Tamesis Issue 228 November 2011

Editorial

There are several new dates for your diary this month, and here is some information about the next two. There are already a lot of bookings for the Christmas event on 4th December. While there are still some spaces left, at the moment priority has to be given to loud wind and tenors, which we need more of. If you�re one of these rare people, please book straight away (closing date 20th November). Even if you�re not, do send your booking anyway as it�s quite likely you�ll get in from the waiting list. If you�re coming, please read the information on page 6. It may look familiar because it�s adapted from what I wrote last year, but it�s not the same so do read it!

On Saturday 21st January we have a workshop in Oxford city centre at St. Peter's College. Don�t try to take your car into the city centre. It�s very near the coach station and bus stops and a short walk from the railway station. There are several Park and Ride car parks and those of bus pass age can use them to travel free into Oxford. For more information about the workshop see the Events listing at the back and the enclosed form.

Important - please make sure you read the article on page 5 about how to submit information for Tamesis, because it�s taking me far too long to extract it from the variety of emails, posters and links I�m sent. Don�t miss also the proposed finance policy on the same page, which could be discussed at the AGM, and the extremely good value theatre outing mentioned by David Fletcher in his Chairman�s Chat

I�ve been asked to say that Tamesis chamber choir based in Reading has nothing to do with us, and they don�t sing early music!

And finally, though it seems very early to say it, Happy Christmas to all our readers!

Victoria Helby

AGM AGENDA


Sunday 4th December 2011 at 5.30 approx.
(after the Christmas workshop in Amersham)
1. Apologies for absence
2. Approval of the minutes of last meeting
3. Chairman's report
4. Secretary's report
5. Treasurer's report
6. Election of officers and committee
7. Any other business

Chairman�s Chat

The second event: music by Thomas Tomkins with James Weeks went very well and confirmed my view that Tomkins has been unjustly neglected. However it was marred by a subsequent complaint from the church administrator that we had left the church it in a less than satisfactory state. Apparently some people had taken coffee cups into the church, contrary to the notice in the hall forbidding this, and we had also failed to restore the chairs to their original positions. After an apologetic letter and an extra donation it looks as if we will be allowed to use St Andrew's again. We must all take responsibility for clearing up such things as used cups and must take careful note of, perhaps photographing, the layout of the chairs or other items that we move to avoid this happening in future.

Apropos of this, may I say that I'm always grateful for assistance in packing up our tea-making equipment but please don't include items that aren't clearly marked TVEMF or in the case of cutlery aren't marked with light green paint. On more than one occasion when unpacking I have been embarrassed to discover jugs and bowls which belong to our hosts and have had to make arrangements to return them.

The third event was the Baroque Day, which took place on the 5th of November - did anyone play Handel's music for the Royal Fireworks I wonder? I enjoyed four assorted combinations of keyboard, theorbo, strings, recorders and even a session with cornetts, sackbut and curtal. Many thanks to Victoria Helby for organising with her customary skill.

We have had on offer from the Royal Shakespeare Company of a group rate for a new production opening in the Swan Theatre in Stratford. I don't know how our members will feel about pastiche early music but if enough people are interested we could perhaps organise a trip - see below for details.

David Fletcher

Theatre offer Written on the Heart is a new piece of writing by Guardian writer and playwright David Edgar and is about the making of the King James Bible. The set design is the inside of a beautiful church, complete with stained glass windows and beautiful, original costumes. There will be 5 professional singers on stage throughout the play, performing the originally composed music by award winning composer Paul Englishby, all in an Early Music style of composers such as Byrd and Dowland.

There is more information about the play, including an interview with the director Gregory Doran and rehearsal photos at www.rsc.org.uk/written and you can find out more about Paul Englishby, the composer, at www.englishby.com

The best performance looks like the 1.30pm one on Saturday the 10th December. The normal group booking rate is �5 off top price tickets but we have been offered a special group discount price of �12, which is cheaper than the cheapest standard ticket price available. If you are interested then get in touch with David Fletcher as soon as possible.

New Member

How to send information to Tamesis

You can either put the information directly in an email or attach a Word document. I can�t open documents ending with .docx so you need to save them in an earlier version of Word. It takes a surprisingly long time to extract the relevant information from a combination of an email, a poster and a Word document, and there are many events and concerts sent to me each month, so don�t ask me to do it! Please avoid using a lot of formatting, italics, coloured type etc, and above all don�t ask me to extract information from posters, PDFs and websites. It is also helpful if the subject line of your email makes it readily identifiable. So a subject such as "Christmas concert 17th Dec 2011" would make it clear where to file it and, quite importantly, when to delete it. By all means include Tamesis or TVEMF in the title if you like, but don�t put just that. Thanks.

Victoria Helby

TVEMF Finance Policy

Comments are welcomed on these proposals either by emailing the Treasurer, David King (treasurertvemf.org) or through attendance at the forthcoming AGM on 4th December in Amersham.

Christmas workshop arrangements

Victoria Helby

British Library Early Music Online

I heard about this project a month ago and was quite enthusiastic at first. My enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by my initial experience when I had a quick look at some pieces that caught my eye. I loaded a page of In epitaphiis / Gasparis Othmari to see what the quality is like. The answer is that it's perfectly adequate, being 300 dots per inch grey-scale. Sadly when I read to the bottom of the very extensive notes I discovered that it said "Physical Description: 4 part books" but just above that is remarks that "only the Bassus part book is extant". My next choice was what looked like a fine collection of SATB motets by Brumel, Obrecht, Josquin, Mouton et al and it took quite a while to spot the note saying "Copy at K.1.d.4. Imperfect: the Superius part only". I had similar experiences with some pieces by Clemens, shelfmarks K.2.b.11.(2.) and K.2.b.11.(5.) which have the Bassus part only.

Having read the small print and established that you have found a complete set of part books and that you are prepared to cope with the wide variety of clefs, you are then faced with the problem of downloading and printing them. The part books have been scanned against a black background to reduce the effect of print-through from the reverse side - still quite severe in some cases. Each opening of the book has been scanned as a double-page spread, typically about 15" by 6" surrounded by a substantial black border. This doesn't fit well on an A4 sheet unless the two pages are cropped and repositioned one above the other. I have software which will do this, as well as converting to black and white using a suitable threshold value which removes most of the print-through. I also have a means of doing bulk downloads to facilitate the process but I'm not sure if I'm up for singing from baritone clef or playing from soprano clef. If anyone is interested in specific collections then I might be willing to prepare printable PDFs."

I wrote to Dr. Stephen Rose of Royal Holloway, University of London, who is in charge of publishing the music and he agreed that better indexing was required. He is also prepared to listen to any constructive comments that people might have. I gather that it is hoped to fill in some of the gaps using material from other collections. To a musician it does seem sad that part books should be held in different libraries but I suppose that to a librarian they are just books!

David Fletcher

Tomkins in Ealing

Thomas Tomkins (1573-1656) is the only English madrigalist of any significance to have survived into the repressive years of the Protectorate, an age in which everyone was to be virtuous and there were to be no more cakes and ale; �if any man wished to be merry�, exhorted one of the Cromwellian divines, �let him sing psalms�. Tomkins� one collection of mainly secular music, the Set of Songs of 3, 4, 5 and 6 parts, was published in 1622. It contains 28 compositions, and is unusual in two respects. One is that, contrary to the more usual custom, the Set was not dedicated to a single person; instead, each piece has an individual dedication. Some are to members of his family, several of whom were musicians, and others to madrigalists and lutenists of the period; the dedicatees include his �ancient and much revered Master, William Byrd�, as well as John Dowland, John Cooper (Coprario), Nathanael Giles, who was master of the choristers of the Chapel Royal when Tomkins succeeded Edmund Hooper as an organist there and Orlando Gibbons who was the senior organist until his death in 1625. The other is that four of these �songs� were settings of scripture words, one of them being the well-known When David heard that Absalom was slain.

Tomkins, in so far as he has attracted comment, has had rather a mixed press, and has not figured to any great extent in the anthologies. Of over a hundred anthems listed in the New Grove, only two appear in the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems and three others in the recent collection of Tudor Anthems edited by Lionel Pike (Novello, 2010). As to the madrigals, Fellowes, in The English Madrigal Composers, (first published in 1916, second edition 1948) describes the Set as �the last volume of first- rate importance in the great series of English madrigals which began with Byrd�s Psalms, Songs and Sonnets (1588)�, though he does say that the other three settings of scripture words in the Set �do not quite reach the same standard as the rest of the volume�, while the writer of the article in the New Grove remarks that �the book gets off to a dull start, for none of the three-part madrigals except the last (Love, cease tormenting) is at all memorable�. However, the writer is more positive about the four- and five-part compositions.

No doubt to lead us gently into Tomkins, James began by taking us through the five- part To the shady woods, which is one of the nine madrigals in the set with a fa-la refrain and which, as Fellowes observes, is one of the more conventional of that type and adds little to the development of that form by Morley and Weelkes. It displays none of the rhythmic invention of (for example) See, see the shepherds� queen which is one of the five madrigals of his in the Oxford Book of English Madrigals. This was followed by the considerably more demanding Almighty God, The Fountain of All Wisdom - something of a steeplechase with a set of gymnastic exercises at the end in the shape of the 13-bar Amen. A return to perhaps more familiar ground ended the morning session, in which we tackled Adieu, ye city-pris�ning towers and were encouraged to emulate the chirping of the birds, though whether this rendering would in practice have been an inducement to our loves �to delay not� but �to come and stay not� is perhaps open to doubt.

Refreshed in our various ways, we had a short warm-up to banish the post-prandial somnolence before attempting the piece probably most familiar to us, When David heard. It was a new insight (at any rate to your reviewer) to have pointed out to us the contrasting ways in which we should perform the opening section, the words of which are in reported speech, and the direct speech of David�s lament. This was followed by probably the most well-known of all the madrigals, Oyez (or, as the Oxford Book of English Madrigals for some inexplicable reason has it, O yes !) Has any found a lad ? This variant is somewhat reminiscent of Misadventures at Margate in the second series of Barham�s Ingoldsby Legends, in which the narrator is taken in by a juvenile con-artist who makes off with all his belongings and consequently sends the town crier round to find him, with conspicuous lack of success, recounting that �But, when the Crier cried O Yes, the people cried O No!�. Agreement having been reached on Oyez, we engaged in a spirited if not always accurate attack on the madrigal, fortified by thoughts of tea to come.

James saved the most ambitious piece till the final session, telling us that we ought to go home exhausted. The seven-part O sing unto the Lord a new song from Musica Deo Sacra is a work of great splendour with many contrasts, going from the firm but reverent setting of the opening words, to the dancing rhythms of �Sing praise unto him�, then to the majestic �let Israel rejoice� and finally (it being the portion of the blest to sing eternal psalms, or so it is said) to the more contemplative �And let the children of Sion ever sing� ending with the long-drawn out Alleluia; though even the heavenly choir might have had difficulty with some of the underlay, particularly the variants of �children�. If James wanted us to go home exhausted, he achieved his object in that respect; but we also went home refreshed after a most enjoyable encounter with an inexplicably neglected composer. Our warmest thanks go not only to James for his patient and good-humoured direction but to Nicola Wilson-Smith for organising the event and (without which no event and no review can, for this reviewer, ever be truly complete) to Mary Reynor for yet another admirable display of the cake-maker�s art.

Sidney Ross

News of Members� Activities

At a TVEMF event I attended earlier this year the conductor, Will Carslake, said plaintively to the singers standing in front of him, �I�ve lost my fearless sopranos�. What he meant was that, where they had been singing beautifully a minute earlier, in the phrase at hand they had collapsed: lost their direction and confidence, and with it pitch and rhythm. We are born to sing. Some neuroscientists think that speech developed from singing. Our most basic instrument is the body. Patricia Hammond, a professional singer who has had Alexander Technique lessons, told me: �Dance when you can no longer walk, and sing when you can no longer talk�. Think of the film �The King�s Speech�, where therapist Lionel Logue has the king sing about events too emotional to talk about. Why is the result when we sing often less than we have in our mind�s eye? Why do singers and actors believe that Alexander Technique lessons can help them use their voices better? It�s not always about the vocal cords: it is about the rest of the instrument, the body. AT teachers often start a series of lessons by looking at posture. The singer is at the heart of the Renaissance and Baroque repertoire: the messenger of the poetry, word expression and emotion � the affect � the composer wanted to convey. The treatises on all instruments stress that they should model themselves on the singer. If you want to see a fantastic, expressive singer who uses herself well, watch the YouTube clip of Emma Kirkby singing �Thou art gone up on high� from The Messiah (http://youtu.be/n09yLx3kKtc). She is the instrument through whom the music flows. Note her posture: nothing forced, nothing held. Nothing impedes the music. The vocal instrument is unique. The singer is the instrument, and the instrument exists only when it is being used. The vocal cords are not fully engaged when speaking; only in singing are the vocal cords used to the full. Suspended in the larynx, they are held in place by a web of muscles. This means that tension and stiffness in the instrument � the whole body � affects the quality of the sound. The body is a vibrating column of air. Think of what happens to a garden hose: if it�s kinked, the water is blocked. The same is true of the air column: inappropriate tension acts like a kink in a hose, stopping the free flow of air, and that affects the sound.

There is no point trying to hold yourself up;
that only creates more tension. Look at the
diagram. The two small illustrations on the
right show common postural
misconceptions: the upper illustration shows
what happens when the singer loses
confidence and collapses back into her
habitual stance; the bottom shows someone
who has been told to �stand up straight�.
Note the vertical line in both cases. It falls
outside the line of balance, especially the
balance of the nick and head. The
illustration on the left, by contrast, shows a
vertical line going through the points of the
skeleton designed to bear weight: the head
is balanced on top of the spine, and aligned
with the shoulder sockets, hip joints, knees

How we stand determines how we sound. Start with the shoes you wear while singing: it�s important to have good contact and feel supported by the ground. Moving up, think of softness (not collapse) in front of the ankles and behind the knees. And think of �hips over heels.� Look at the diagram on the left again. If you�re not sure what I mean, find me at a TVEMF event and ask me to demonstrate.

This leaves more space for the lungs, allowing the air to flow in and out, rather like waves on the beach, rather than being pulled in and pushed out.

Too often we rely on what �feels right�, trying to micromanage our bodies, especially in difficult passages, and lose track of the larger goal. Standing well, having good posture is not the end, it�s the means to expressing the song. Trust the message of the song; if you can�t speak it, said Patricia, you can�t sing it. And if you�re trying to get it �right� chances are that won�t happen. At that event where Will Carslake was conducting, he said he�d rather have a good wrong note than a tentative right one. �What do you have to lose?� he asked. Better by far to maintain poise and direction to create the best conditions to allow the voice to emerge by itself.

The final article will be for plucked instruments.

Shelagh Aitken

Singing music from 1500 to 1900:
style, technique, knowledge, assertion, experiment

The 16 essays presented on this website are re-workings of papers given at the conference. Richard Bethell writes: �In my view, these proceedings make a valuable contribution towards historically informed vocal practice. Some essays include links to vocal illustrations, using recordings made at the University or taken from external sources. In addition, two contributions (those from Elisabeth Belgrano and myself) include an illustrated video or embedded sound clips providing essential support to the authors� arguments. Taken collectively, the essays certainly cover most of the conference themes flagged up in our �call for papers� (see website introduction). However, vocal vibrato (tackled by four contributors) was by far the most popular and controversial topic.�

Opportunities to make music

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