Change of scene

This is a very occasional music blog.  And I'm writing now to signal the end of an era.  That is, I have decided to stop singing solo or in choirs (the bathroom is another matter!) though music remains a  very important part of my life - of our lives, since (as often) I am writing a blog while Mary practises the cello a few metres away.  My experiences as an amateur musician have shaped by life, and I often wish my career choices has centrered round music ratther than chemistry.

I started singing at primary school, and at the age of 10 I was successful in a local festival, singing soprano solo.  I still have the certificates from those early days,  My singing career in my teens was good - I still remember the words of the Quaker James Naylor set to music in one of 4 motets by Edmund Rubbra which I sang (one of 4 boy soloists) with the school choir in Saffron Walden church in the late 1950s, and the thrill of singing (age 14 - bass by that time!) with the combined choirs of 3 Quaker schools in the Verdi Requiem a few years later.  I expect I am not the only boy soprano who was teased for preferring singing to sport, but my early musical experiences continued after school with the exceptional encouragement of Philip Ledger, the first Director of Music at the University of East Anglia.  Even before he arrived we had staged Purcell's Dido & Aeneas, but he had bigger things in view and our choir sang Bach's St John Passion in Norwich Cathedral with Peter Pears as the evangelist in 1966.  

I had had singing lessons with teachers including James Gaddarn intermittently from the mid 1960s onwards, but I am the first to admit I never practised enough or developed a solid technique as a singer.  But it was, with enjoyment in the mid-1960s that I started to sing lieder with various accompanists.  My enduring love of Schubert began under the guidance of Joan Robinson, a brilliant pianist sadly no longer alive.  She introduced me to over 100 songs which we performed (shared with 2 women singers, Lisa Westerhout and Irmtraud Schorbach) at a succession of recitals and  residential  song weekends over several years.  As time went on Mary became a regular accompanist and made a fine job of accompanying the Schubert cycles (Die Schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang) in Wirksworth and elsewhere.  She still plays the piano well though less frequently now, having decided to spend more time on the cello.  More recently, in France, I encountered our friend Kamala Calderoni who became for a while my singing teacher and then conductor of the Bach choir BaBach which is happily still going strong.

At UEA we performed Britten's St Nicholas in Norwich before Phlip Ledger's arrival, and that music has stayed with me - in the 1990s Mary was conducting our community choir when I sang the difficult solo role in Wirksworth - a challenge I still remember with some pride.   Here in France Mary and I have shared many summer residential events in the Ain département run by the multi-talented Stéphane Fauth.  Originally these trips were for Mary as a part of chamber music ensembles, but quickly I was included to sing with the group of the moment, Stéphane making splendid arrangements for chamber group and tenor of things as varied as Vaughan Williams' Songs of travel and songs by Stephen Foster, whom I'd not heard of till then but which have also stayed in in my memory.

Viv singing at my 60th birthday party

One of my early (age 20+) experiences was of playing recorders at Ruth and Heinz Liebrecht's home in the converted chapel they lived in in Holly Mount.  That  led to more recorder playing including summer sourses in the course of  which I met Mary!  The experience of visiting Hollly Mount included frequent glimpses of the early music group Musica Reservata, whose influence has remained with me ever since.  I was part of the Caneterbury Waits through which we acquired assorted renaissance instruments - a consort of crumhorns, many more recorders, an early hurdy-gurdy,called a sinfonye, even a sackbut (early trombone) for a while.  The recorders have stayed with me, all the other instruments have passed on to people who use them better than I would now.  We are proud to been involved in our friend Vivien Ellis's encounter with early music, where she blended her own talents in mid-European folk singing with  the medieval style we first heard from Jantina Noorman in Musica Reservata.  I'm not sure now shat I'll do with the recorders, but they need playing to keep their voices     and I quite fancy resumiing some playing.

In France we have enjoyed a variety of good musical experiences arising out of the Association des Musiciens Amateurs (AMA) which holds regular 'play-ins' (instruments and  singers) much like the Society of Recorder Players events we used to go  to in England.  Through this we met Charles Whitfield and Pierre Bonniffet still living not far from us, in the Cevennes.  The baroque trio sonata group we had together for many years gave Mary and me great pleasure and it is sad that for various reasons we coud not continue for longer.  We discovered a lot of excellent music together, including the works of Corelli.

With Pierre, Charles and Mary in our baroque trio sonata group

However, things had to move on and I have become a listener rather than a performer.  Despite too  little practice, I enjoyed my singing life enormously as long as my reasonable ability to sight sing made up for the lack of hard work in old age.  I stopped in the end because I found myself floundering in some Bach - it was a shock to lose my place in a polychoral piece, and I realised my brain had slowed.  For so many years I had often been the  'only tenor' in various choirs, and it was time to pass on the responsibility while there were several around me.  It was a great pleasure to go this last weekend (for the first time in ages) to a BaBach concert, to hear Bach well sung and played and to re-meet many old friends in the choir.  

I did try the mandolin for a while, but found my brain and hands could not manage two things at once.  A shame - it is a lovely instrument - thanks to Annie for lending it to me

All our sons have music in their blood, but Jeff has taken his interest in drums even further, running very mushc sought-after drum-tuning workshops aross the world.