And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

I'm writing this on Sunday night, and we've just finished giving a concert. I'm in a small group of singers, the Gaudete Singers, who perform a cappella. This means that we sing without accompaniment, mainly because we can't afford to hire an orchestra or band to accompany us. The concert was of 16th Century English church music, which I'm sure is not everybody's cup of tea, but the audience that turned up seemed to enjoy it. We performed in a small local church.

My first task was to put on my dress suit, which requires me to tie a bow tie. Mrs G presented me with a dress shirt and bow tie about six months ago and I’m still struggling to learn how to tie it. At present, I have to look at a video on YouTube on how to tie a bow tie, then run upstairs where the only mirror in the house is, to tie it. When things go wrong, I run back down to the computer and look at the instructions again. Once the bow tie is tied, I don’t touch it and trust it to stay in place for the few hours of the concert.

There are at present 18 of us in the choir, and the audience was about 30. I always consider it a successful concert if there are more in the audience than on the stage, so by that criterion this was a good one. I'm in the bass section along with three others. For most of the pieces, the four of us sang together, but for one we split into two high basses (including me) and two low basses. This is very demanding, particularly since the other high bass who was singing with me has been sick for the last four or five days; we didn't even know if he would turn up, so I didn't want to rely on him being there to sing all the notes for me.

The main item of the concert was The Western Wynde Mass by John Taverner. England has two composers with very similar names: John Taverner was 16th Century, while John Tavener is modern, composing in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Apparently, though, the modern guy is a direct descendant of the ancient guy. Taverner’s Mass is written for four voices: soprano, alto, tenor and bass. We have four or five people on each of these voices. It is interesting because it is based on a folk song of the time: the Western Wynde. The main tune of this song is sung by one of the four voices, while the other three voices sing all sorts of complicated and rhythmic stuff around the tune. It is one of the trickiest things I have ever sung, because it is so old that I wasn't familiar with the style and couldn't predict what it was going to do next. Nevertheless, we eventually learned all the notes, all the peculiar turns and all the strange rhythms. I'd say that I only fully knew how to sing the thing on the Monday before the concert. It went well: there were the inevitable dodgy moments when one voice or another gets lost or comes in flat or too late, but overall it was a fine performance. The audience certainly loved it.

The mass is divided into four sections which would originally have been sung at four specific times during the celebration of the liturgical mass: the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Benedictus, and the Agnus Dei. Most masses have an additional fifth section at the start, the Kyrie, but this one doesn’t for some reason. We decided, rather than singing the whole thing in one go, we’d break it up by putting other songs in between the different sections. We used material by contemporaneous composers, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. I have to admit these were lovely pieces. Two of our singers also play the viol, a sort of old-fashioned string instrument similar to a violin or cello. They’re in a group of four, the Dublin Viols. These played a few tunes in the middle of each half of the concert, to give us and the audience a break.

16th Century music is odd to my ears. They hadn’t really invented the idea of chords, nor of the modern major key that most of us are familiar with. Most of the Mass was written in a mode, the scale of 8 notes you get if you play the white notes on a piano starting on the note D. This is like a minor scale, but with a few unfamiliar notes to catch you out. The harmony of the piece did unexpected things at various points, so that I found it difficult to sight read, a bit like trying to read Shakespeare—it’s familiar yet not familiar.

My daughters and my sister attended the concert and were impressed. After the concert we all headed back to our house where we had pizzas, beer and, later, champagne; I should have been writing this report, but instead I was filling up on Moet et Chandon, so this Post article is slightly shorter than normal.

The group’s next concert will be more modern material, although we haven’t chosen it yet. That’s work for tomorrow’s meeting...

Gnomon

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