seemed rather easy to sort too: give every member of the choir four felt pads to stick on the bottom of the chairs and within 15 minutes the volume of the chairs would drop appreciably. Anyway no such creativity was at hand.

I should point at that even though the upcoming performance is billed as "The SSC 25th Anniversary Concert", the chorus is actually an amalgamation of four choirs: the Singapore Symphony Chorus (SSC), The Philharmonic Chamber Chorus (TPCC), The Hallelujah Chorus and the Singapore Bible College. This is because the SSC at only 90 strong is too small to be a symphonic chorus. Ideally you need 180. There actually used to be as many as 140 people in the SSC but due to what Lim Yau candidly described one day as his "charming personality" numbers had dropped since he took over as conductor. The fact is, he set the bar higher and not everyone could make the grade or was inclined to. The standard has supposedly improved (I don't really know as I wasn't around then) but on the con side reinforcements are now required. Having dedicated Christians supplement your numbers also limits the possible repertoire but this is another story.

The TPCC is LY's own choir and it's understood that you have to be pretty good to get in there. In truth they are fantastic: I've been to several of their concerts and they've never failed to completely mesmerize me.

Our rehearsal started with the semi-chorus opening of The Choral Fantasy. The "semi-chorus" is a hand-picked subset of the larger chorus chosen to sing the solo parts as a group. Each participating choir nominated 2 people for each voice part. This meant that LY didn't hand pick the entire semi-chorus: half were chosen by the choral masters of the respective choirs.

The result was that in the choral opening for Fantasy, the sopranos were extremely weak. Even the dedicated semi-chorus rehearsal had not corrected this - their voices were lost in the great hall. No problem - some quick adjustments were made. LY started moving people around. He asked various women to sit to one end of the second row and join the semi-chorus. When the dust settled it was apparent that he'd deftly pulled together a cast of seven TPCC sopranos to carry the effort.

It worked - the section now sounded great. Plus there was a group of TPCC sopranos looking like a pack of cats who'd eaten canaries. They were definitely pleased to be in the semi-chorus. Meanwhile various members of the SSC were steaming. It seems that some of the altos were none too impressed that despite that this was the SSC anniversary concert, only 2 of their section made it into the alto semi-chorus of about 18.

I have no illusions about my diva status so I was just glad he sorted out the opening. The fact that less than an eigth of the semi-chorus is made up of SSC members is a footnote that concerns me not.

OK so the way rehearsal usually goes is this: We start at 7:30pm or a few minutes later in which case there's a mandatory lecture about arriving late which all the latecomers miss; then we run through a passage; the choral master (Lim Yau) has us work on a few problems; he works with individual sections on weak areas in such a way that each section (i.e. soprano, alto, tenor bass) gets a bit of a vocal break; occasionally he waxes lyrical about some topic and thus amuses us while we get a breather; after an hour and a half of this we get a 15-20 minute break; then we carry on for another hour and end by about 10:15pm.

This lets us get in about 2 1/2 hours of rehearsal with enough breaks thrown in that your voice isn't pushed too hard.

However last nights rehearsal went like this:
A number of people arrived early. LY wanted to get going so he started warming us up and thereby got an early start on being irritated that we weren't really ready. Finally the whole choir was in place 5 minutes early (this is a record) and we started with the Choral Fantasy. There was very little breaking into sections (semi-chorus reconfiguration aside) as at this point it wasn't so much that individual sections needed boning up but that we needed to come together as a choir. We needed to feel out our color, tempo and space in this new hall as the acoustics of the Esplanade are a bit tricky to get used to. It can be quite difficult to hear what's going on at the front of the stage when you're at the back and at times even hearing your cues from the other vocal parts is difficult. So we worked on this. It was full on.

Come break time, LY wasn't inclined to stop. The fact is that when you have 150 people head off in different directions for 15 minutes, the break can drag out. He proposed to the choir that we would press on but that he'd agree to let everyone go early. I can tell you that nobody in that room was under any illusion they were getting out of there a minute before usual. Anyway with rehearsal time so precious at this stage, who could argue?

Fantasy is not that demanding. Ode, however, is a serious piece of music requiring full use of your pipes. By 9:30pm my vocal chords were genuinely tired. I could hear a lot of voices around me start to fade. There's one section where we sopranos have to hold a high A for 8 bars. Most people have to take a breath in between but I find this no problem. I noticed, however, that as voices paused for breath, many weren't coming back in for the rest of the passage. At one point I was the only voice in a section of about 5 chairs. I realized that if I didn't adopt a similar strategy I would be putting my voice at risk for the efforts required later in the week. So I started to join them. LY wasn't totally oblivious to what was happening as at one point he asked us that if we were going to fake it at least try use the appropriate mouth position and not be so obvious.

So what time did we finish? 10:12pm. Technically we did finish early although it certainly wasn't quid pro quo!

Lim Yau's parting comment to the choir was that we should keep our Esplanade sticker as a memento of "Administrative Incompetence."

2 more rehearsals to go before Friday...

Tags: singapore, choir, beethoven, music, limyau

The Sydney Opera House

This week I went to Sydney for business (photos). This largely involved lying in my hotel with food poisoning but that's another story. As I was in town, I had to check out the Sydney Opera House.

On Thursday I went to see Carmen in the Opera Theatre along with a lot of pensioners and a few tourists (the average age of the audience was about 65). The place was packed and with tickets going at $220 a pop, it's safe to say these people do not have financial problems.

The performance was enjoyable although this Carmen was a total bitch and I was rather happy to see her murdered in the end. They portrayed the French equally well... as being the bunch of cigarette smoking bastards that they are. They were even smoking Gauloise so the whole place stunk. No in fairness it was not bad at all. I have, however, resolved never to see Carmen again... It's never advisable to see opera in a language you speak because invariably the cast will butcher it.

The next night I went to see the Sydney Symphony in the concert hall. The hall has a cozy feel and even though there is more seating than the Esplanade, there seems to be a great focus on the stage. I felt closer to the musicians even though I was near the back. The hall has a high sweeping ceiling from which clear plastic donuts 1 metre wide (affectionately referred to as perspex calamari below) are suspended on cables. This is presumably to improve the sound quality - my chief interest for the evening.

I was keen to compare the acoustics of this famous space to my adopted home auditorium: The Esplanade. Major disappointment. The Symphony was doing a jazz thing and were using SPEAKERS to amplify the sound. Huh? Then the guy next to me spills the beans that the SOH concert hall acoustics are notoriously bad. Well I'll never know because I caught the show via the speakers above my seat. Imagine paying $90 for a ticket and then your aural experience comes down to the audio set up. Well the concert was a great performance I only wish I could have heard it live.

On the SOH: A disappointment since it opened its doors 32 years ago and the Australian Opera tried to cram Prokofiev's epic War and Peace into the mean stage and claustrophobic pit of the opera auditorium. Not Joern Utzon's fault. He had planned the big auditorium for opera, and the smaller for orchestral music. But the Sydney Symphony Orchestra wouldn't leave the Sydney Town Hall unless it got the larger space. So the Opera Theatre became the Concert Hall and vice versa. Neither is a success. Even with the perspex calamari floating above the orchestra, the Concert Hall acoustics are certainly no better than the Town Hall's, though the real problem is an opera theatre with too few seats, too small an orchestra pit and too little wing space. The Opera House should have been abandoned after stage two, when the shells were completed, without ever attempting the interiors. It would be a glorious white-tiled folly on Bennelong Point, strikingly beautiful as a soaring sculpture, and no less effective as a symbol for the city. The money spent redesigning then executing the compromised Opera House interiors could instead have financed a couple of plain but functional boxy auditoriums in some then-neglected part of Sydney which could have done justice to both voice and instruments. - source.

Glag Post Mortum

Glag Post Mortum

The SCC Performed Janacek's Glagolitic Mass on Saturday 20 November.

I woke up with a bit of post concert depression yesterday. It wasn't as bad as in the past though. Perhaps I wasn't as attached to Janacek as Mahler (highly possible), perhaps I'm getting used to it (maybe) or perhaps I felt we did a better job at nailing this one (we did) so I could let go without regret.

In the end, everything seemed to come together. The orchestra was struggling at rehearsal Friday as were the soloists but on Saturday night, it was pretty tight. Our Veruju ("Credo") was still a bit blurry but overall I was happy with the performance. I don't think we ever really got what the maestro wanted from us on Veruju but otherwise I felt we were in sync.

My friends in the audience said that some of the soloists were pretty weak but from where I sat, they sounded clearer than they had during any of the rehearsals. It's safe to say, however, that the SSO doesn't have a huge budget for bringing in big voices so it's probably a good idea to sit a little closer to the front for such concerts. Anywhere in the first 20 rows should be a great performance no matter who is singing. The front of Circle 1 should also have a nice sound plus a great view of the choir.

Although we kept being told that The Glagolitic Mass was a bloody difficult piece, I found it the easiest thing I'd done so far (in my vast experience of 4 concerts). There wasn't a lot of singing, it was really a matter of getting used to the timing and few weird chords. After Mahler, it was a price of cake.

This was a great season largely because Lim Yau was such a prince. I don't know if he's found enlightenment or Prozac, either way, he was sweetness and light for the whole season. Some members of the choir figured he was just on "best behavior" because of the visiting choirs. But we had visiting choirs last season and he was frequently grumpy. No there seems like something fundamental has happened there and it's great to see. It's very easy to forsake every other demand on my time Monday nights when I have the chance to be in the audience of this guy's wit and talent. Last year I often left rehearsals feeling quite discouraged but this year I've mostly left my Monday nights feeling inspired. Quite frankly, when he's in form, the man is brilliant.

Several members of the choir skipped out for this season. They seemed to be voting with their feet on Janacek. I admit it took me a while to get into it, but in the end, Janacek won me over. But it never occurred to me to take a break if I didn't care for the piece. That seemed part of the challenge of it all, committing yourself to the choir regardless of the repertoire on offer. It just seems the professional thing to do and in any case, most rewarding because it takes you outside your box. I think I take all this more seriously than many of my peers!

So next season it's Beethoven's 9th and Choral Fantasy.

Janacek

A Sense of Arrival

Imagine transplanting the ending of Beethoven's 5th Symphony to the beginning of the first movement. The effect is at best comical, at worst ridiculous. Why? Because the simple tonal affirmation and the rhythmic repetition of the tonic over large spans of time in completely unornamented form suggests ending rather than beginning. There is a sense of arrival, rather than departure.

The King

The King

This webpage cracks me up. Who's the one in the dinner jacket witht he hair?!:

The Words to The Glagolitic Mass...

After much searching, I have found it... The words to Janacek's Glagolitic Mass is here: MÅ A GLAGOLSKAJA. This saves me typing it out in order to have a handy one pager for practicing. With far too many consonants and a famine of vowels, ancient Czech is a bit of a tongue twister and takes some effort to get used to.

But that is the job at hand! The SSC is performing this November 20th. It's probably an acquired taste for most, so if you are going to the concert, get a recording first and practice listening - it's amazing how this can improve one's enjoyment of music.

The piece has great feeling of space - of mountains and valleys. There's a lot of folk influence, but the story is told in such a strange musical language that the listener may be dumfounded.

The music has a lot to offer but if the message is religious, it is frightening. The plea for mercy is so desperate that it is as if the choir was expecting a shower of brimstone at any moment.

Perhaps it is not God the composer fears but lonliness. I find the music makes more sense if I don't think of it as a mass but as a piece about longing and torment - love unrequited. I suppose for a soul tormented, love unrequited has God to blame so it amounts to the same thing. Apparently that was Janacek's state of mind and in that context, the music has a lot to communicate.


Failure

BECAUSE God put His adamantine fate
Between my sullen heart and its desire,
I swore that I would burst the Iron Gate,
Rise up, and curse Him on His throne of fire.
Earth shuddered at my crown of blasphemy,
But Love was as a flame about my feet;
Proud up the Golden Stair I strode; and beat
Thrice on the Gate, and entered with a cry!

All the great courts were quiet in the sun,
And full of vacant echoes: moss had grown
Over the glassy pavement, and begun
To creep within the dusty council-halls.
An idle wind blew round an empty throne
And stirred the heavy curtains on the walls.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). CollectedPoems. 1916.