For the Love of an Echo

The Glory of Peterskirche, Vienna

They are beginning to sound good - really good. All the choral pieces have slicked up, and most of the singers are, at last, using their brains as well as their voices!! The tone is good, and I think almost everyone knows the music off copy now!

Which is great, since the concerts are friday and saturday this week!

I forget how beautiful sacred music is, when I spend so much of my time teaching secular music, ranging from opera to song to light music. There is such strength in sacred music - perhaps because so much of it was composed by devout believers. Unless a composer has been commissioned to write a mass or a modern oratorio, I can't imagine why anyone would want to write about God unless they had a strong belief.

The lovely setting of the Tallis Canon - Glory to Thee my God this night - so simple and yet so effective, is based on the redoubtable canon form. Literally everyone sings the same tune at two bar intervals and it all fits together like a miraculous musical jigsaw, just like the children's rounds, London's Burning, or Kookaburra sings in the old Gum Tree.

Simplicity is, in the end, always best, and I love the way the arrangement begins in unison and finally ends with a majestic explosion of sound in four parts with a high soprano descant thrown in for good measure.

I am so looking forward to hearing it in a large hall with a bit of resonance, so the sound can trumpet around the place and send a thrill up and down the spines of the singers as well as the audience.

There really is nothing like a good echoy venue, such as the wondrous Peterskirche in Vienna, where the echo lasted about 2 days! The thrill of singing in that beautiful place will live with everyone in the group. The first strains of our music rang around us all, up and down the mountainous walls and around the ornate dome, giving each singer, old and young, professional and amateur the musical memory of a lifetime.

No wonder Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Mahler and Bruckner wrote huge sacred works to be performed in all those fabulous Viennese basilicas, and for the delight of listeners whose belief was strong enough to bear the beauty of it.