Five voices on collaboration: leisure-time and professional perspectives on singing together

How it happened

Can you take us back to the beginning and start with how it happened – how this whole project began?

Charlie: It was various different threads coming together. Ben and I had spoken a few years ago about doing something with the Chapter House Choir and Jervaulx Singers. But there was also […] the 50th anniversary concert, ten years earlier. The culmination of that programme was a new commission from Roderick Williams called 'Everyone Sang.' The brief Roddy was given was for three interlocking pieces – separate, distinct musical material for each of the three groups, but that would intertwine and work together as one coherent piece. That was a wonderful event, but the work didn't really receive much attention afterwards because of its very specific scoring.

We were approaching the 60th year, and I had a thought, with my youth choir hat on: it would be nice to re-perform some of the things the choir has commissioned over the years. And then from Jervaulx Singers' side – we've been working out what we want to be as a group, and how to grow our audience. We were thinking, how can we grow it more widely around the country, going into places where we don't have links? And so I came up with the idea – it’s a really great piece by Roddy, how could we use it to go into communities that we don't have links with? Working with [leisure-time] choirs just seemed like a really nice way to do it. 

From there I started looking at what other repertoire we could build around it. I knew that Owain Park had written a piece for Tenebrae and for community choirs, so I dug that out and completely fell in love with it. So from there the genesis of the project sprang forward. I talked to Ben, who very kindly was on board and up for it.
 

Ben: Charlie came to me and from the start it was an obviously great idea – particularly fitting in with our anniversary. One of the benefits of this one was the way we were able to work with Jervaulx Singers – putting time in beforehand, the opportunity to have sectional rehearsals, so it became more of a package event which we could, as a choir, benefit from.

What else appealed to you about this kind of collaboration?

Sarah: From my perspective, it's such an amazing opportunity to have these moments where we come together with the top of the industry to put on these performances – because as a [leisure-time] choir, we don't often get that opportunity. It means we can do those bigger works, give ourselves opportunities to perform things we wouldn't otherwise have. It's a really spectacular thing to be able to do. When those opportunities present themselves, we leap at them.

–and Will, what is it like working with professionals from your perspective in the Youth Choir? Is it nerve-wracking? 

Will: I think there's a little bit of nerves to it, you want to be at your best, you don't want to make mistakes and embarrass yourself, but ultimately I think it's more exciting than anything. Working with professional groups normally means you're doing a larger-scale concert, like the big pieces we did - you get to do pieces that are written for a much larger choir, and you can only do that when you're working with a larger professional group that can add that scale.
 

The experience

The programme drew on repertoire that was ambitious by any standard - getting three groups to grips with it, in a limited amount of combined rehearsal time, required some creative thinking.

What do you remember about your first rehearsal all together?

Ben: My abiding memory is the logistics – and I have to give all credit to Charlie for that one, who really took that on. Organising a choir of thirty to forty is quite enough of a logistical challenge. We were seventy-something that day. But it's that moment when you sort of see how it's all going to fit together – and seeing what a group like Jervaulx Singers bring to that rehearsal environment. Our big focus that day was really the two big polychoral pieces – the only pieces where each group had distinct parts – making sure we each understood our respective roles in them.

Sarah: My lasting memory of that first rehearsal was the warm-up. It was just a wall of sound, and I remember thinking – I've got goosebumps, this is going to be really exciting – and all we were doing was singing arpeggios. But that was really, really exciting, just to hear the combined forces. That's my lasting memory of that first one.

Mark: You had to study where you were sitting for about five minutes to work out exactly where you were! But, it's that thing of the professionalism of the professionals. There are some really tricky bits in the [Park] piece, and when the Jervaulx singers just – boom – they're straight into it. I know that's what professional musicians do, and hopefully good [leisure-time] groups like ours aim for that level of focus too. But there's another notch up, or several notches up, when you watch a professional group do that. It raises your own game, in terms of what you know can be done.

Charlie: One really lovely, pervading memory for me was when Ben and I got to have half an hour off during the sectionals – the eight Jervaulx pros divided into their four sections and went with the Chapter House Choir and Youth Choir, taking apart all of the trickiest corners of the repertoire. Wandering around hearing the altos talking about laryngeal placement, feeling the resonance on the soft palate – really, really specific stuff that Ben and I try our very best to do, but ultimately we're not singing teachers at the Royal Academy! That was a really lovely moment. I was so pleased we could manage to build that into this particular project.

Were there any other moments in rehearsal or performance that have really stuck with you?

Will: With the scale of the pieces, it's very hard to tell how it's going to sound when you're just practising as a youth choir in a cold church on a Tuesday evening. It's very hard to tell how it's all going to fit together. But then when you're all together, it all starts to make more sense, and it sounds really amazing. That was a big moment for me – that first joint rehearsal, actually hearing the multi-choir pieces all together and it all making sense, finally. 

Charlie: A really great moment for me was seeing the youth choir perform Howells' Requiem. Because of the complexity of the other music, we didn't really get through it in the rehearsal before the day. We got to one movement and two bars of another, or something like that.

Ben: I think we did three or four movements in nine minutes.

Charlie: It was a feat of efficient rehearsing. But [seeing] kids as young as fourteen singing the entire thing – I just thought that was a really great opportunity and a really great experience. I was just thinking of those Tuesdays in our rehearsals on our own, as twenty-five of us, thinking, 'this is really hard, how's this going to work?' And it's like – the wave of the whole [combined group] makes it fine. That was a really special moment.

Ben: The Howells was actually the highlight for me in the performance too. What really sticks with me is that on the day, the commitment and flexibility was just there right from the start.
 

From Jervaulx's perspective, what did the leisure-time choirs bring to the experience?

Charlie: What my Jervaulx pro singers came to me and said afterwards was that these sorts of gigs give a different kind of reward to when they're doing their own thing – where they might obsess over the most minute nuances and get satisfaction from achieving that. But for them, they were saying how impressive both choirs were – particularly the Youth Choir, just seeing them work like adults and perform at such a high level. There's a sense of everyone listening and steering the performance together, everyone aware of each other. The pros can just be there to support the sound, without having to lead with any effort. That's a really rewarding experience for them – and it was lovely to hear that they'd really enjoyed working with the singers.