O Canada

Posted on 16 December, 2011 by Bronwyn

Four years ago today, I was just about to leave Vancouver after a really wonderful three and a half months living in Canada. And a couple of weeks ago, I picked up the travel journal that I had kept during that time and began leafing through its pages of scrawl and glued-in mementos, and was swamped with recollections of many little things I had forgotten. One of the things I wrote the most about was my experience of singing with the choir at Christ Church Cathedral, and the huge amount of new music I discovered by singing new repertoire every week. I had never been an ongoing member of a church choir before and nor was I even a regular churchgoer, but a chance meeting with Rupert Lang at a musica intima concert led me to ask on impulse whether he’d have room in the choir for a soprano for a couple of months. It was probably the best decision I could have made, opening me up to new music and new friends, who welcomed this crazy Aussie and made me feel at home. Since I was only working sporadically in Vancouver, the choir also gave my time there some structure with weekly rehearsals and services, followed by Sunday lunches at Milestones on Robson. There were a few other performances too, like the ‘By Request’ concert where the audience voted for the repertoire in advance, and Advent Lessons & Carols. So much music! This was probably where I discovered the adrenalin rush that comes from singing music on only one rehearsal (or less), and I loved it. And four years ago today I sang my last service with them. This entry was from my final week in Vancouver:

Tuesday 11 December 2007

My day of departure draws nearer and nearer, and not only is my list of things [still to do] growing faster than it is shrinking, but I’m finding that I’m increasingly reflective about all my amazing experiences here and all the things I will miss. My time in Vancouver has certainly been defined by music probably more than anything else. I have heard some of the best choirs in the country, and sung with one of them too. Even fairly ordinary hymns are a joy to sing with the Cathedral choir. But I think my number one performance experience with the choir was singing Rupert’s ‘Kontakion’. It is just so moving, simple without being simplistic, as Tony put it perfectly the other day. The choir’s recording with Bruce doing the solo is just unbelievable. I could listen to it over and over again and not tire of it.

The first piece of Rupert’s I ever heard was ‘Agneau de Dieu’ when musica intima did it at a special Evensong in September. I knew then that I had to sing this piece one day so I made a special request to Rupert to include it in a service before I leave, so we’re doing it this Sunday, my last time singing with the choir.

On the left there is the congregational refrain for Kontakion – tilt your head and sing along if you like.

And the piece where it all began – musica intima remains one of my favourite choirs ever, especially for the way they communicate in performance. Amazing what you can achieve without a conductor, eh?

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The Piper of Sandgate

Posted on 9 December, 2011 by Bronwyn

Last year sometime – I don’t really remember when – after an otherwise ordinary day at work, I walked back to my car parked on the Sandgate esplanade and was treated to a very brief but spontaneously delightful musical experience. Sandgate is a northern suburb of Brisbane, about half an hour north of the city, and situated on Bramble Bay, which is between the mainland and Moreton Island. When the tide is in and the sun dances over the water it’s a really gorgeous spot. And when the tide is out it reveals a vast expanse of mud flats which is much less exciting but somehow equally pleasing. Either way, it was always quite nice to start and finish the day with a water view, even if I did spend the hours in between staring at a computer or arguing with the photocopier.

This particular day was really just like any other in terms of the runners and dog-walkers and cyclists that peppered the walking track which runs the whole length of the bay. Except for one thing that I had never seen before. Or since, for that matter. Because the tide was out the huge plain of sand and mud and rock pools was visible, and so a few people were walking out near the water line, maybe a hundred metres or so from the esplanade. But it was the music that grabbed my attention first; from somewhere I could hear bagpipes playing Mull of Kintyre, the song Paul McCartney wrote about his own little patch of Scotland on the Kintyre Peninsula. Strolling aimlessly out on the mudflats was a lone piper, playing to his heart’s content, just the one song over and over again.

Now, I wouldn’t really have described myself as a huge bagpipe fan, but there’s something quite magical about them when heard from a distance, when the sound is just carried by the wind. That, and it’s really quite a nice song. I sat down on the rock wall that afternoon and listened until the sun went down behind me and the breeze turned chilly. Then I got into my car and sang to myself the whole way home.

Mull of Kintyre, recorded here by the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards

Mull of Kintyre, oh mist rolling in from the sea,
My desire is always to be here, oh mull of Kintyre.

Far have I travelled and much have I seen
Dark distant mountains with valleys of green.
Past painted deserts the sunsets on fire
As he carries me home to the mull of Kintyre.

Sweep through the heather like deer in the glen
Carry me back to the days I knew then.
Nights when we sang like a heavenly choir
Of the life and the time of the mull of Kintyre.

Smiles in the sunshine and tears in the rain
Still take me back to where my memories remain.
Flickering embers growing higher and higher,
As they carry me back to the mull of Kintyre.

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Welcoming Summer

Posted on 2 December, 2011 by Bronwyn

The Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane released their new CD last Sunday. I happen to be on it, because Brisbane Chamber Choir doubles as the Cathedral Chamber Choir, but that’s not why I’m sharing this piece with you today. It’s called We Welcome Summer (both this track and the whole album) which is perfectly timed for the beginning of December in Australia. Or so you would think. Last night it was actually cold, and we’ve only had about two minutes of sun in the past 24 hours, so today I’ve decided that I am ironically welcoming summer instead. Or willing it into existence. Since moving to the Sunshine State my body has definitely decided it would rather be on the warm side than on the cool side, which is perfect for about nine months of the year.

I think the thing I love most about this track is the text by Australian poet, cartoonist, artist and whimsical social commentator Michael Leunig. I’ve been a Leunig fan for many years now. I have most of his books (and recall one Christmas when I was most disappointed that my brother was given his latest collection of cartoons and I was given… well… something much less exciting – I can’t remember what). When I lived in Melbourne I would look forward to opening up the Saturday Age for his weekly inspired take on the world. I’ve collected all of his calendars for the past however many years, and even framed a few of the pages to hang on my wall the following year. I am, in short, a fan. Of his work and of his overall philosophy toward life.

I only know of a few of his works that have been set by composers and most of them actually don’t grab me as much as I had expected. But I do enjoy this piece by Clare Maclean. It’s languorous and lazy, just the way a hot summer day feels, when the air is thick and heavy and still and humid, and you don’t feel like doing anything except sitting on the back verandah with a fan blowing on you, a good book in one hand and a bowl of watermelon in the other. And even in the shade you can feel the sun baking the earth, sometimes oppressively. That’s what this music feels like to me.

This particular text is from one of his non-denominational and actually very human prayer collections, called The Prayer Tree:

“We welcome summer and the glorious blessing of light. We are rich with light, we are loved by the sun. Let us empty our hearts into the brilliance. Let us pour our darkness into the glorious forgiving light. For this loving abundance let us give thanks and offer our joy. Amen.”

And just in case you haven’t had the pleasure of being acquainted with Michael Leunig’s other work, here are a few of my favourites.

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Bernstein in the outback

Posted on 27 November, 2011 by Bronwyn

In July 2008 I sang (for the sixth time) with the National Youth Choir of Australia for its first ever Northern Territory tour. Every year the choir meets in a major Australian city to work with a renowned conductor, different each season, and then generally tour a regional area, bringing high quality performances to areas that see many fewer live music concerts than the capitals.

Beginning in Darwin, we spent an intensive week rehearsing a wide variety of repertoire, among which was Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. The work was completely new to me, as it was to most of the other 26 singers being directed by guest Canadian conductor Tony Funk, but it was a rewarding challenge to sing in Hebrew, especially at such a rollicking pace and with complex rhythms. After performing in Darwin, we took the music on the road and headed south for the Red Centre. What an amazing trip, with a fantastically talented and engaged group of young Aussie singers! Some of my favourite people in the whole wide world are singers who have been part of NYCA.

There were many highlights during those two weeks: an unplanned backyard concert in Katherine, breaking into song in Stanley Chasm to ‘test the acoustic’, singing with the Aboriginal women’s choir at the Hermannsburg Mission, and singing under the stars in the Yulara amphitheatre. But for some reason the performance I remember most was the concert we gave in the tiny, historic Catholic church in Tennant Creek, about two thirds of the way to Alice Springs. “The middle of nowhere”, by all reasonable definitions.

We only had an audience of about thirty, but in the very small church this was enough to make the building look almost full. Our programme was met with favourable applause and big smiles, and I think singers and audience alike all had a lovely evening. But when we got to the Bernstein (which we sang accompanied on the church’s electronic keyboard), with its explosive opening chords, the poignant and lyrical solo of the second movement and the beautiful legato lines of the third, I remember pausing to take in where I was and thinking, “I wonder whether this is the first time there’s been a live performance of the Psalms here in Tennant Creek, population about 3000.” And I wonder whether it ever occurred to Lenny Bernstein when he wrote it in 1965 that one day a choir of young Australians from across the country would ever gather there to sing his beautiful music, under a tin roof, under a vast desert sky.

The second movement of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, with the choir from Clare College, Cambridge and countertenor Lawrence Zazzo

Posted in Choirs & Choral Music, Travel | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Finlandia in Finland

Posted on 25 November, 2011 by Bronwyn

Since I said in my first post that one of the things that inspired me to resurrect this blog and take it in a new direction was the Classic 100 Stories project by the ABC, I thought maybe that was a good place to start. Here’s the post I wrote for the project a few weeks ago, but since I don’t know how long the submissions will stay on their site, I’ll include it below as well.

For me, music and travel go hand in hand. A bit over three years ago I was in Helsinki for a few days, and nearing the end of an amazing ten month round-the-world trip. I was a bit sad, a bit happy and very reflective now it was about to come to an end and I would head home to Melbourne.

After dumping my bag at what felt like the thousandth hostel on my trip, I walked to the nearby Sibelius Park and Monument. The monument was built in the 60s and is probably unlike any other monument dedicated to a composer – it’s made out of some 600 hollow steel pipes which have been welded together in a wave formation, like some kind of surrealist pipe organ. On impulse I took my iPod from my bag, which held only a shamefully small four gigabytes of carefully chosen music for my trip, but I had managed to include the powerful Finlandia.

Even though it looked like it was about to rain, I sat down on the bare rock beneath the monument and listened to the ominous opening brass and thundering percussion, which gives way to the more delicate woodwind, followed by the sonority of the strings. The feeling that came over me on that early summer evening was unforgettable, especially listening to the beautiful hymn-like section in the middle as I watched the dark clouds roll in across the bay and islands to the west. When the music finished and it started to rain, I meandered slowly back to the hostel with no desire to be anywhere else in the world except right there. It seems like such a small thing, but those eight and a half minutes were the most special part of my visit.

So that’s my Finlandia story, forever fixed in my mind as the moment when the music suddenly became real to me. I should mention that it was only AFTER I had voted for it in the Classic 100 and written the story above that I realised the first incarnation of the piece was actually written in 1899 and so technically doesn’t make it into the 20th century. However, its influence on Finnish culture since then has been profound, especially during the Second World War when Russia was threatening to invade the already-independent Finland. Perhaps this could still allow it to be called one of the most important works of the twentieth century. Anyway, someone else had already voted for it before I got to the ABC website, so I obviously wasn’t the only one to make that error!

If you haven’t listened to the piece before, here’s what I think is the best recording on YouTube, by the London Symphony Orchestra. But the Lahti Symphony Orchestra performance here is also pretty special. Could you get a more dramatic and foreboding opening to a piece of music?

And it’s possible that if you’re not familiar with the whole orchestral piece, you might know the section from the middle that has become a well-known hymn and Finland’s national anthem, but it has various different words set to it. ‘Be Still, My Soul’ is probably the best known English text, but here is the ensemble Cantus singing another version.

I hope you have enjoyed your first ‘taste’ of Music Tasting – I encourage you to leave comments letting me know your thoughts, or sharing your own stories. As the site evolves I look forward to connecting more people with music through storytelling. Till next time, happy listening.

Posted in Orchestras & Instrumental Music, Travel | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Beginnings

Posted on 25 November, 2011 by Bronwyn

“Let’s start at the very beginning – a very good place to start.”

– Maria, The Sound of Music

Hello, and welcome to Music Tasting, a site for people interested in listening to, reading about, thinking about and talking about music. Here, I hope that anyone who wishes to deepen their understanding and love of music can come to learn and share, regardless how extensive (or how absent) their musical background might be.

This site was born for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I realised about a year ago that not only do I really enjoy performing and listening to music, I also enjoy talking and writing about it. It nourishes me to be able to make music myself, but the continual process of learning, reading, researching and discussing music is also a huge part of that. So by creating a place where I can share what I’m discovering as I go, this blog becomes a way to document that journey.

Secondly, I wanted to create a place that talks about music in a way that is accessible and relevant to both musicians and non-musicians alike. The world of classical music in particular can often seem like an utterly foreign land for those who have either no involvement in it or for those on the periphery. Sometimes I think musicians can unintentionally widen this chasm rather than bridge it, making it harder for people to engage with classical music and to want to know more about it. Why would you go to a concert of music you’ve never heard of, or turn up the dial on your local classical music station, if no one is giving you an enticing reason to do so, and if it seems like everyone’s speaking a different language? Music Tasting aims to be an inclusive community that breaks down some of those barriers. Everyone’s invited to the party.

A little something about me

My name’s Bronwyn and I live in Brisbane, Australia. I’ve been here since October 2009 but before that I was a Melbourne girl my whole life, apart from some time spent living and working overseas. I was in Vancouver, Canada and Cork, Ireland for about 3 months each back in 2007-8, and hopped across the US and around Europe for a bit while I was over there. And not that you really need to know, but if such things interest you, I’m now in my early thirties.

I have been a singer and musician for much of my life, but it’s not really my profession. At uni I studied history and politics, which I loved at the time but feels like aeons ago to me now. Professionally, my background is mostly in administration, event coordination and a bit of marketing, some of it connected with music, some of it not. But I’ve done a range of things in various capacities for small businesses and not-for-profits connected with music education, and done lots of voluntary work for community choirs that I’ve been part of or with music festivals. I sang for seven seasons with the National Youth Choir of Australia (until I begrudgingly gave in to their definition of youth), was a member of Concordis for ten years, and owe much of my earlier music education to the Young Voices of Melbourne. There were a few other choirs as well, in Melbourne and overseas, but if I listed them all I’d be here a while. Currently I sing with Brisbane Chamber Choir and Fusion. I also play the piano (sporadically).

But I am not a music teacher. I’m not a conductor. I don’t perform for a living. I don’t have a music degree. I am occasionally invited to do paid solo or ensemble work (weddings and the like), but this isn’t something I aspire to make a living from. But music is my passion, and it feeds my soul.

I first sang in a choir at the age of five, standing in the front row of a fairly standard thrown-together-to-sing-a-few-songs-at-the-end-of-year-concert kind of group from Monash Primary School. I was always a fairly earnest child, eager to please, mostly well-behaved (well, my mum may have some contradictory examples), curious, open to new experiences. So I was never the type to consider singing in a choir boring. And yet I had no idea what a world it would eventually open me up to.

The first performance (that I can recall) of this first choir I ever sang in, was in the large auditorium of Robert Blackwood Hall at Monash University, just up the road. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve stood on that stage since, and that first performance is just a hazy memory now. However, I do know that one of the songs we sang was The Rainbow Connection, of Kermit the Frog fame, from the original Muppet Movie from 1983:

“Why are there so many songs about rainbows

And what’s on the other side?

Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,

And rainbows have nothing to hide.

So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it –

I know they’re wrong, wait and see,

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection –

the lovers, the dreamers and me.”

There are another two verses, which I won’t share with you here, but two and a half decades later I still know every word of the song. In fact, the song has been something of a recurring theme at various times in my life and is heavily loaded with memories of people and places and occasions. Most are great memories; some are bittersweet. But what I do know is that hearing it – or even the mention of it – can transport me right back to another time or place. Sometimes so vividly it’s like I’m right there again.

Music can do that. I’m sure most people won’t need any convincing of that either, as nearly everyone has a favourite song, or a favourite album, something from a time in their lives that just wouldn’t have been the same without the accompanying soundtrack. Right now I won’t go into what it is about music that does that, and why it is that music can have such a hold over us. But I guess one of the first points I want to make is that the ability to love music – and to feel its power and its significance and its relevance to our lives – is universal. To love a piece of music, any piece of music, you don’t need to have studied it, or analysed it. You don’t need an education. You don’t need a piece of paper with a qualification. You don’t need anyone’s permission.

Now might be a good time to add a short confession: I actually started Music Tasting about ten months ago, when a couple of things in my life were different and I had a slightly different focus in mind for the site. I posted all of two entries (they’re gone now, sorry) but never told anyone about the blog, and thus never had a readership to whom I was accountable. So if you were one of the seven people who did happen to stumble across this site in its previous, very-similar-but-not-identical incarnation, then I owe you an apology. I’m very sorry. I got all excited… and then didn’t follow through. My bad. In my defence, I launched the blog about a week before I decided (with relative suddenness) to resign from the job I was currently in, so my priorities shifted when I had to start hunting around for new employment and work out what would come next. And shortly after that, in a spectacular fit of clumsiness, I managed to sprain an ankle and both wrists and was out of action for a couple of weeks. It’s an uninteresting story, involving a zumba class, a very hard floor and a lack of coordination – you can use your imagination for the rest. And then two weeks after that I caught whooping cough. Which was kind of also sort of maybe pneumonia, according to the x-rays my doctor sent me to get. So yeah, woe is me. Or was me, I should say.

But now that I have the sob story out of the way, I should finish telling you about my purpose and renewed interest in getting this blog up and running again.

Music and Storytelling

About a month ago, the wonderful ABC Classic FM radio station that we’re so privileged to have in Australia ran another one of its Classic 100 competitions, this time of music from the 20th century. When I say competition, I suppose I mean that all the music is competing against all the other music for the coveted number one position, plus the 99 ‘runner up’ spots. So listeners were able to vote for up to ten of their favourite pieces written after 1900 (and presumably before 2000) that they thought should make it in to such a prestigious list. Starting tomorrow they’ll be broadcasting all 100 pieces that made the list in an on-air countdown, and the top 10 will be performed live by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra next weekend.

While I’m looking forward to hearing what makes the cut, and probably discovering a tonne of new music, I was actually really interested in the companion Classic 100 Stories they’re running over at ABC Pool, the community forum. The Classic 100 list itself will probably feature a lot of very well-known music, much of it amazing I’m sure, but I know that there will be pieces I absolutely adore that won’t be in there, just because no one knows about them enough to vote for them. And that’s fine. They don’t need to be on a list; I’ll still know they’re amazing. But what they’re asking for on the Pool is for people to submit stories behind the pieces of music they voted for. Maybe it’s stories of the place where they first heard it, someone it reminds them of, a particular performance they were involved in… it could be anything.

Well this idea really intrigued me, because I began to realise that stories are really my doorway into loving music. Because I haven’t studied music at a tertiary level, I don’t think analytically about music very often, at least not when I’m just listening to it. I do when it’s required of me to perform it well, when I might start considering harmonic structure and phrasing, or stylistic things relevant to the period, or the use of text or word painting. But these are almost always secondary for me. It’s the associations of people, places, events, moods and emotions that really fix a piece of music inside me as special and memorable. I’m hoping that there are other people out there for whom this is the case as well. I’d like to find them and have a chat. I think we’d get along.

So it sparked an idea in me. This is what Music Tasting is, I’ve decided. It’s a place to share stories, and to use those stories to connect music and people. Because music is all about people. The people who write it, play it, conduct it, sing it, buy it, listen to it, live it. I’m guilty of forgetting this sometimes, of course, as perhaps we all are from time to time. When I’m busy rehearsing a piece of music it’s easy to forget that the person who wrote it had something to say, had a story, and was a living, breathing, flawed human being like myself. When I listen to a CD, it doesn’t usually occur to me to wonder about the life of the performer, their story, and what the music means to them. And when I’m on stage performing I don’t give a second thought to who might be in the audience, what they’re thinking, and what stories they brought with them that day. But these are the details that make music personal and meaningful rather than abstract, so this is what I plan to explore here. Music has as many stories as it does listeners, so I’m going to tell some of them.

Hoping you’ll join me on the journey.

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