Six geeeeeeese a-laying

Not for the first time, I find myself trying to type on my laptop while my cat insists on sleeping in my lap. I could move him, yes... but he generally crawls straight back there. And he's so cute!

Last week didn't entirely go according to plan, but it was very great fun. We started at FC United, where we discovered that the other band had cancelled, so we offered to sing some extra songs to help out :-) Oddly enough, although these went down very well, there was a totally different atmosphere to the one in previous years. Usually their request is for two specific football chants ("Pride of All Europe" and "The Twelve Days of Cantona" (both of which we have a cappella arrangements of) plus "Fairytale of New York" (which they love us to sing because it amuses them when posh people sing rude words - no, I have no idea why they think we're posh!) plus a couple of general Christmas songs. So it's usually a set of five songs, of which at least three are quite rowdy, and by the end, we generally end up singing along to the crowd rather than the other way round! But this time, we did a load of extra Christmas (non-football) songs, and they asked for the football ones to be at the end. The unexpected result was that they didn't join in at all, until the very last verse of "The Twelve Days of Cantona". I think the earlier songs put them in a listening mood. I still can't decide whether this was a good thing or a bad thing!

One thing that was definitely good was that as a result of singing for longer in the bar, we weren't carolling outside for as long, so we didn't get as cold as usual (plus it wasn't a very cold day anyway - unlike today! Brrrrr!) I'd managed to almost lose my voice by then, though, as a result of being too enthusiastic with my Slade shouting (i.e. the "IT'S CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAAAAAS!!!" bit at the end of Merry Xmas Everybody). And Claire was just recovering from a sore throat, so the fact that we sang the chorus of the Champions' League Anthem three times didn't help her at all, as the soprano part is quite high and very exposed. (You can hear the whole anthem on the official UEFA site.)

We left Gigg Lane just as the match started, by which time we'd sung "The Twelve Days of Cantona" THREE TIMES - it was the best song for getting fans to put money in the collecting tins. (The money wasn't going to us, I hasten to add - it was all in aid of the club's Development Fund, with which they plan to buy their own ground.) Traffic into the city centre was predictably horrendous, but we still got to the City Library (the new one, on Deansgate) in plenty of time for our 4pm performance. The librarians were actually waiting for us at the door, which was very nice, and there was a bigger audience than we've ever had there. It was a really nice gig - we ended up adding an unplanned a cappella carol to the set when our guitarist broke a string and needed a few minutes to fix it, and then (even though we'd gone well over our time as a result of this) they insisted on an encore. Claire wanted to repeat 'O Holy Night' because her husband had arrived late and missed it, and it's his favourite, but I could hardly sing at all by that point, having just done the Slade shouting AGAIN. (I did consider asking someone else to do it, but I do look forward to shouting in a library, and usually no-one else WANTS to do it!) So we went with 'Santa Claus is Coming to Town', because our kazoo player could cover me in that :-) (I think my favourite thing in the whole performance was the kazoo solo in Merry Christmas Everyone (that's the Shakin' Stevens one). We really need to record that with her there!)

(Which reminds me: Radio 3 are hosting a concert for Red Nose Day next year, and every member of the audience will be given a kazoo. Excellent.)

I had a carol service on the Sunday at which I'd agreed to sing, and by Saturday night I was thinking I wouldn't be able to. It wouldn't have been the end of the world, though, because there were several other altos (it was only Saturday when it would have been a real problem if I couldn't sing). But by Sunday afternoon I felt quite a bit better (it helps that I live alone, so I didn't have to talk to anyone other than the cat) and it turned out I could sing OK. But maybe I was incubating something anyway, because on Monday and Tuesday I felt like death warmed up (well, not even warmed up all that much!) I went to work, because I don't get paid if I don't, but on both days I went to bed as soon as I got home and slept for 12 hours (well, interrupted by regular instances of sitting up to blow my nose). By Wednesday I felt a bit better, but that's the day the cough began. I went to choir anyway (although I didn't attempt to actually sing), partly because I wouldn't have been able to sing in the carol concerts if I hadn't, but mainly because I didn't want to miss the return of Jamie!



I felt much better by Saturday, but hadn't actually tried singing until that afternoon. It turned out to be mostly OK, although the annoying tickly cough kept coming back from time to time, most often when I was humming. Once I realised this, I just had a rest in the humming bits, and it was much better. The other strategy was to keep a cough sweet in my mouth throughout the whole of each concert (not the same sweet, obviously!) because if the tickle came, I found that putting a cough sweet in at that point didn't work fast enough to suppress it. The only downside of this is that it's quite hard to sing with a cough sweet in your mouth - if you've never tried it, you may be surprised to hear that the main problem is excess saliva! Particularly in songs with lots of words (The Twelve Days of Christmas caused a bit of dribbling, between you and me...)

The carol concerts have been great fun so far, though (and quite eventful, what with projectile vomiting in the children's choir and someone passing out in the main choir - paramedics had to be called, but thankfully she is fine now). I imagine everyone's highlight is the children's choir singing Santa in Waikiki - with actions and acting and accessories! It is the best thing EVER, and I wish I could have a video of it. (I can't find anything out about the song - which apparently is by Stewart and Albrecht, arranged by Alwyn Green - or any recordings of it -does anyone know anything?) I love our world premiere of On Christmas Night as well, though, and I also really like The Crown of Roses. And of course Sleigh Ride is as fabulous as ever - this year the trombones have bought themselves special red instruments just for the occasion!



Oh, and everyone was in awe of Libby's hat:



(There wasn't a LOT of silliness in the orchestra - the red trombones is about as silly as they got - but I have faith that they'll redress the balance at the last concert tonight!)

And if you haven't seen the FABULOUS sparkly stags in my photo at the top of this post, do go and examine them next time you're in town. They're in front of the new council offices at First Street, and I think they're great. It's POSSIBLE that they're supposed to be reindeer, I suppose, but they are so very like Harry Potter's Patronus charm that I can't believe it's just a coincidence. Here's what they look like in daylight and then from the same angle at night. (They twinkle perfectly, because most of the lights stay on all the time while a few of them go on and off randomly. That's how twinkling should be done. Look, someone even took a video of it!)





The Big Picture doesn't have our stags, but it does have lots of other great Christmas photos.

Carol Ann Duffy introduces a whole load of new poems which may well become the carols of the future. Some of them are very lovely.

Bob Stanley, in the Guardian, has a guide to writing the perfect Christmas pop song. Step 3 is the most important ("Use sleigh bells!")

Hurry down the chimney tonight

Not sure where the last month has gone, but I'm here now! *waves* Actually, I do know where it went. A much-higher-than-usual proportion of it was spent singing, and it feels as if all the rest of the time was spent either on buses, typing letters for psychiatrists, or going to bed early with a hot water bottle in order to warm my feet. Oh, and trying to sell my house. The repossession order has now been given, but because the house was already up for sale (on the advice of the CAB) before the final court date, the judge allowed me three months before the repossession comes into force. So if I can sell the house before 28th February all is (relatively) well - if not, that's when I get evicted. Fingers crossed.

As for singing, it hasn't all been choral, but most of it has. We did the Cherubini Requiem on 11th November, and it went very well - not that that was ever in any doubt, when Lovely Markus was conducting. He gave us an inspiring speech during the warmup before the concert, which I wish I'd recorded, because I can't remember a thing he said now - just that it was inspirational! Also, I will long remember the bit at the start of whichever movement it was (probably the Dies Irae) that had the surprising gong. The image of Lovely Markus standing with one arm pointing upwards until the sound died away will stay with me for quite a while.

(There were a couple of reviews: Manchester Evening News and Music Web. And the Times, but I can't link to that.)

A couple of weeks later, I went to Poole for the weekend, at the invitation of the Bournemouth Male Voice Choir. I've done a few arrangements for them this year, and they were performing a couple of them at a concert at the Lighthouse in Poole, so they asked me to go along and listen. After I agreed to this, they also asked whether I could be persuaded to sing a couple of songs, and I was absolutely thrilled. No-one EVER asks me to sing on my own (well, I can think of one time a few years ago, but on that occasion I was asked to stand in for someone else - I wasn't the first choice) - it's always "Jocelyn, could you sort out a group of singers?" So, with (as always) lots of help from Maggie, I spent weeks preparing. I don't think I've ever practised so much as I have in the past month.

I wasn't nervous until I got there. But when I saw the size of the venue - and heard that 750 tickets had been sold - I was a little freaked out! But then I had a bit of an epiphany. My panicked mind had been screaming "I'VE NEVER SUNG IN SUCH A BIG HALL! OR IN FRONT OF SO MANY PEOPLE!!!" But then it occurred to me that of course I *have* sung in a much bigger hall (many, many times) and in front of considerably more people (many, many times). And the technical skills I use when I'm being a choral singer are more or less the same skills required to sing a solo. So all I had to do was to just sing as I usually do, and ignore the fact that there was no-one standing next to me. (The thing that our ex-choral director used to do, in which he made us spread out until we all had space around us in the performance, REALLY helped with this - I wish we still did that.) This train of thought made all the difference, and my nerves vanished. (I won't say that my performance was spectacularly good, because I'm not - yet! - a spectacularly good singer. But I enjoyed it, and I think it was OK.)

I really enjoyed listening to the rest of the concert, too. It was billed as "A Festival of Male Voices" (I did NOT know that when I agreed to sing, and I felt quite uncomfortable when I found out! But I apologised to the audience for being female, and I think they forgave me.) and consisted of four male voice choirs, who performed separately and together. I was pleased to find that the Bournemouth Male Voice Choir (my hosts) were by far the best (in my opinion), and I loved hearing them sing my arrangements. Here's an interesting thing, too: all the other choirs were a bit out of tune, and I had in fact never in my life heard a male voice choir that didn't sing a bit flat. (Well, apart from occasionally Only Men Aloud.) But Bournemouth were in tune just about all the way through, and I believe that a large part of this was due to the fact that they sang "jumbled up", i.e. people on the same voice part were not all physically grouped together.

(Also, not only were they the only choir that didn't have entirely white hair, one of their tenors - a 16-year-old boy - had BRIGHT BLUE hair, and it looked great!)

The singing didn't stop there. Last weekend was Messiah with Stephen Layton, and I think most of us agreed that it was the best one in years. There were quite a few new ideas, but the main thing that made it so good was that he insisted that people WATCH him, and refused to go on until they did. This broke people out of the autopilot mindset that so often pervades Messiah, and by the time even the SOPRANOS had realised that they couldn't look down at their scores as often as they usually do, it was starting to sound amazing!

It went very well on the night. The only thing that made it not perfect was that the Hallelujah Chorus was spoiled (for me) by the fact that (like so many conductors) he gave the audience a signal to stand, rather than letting them do it if and when they felt like it. I can understand the reason why conductors do this, but the fact remains that it ruins my most favourite moment: when the audience stands up without any prompting, in small non-simultaneous groups all over the hall, it always moves me to tears, and I'm usually still wiping my eyes by the end of the whole work. But when the audience are INSTRUCTED to stand, I remain completely unmoved. Yes, it makes that much difference.

However, he almost made up for spoiling my favourite bit by what he did at the end - a BRILLIANT idea that I can't believe no-one's thought of before. For Messiah, you see, we don't sit in the choir seats - we sit on the actual platform with all the musicians, because it's only a small orchestra. The organist usually sits on the platform too, rather than up on high at the organ console - they have a chamber organ that they wheel in specially. Well, when we started on Sunday there were TWO organs on the platform: the chamber organ, at which the organist was sitting, and another much larger portable organ console, which appeared to be connected somehow to the big full Hall organ. The organist remained at the chamber organ for almost the entire concert, and the audience (if they were paying attention) must have wondered why on earth the large extra console was on stage at all. Their curiosity was only satisfied at the very end. On the LAST PAGE of the Amen Chorus, the organist stopped playing the chamber organ, went over to the full organ console, and played just the very last few bars of the piece with full organ. The effect was AMAZING - I loved it. (Needless to say, those people who believe Messiah should only ever be done with one to a part thought it was awful, but what do they know? Stephen Layton said that he does it with both small forces and large, and since we had a large choir on this occasion, it made sense to him to go for a large sound. I think it was an inspired decision.)

Even more singing this week. On Tuesday I was in Macclesfield with Pleiades for an open mic night at Ronnie's Bar. Unfortunately they'd decided to start an hour later than usual, and we couldn't wait that long, but we asked whether we could sing a couple of songs unplugged to the people in the bar before the event started - since we'd gone all that way specially! - and they agreed. So we did get to sing a bit, at least. Such a pity, though - that's the first time we'd managed to get everyone there at the same time (we'd been before with fewer of us), and I doubt we'll manage it again - people won't want to go all that way for something that might be cancelled or postponed. Oh well.

Tomorrow's a huge day. At lunchtime we (Pleiades again) are singing for FC United, who have been much in the news lately. Sadly they went out of the FA Cup this week, but they did so with their heads held high, in front of a home crowd of 7000 - not bad for a non-league club! (There's another good article about their history here.)

We won't be able to watch the FC United match tomorrow, because just before it starts we will have to stop singing and dash to town for the annual Henry Watson Christmas Music Day. This year it's actually in the new temporary City Library on Deansgate, of course. The musical bits of the day are happening on the first floor (the music library is on the second floor, but there's not much room there) and we're the finale, starting at 4pm. Do come along and listen if you're in town - it's very informal, so you can pop in and out as you choose. I'm very much looking forward to it - particularly the bit where I get to shout!

The following weekend has the choir's series of carol concerts, but I'll try and post again before then. We're VERY pleased that our ex-choral director is coming back to conduct them, though!

Right, I'd better give you some of the links I've got saved, so I can delete some bookmarks.

Alison turned up on Messiah day wearing an all-purple outfit, so I mocked her for obviously being old. This led to the realisation that apparently not everyone knows the poem about old ladies wearing purple, so here it is: Warning, by Jenny Joseph.

I'm sure you've all seen this by now, but in case you haven't: Food Court Choral Flash Mob.

Chris Rowbury (From the Front of the Choir) hates choirs that dress identically. It's a thought-provoking post, and I can't say I really agree with it, but I haven't had time yet to articulate my objections in a comment. I will one day, though, Chris! I'm much more in agreement with another post of his, though: this one is about why people think they can't sing.

Two more practice tips from Stephen Hough: even if you only have a few minutes, you can still do some useful work, and scales and other exercises really can help.

Have you joined Eric Whitacre's virtual choir yet? I keep meaning to but haven't had time yet. A month ago he pointed out that he'd only received 160 videos despite 11000 people downloading the sheet music. Last week he was up to 300 videos, but reminded us that there's only a month left.

As usual, several interesting articles from Tom Service in the Guardian: carrying a cello could keep you out of the UK; several lost Vivaldi manuscripts have been found recently; there's now a prize for orchestral players who contribute most to the team; Alex Ross wrote an article about why modern classical music is unpopular, and Tom responds; he talks to countertenors Andreas Scholl and Philippe Jaroussky (and there's another interview with Jaroussky in the New York Times); Radio 3 is to play nothing but Mozart during the first twelve days of January, and Tom comments on this; and, finally, he brings us good news: twenty new works, lasting twelve minutes each, which have been commissioned for the 2012 Olympics (you see what they did there?)

Also from the Guardian: Leon McCawley writes about Samuel Barber; Stephen Sondheim gives his opinion of other songwriters (I found this INCREDIBLY fascinating, mainly because he has such a low opinion of so many of them!); an intriguing article by Robert Darnton about singing in the streets of 18th-century Paris; and Esther Addley writes about the history of Christmas carols. (A Cappella News, in fact, says that Christmas carolling was started by drunks.)

Cecilia Bartoli performed at the Bridgewater Hall last week - I'm told it was an amazing concert - and Manchester Confidential talked to her beforehand, about castrati and other things. (They also have an article about the difficult times ahead for our orchestra.)

Did you know there was a choir for homeless people in London? Me neither. They're called The Choir With No Name, and you can see them sing here.

Barbara told me about this: The Virtual Piano. It refused to load for me the first few times I tried, but you might be in luck - and it's very clever. There's a piano keyboard on the screen, and you can play it by clicking with the mouse if you like, but you can also use the keyboard. If you start with the number keys at the top of your keyboard (1 to 0) and then move through each row of letters in turn (from Q to M) you will play every note. If you hold the shift key down as well, you sharpen the note. Clever!

Rachel told me about a fabulous busker that she saw recently on Brazenose Street. She didn't recognise the instrument he was playing, but when she investigated she realised it was a Hang Drum. I may have to go and look.

You'll have seen these before, but they're funny, so I'll mention them again: The Twelve Days of Christmas by John Julius Norwich, and The Twelve Days of Christmas by Brian Sibley. They are very similar, and I have no idea which came first.

Here's a clever thing: the Avian Vocalisations Centre at Michigan State University. It is an online resource containing lots of recordings of birdsong.

Animal Aid are begging people not to give goats (or anything similar) for Christmas: here's why.

The Guardian points out that it makes no sense to grit the roads but not the pavements. I couldn't agree more - I haven't fallen over yet this year, but that's mainly because I've given up trying to walk on pavements and am walking in the road instead - it feels safer. The Royal Oldham Hospital deserves many Brownie points for being the only place I've been this month where the pavements have been kept free of ice. Everywhere else is lethal!

They also have a great article about jokes from other countries, and this appeared on the same day as Boing Boing's article on glorious, elaborate, profane insults of the world.

If you, like me, have always wanted to travel to get a really good view of the Northern Lights, here's a guide that explains your options.

The Big Picture has another set of great snow photos, and also an ongoing Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. Pretty!