BBC Proms 2007 Commission: We Turned On the Light
So here I am in a hall near Waterloo station doing a Tanzanian war dance. I've already had my back massaged by a stranger and done the same to the soprano to my left, trying hard not be overly-familiar with her bra straps. As for the ritual of alternately touching my left ear with my right hand while holding my nose with the other, followed by slapping both thighs…impossible.
It is choir practice. Obviously. It's all to do with breathing and bonding and it is, apparently, essential, especially as my fellow ear pullers are strangers who have answered an ad on a BBC web site for enthusiastic amateur singers only to find that they are rehearsing to sing in a Prom. Not just one Prom but two, with two conductors, two orchestras and 500 singers from ten choirs. Yes, we are the London Rabble – there’s another from Glasgow - a title we come to embrace with pride, referring to the singers from such as the Huddersfield Choral Society and the BBC Symphony Chorus as the 'posh choirs'.
We’re going to appear at the Royal Albert Hall, no less.
The piece we amateurs are to perform is the world premiere of We Turned on the Light ( I know it was described as first realisation in the programme, but come on, this was to be our 10 minutes of fame). It is a pessimistic piece about the impact of global warming with succinctly apocalyptic words by Caryl Churchill and music by Orlando Gough.
Let's be honest. It's a bit odd. We are baffled. Well, I am. This is a long way from the requiems and masses which are the staple of most amateur choirs. What is the tremulous tenor - especially one like me who can't read music and does not belong to a choir - meant to make of a chorus which goes: huzi da vinda veeda hup daveeda izi da maioh? Or indeed: hop g stad up b stop g stad b stad up?
From which bit of the composer's feverish imagination did those incantations come from as he strode, chanting and muttering to himself on the South Downs near his home in Brighton. Will it ever make sense?
"It's like meccano piece made of bits," he told this paper, "You rehearse separately and then bolt it all together."
To help him assemble the meccano he relies on some of the team from his improvisation group, The Shout, who have their own world premiere with a piece called Stand, a haunting working of extracts from famous speeches which have been delivered in Trafalgar Square.
It takes all the wiles of an ebullient instructress, Adey Grummet, to get us into shape. My concentration wavers when the tenor next to me tells me she starred as a pole dancer in Jerry Springer, The Opera. It’s enough to put anyone off his huzi davindas.
But there's no doubt whose show it is. The minute he walked in the joint you could tell he is a real spellbinder. 53-year-old Orlando Gough is a cross between a young Syd Barrett and Jonathan Miller, though judging by the susurration of admiration among the sopranos he has considerably more sax appeal. When he conducts, oscillating his hips in the manner of a 40's band leader, the altos, frankly, are all over the place. Stupendous, he says, thumbs up, after rehearsal, "thank you sooo much" and how we cheer and clap in return, flattered, but not for a moment fooled, that we were anything like stupendous.
Lincoln Abbotts, who is learning consultant to The Proms and helps us make sense of what is going on, says: "With Orlando's writing it doesn't matter what the words mean which is very liberating. You listen to the sounds and feel the rhythm without getting bogged down in lyrics and pronunciation."
One day to go. I've been to three rehearsals and I'm beginning to understand the bit about the rhythm but, whatever Lincoln says, those non-lyrics are impossible and I am spending every waking moment studying the score. American tourists on the District Line look on sympathetically at this poor creature hunched in his seat, muttering "ek ap b fisiti ek ap". Is this some quaint British chant to end the drought?
What on earth is all this going to sound like? How embarrassing will this be? Before I have the chance to lose the tickets I have bought for friends and relatives it begins to make sense.
Another hall and another round of exercises; imagine you are throwing a puppy over a cliff (Wheeeeeeh. Splat).
Good for the breathing, I suppose.
Waggle your hands in the air and say 'fttt'.
Thank God, we're spared unfamiliar bra straps.
Anyway, just after the last wheeeeh splat we find ourselves united with the other choirs and the first bit of the meccano set takes shape as we discover what that chorus sounds like, how that line fits in and above all, how it meshes with our own contribution.
And then we are in the Royal Albert Hall sitting alongside the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. On stage. T he Rabbles, the Shout, the polished posh choirs are joined by the blasting of the horns and pounding of the drums, the charge of the cellos and the crashing of cymbals. At last, the meccano set is welded together. It makes sense, even the words mean something. Phew.
Now we are a rabble with a cause. Everyone, from Mary Jones, the 65-year-old social worker for whom singing has become everything, the insurance broker, the auctioneer from Brighton, the actuary who belongs to an evangelical choir, the 25-year-old architect student who is inspired to take up singing again after seven years, the Radio London presenter, and 31-year-old Shirley Slaymaker, fresh from a tour singing Motown classics.
But will we pull it off?
Can we live up to Orlando Gough's messianic belief that: "The voice can produce a far bigger range of sounds than any instrument but it can also make wonderful melodies that breathe."
Or will we simply make a ghastly racket, to be greeted with jeers and slow hand claps, derided by the audience of 5,000 in Albert's grea t Xanadu?
Half an hour to go, we are gripped with the jocularity of the truly nervous. The fear of starting too late, leaping in too early, forgetting the words. After Gershwin, Poulenc and assured performances by the three youth choirs, we are on our feet and off. I catch the eye of a Prommer and miss two hoh hwee ah ds, feel faint and distinctly shaky at the knees, consonants drop like flies, lines are missed, words jumbled. I sing the soprano line and miss my own. We clatter and whisper our way to the denouement. It is over. Ten minutes feels like ten seconds. And, amazing, the audience is clapping. I find myself surprisingly moved and I understand why performers and footballers are always bursting into tears.
For the second performance, veterans all by now, under the ferocious guidance of Robertson, who gave it such energy and push that it looks as if he was going to leap off his podium and race up into the choir stalls. (One music critic wrote that the first performance was ‘spine-tinglingly visceral’ and the ‘second cooler, clearer and marginally less effective’ I thought it was the other way around).
At the post-performance drinks we are euphoric and over-excited, convinced we had done something extraordinary.
Mary Jones, 65. soprano, sums it up for everyone: " This was very important to me, like jumping on a train without knowing where I was going. I loved singing as a girl but I was put off by a fearsome teacher who would hit me on the hand with a ruler held sideways if we hadn't learned all the notes properly. It put me off until my fifties. Now my ambition is to do the best I can to fulfil my potential. Now I'm drunk on music."
Nick Kenyon, Director of the BBC Proms said it was the "greatest Proms adventure of all time.” The Daily Telegraph saluted its ‘sheer joyous energy.’
No one will disagree and no one will forget it. One day I might meet a fellow Rabbler again and with the verbal equivalent of a masonic hand shake, just say huzi da vinda veeda and we'll remember where we were on July 29 2006.
Stonking? Definitely.
Tall Stories
An Article written by Tom Morris
Scattered through the cool white corridors of the National Portrait Gallery is a captivating array of people, including: an azure-eyed bombshell from Sidney; a mild-mannered rastafarian in faded denim; an ebulliant man-mountain from Catford: a tiny and sleek Sri Lankan with a waistcoat more luminous than a cat’s-eye. If you could shatter the heart of London and dig out the brightest bits, this is what they would look like. And this is what they would sound like too. For this extraordinary and diverse band of people is a choir that has exploded onto the London cultural scene only four years after its founding. The choir is called The Shout.
Each singer is peering intently at a chosen portrait, and each is singing a song. At barely more than a whisper, the song seems to be offered to the portrait as a love gift, and as you walk past, the different songs from different people merge, overlap, harmonise and clash. Then the world seems to swing on its hinges. The singers turn away from their pictures and walk slowly towards the central foyer, singing more loudly and more clearly as they go. The audience is engulfed in a flood of sound, and follows like charmed children wherever the choir will lead them.
A year later, The Shout is at BAC, the experimental South London theatre and co-commissioner of the sung drama Tall Stories. Onto the stage walk the same group of sixteen singers, with the same simple concentration and the same rich diversity of appearance and sound. Once again, each singer is singing softly and each is singing their own song: a Romanian folk-song, a Yiddish lament, an Italian ballad, a spiritual. But above them is Katrina Lindsay’s stark, angular set. As they weave between its towering girders, they recall the people who built the world’s greatest skyline. They are immigrants to the land where dreams supposedly come true, New York.
“Tall Stories was intentionally a piece about the choir,” says Gough. “Of course anything which is about life is good subject matter for a choir. But when Richard and I began the choir, we wanted to write a piece, which was about the choir very particularly. We began with the idea of the Tower of Babel but we wanted something that touched more on modern life. Then we saw photographs by Lewis Hine of the construction of the Empire State Building.” Having found their subject, the songs emerged in a rush of composition.
The foundations of Tall Stories, however, had been laid in 1996, when The Shout’s founders – the operatic baritone Richard Chew and the idiosyncratic composer Orlando Gough – collaborated on a piece of dance theatre by the acclaimed company Second Stride. Called Hotel, the show used dance, music, 13 singers and a libretto by Caryl Churchill to explore the lonely worlds of the guests in a single hotel on a single night. “The performers had to be very diverse,” explains Gough – “we had to audition people to play particular characters, and they all had to sing.” What startled him was that by looking for these roles – a singing little old French lady, a singing African-English salesman, a singing American tourist – Gough discovered a world of different singing styles which he never dreamt had existed. “I suddenly felt there was a whole life out there that I didn’t know about. We were middle-class white boys with a good education behind us. We were looking for performers from very different backgrounds who were going to bring their experience into whatever we did together.” And with the experience came the voices.
Near the beginning of Tall Stories is a piece in which immigrants arrive at Ellis Island looking for a new life. “In turn each member of the choir presents themselves to an imaginary immigration officer,” explains Gough. “We tried to match the solos to the singers so that they were singing things that made sense to them – in some cases very direct sense.” So Manickam Yogeswaran, a Tamil singer, sings about coming from a place where there’s been a famine. Carol Grimes, who's an orphan, sings “Will I ever see her again?” “I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the singers to inhabit those characters,” says Gough. “So the characters are very close to themselves.”
As in Hotel, alongside the characters came the different musical backgrounds of the singers. Yogeswaran, known in the choir as “Yoga”, is highly trained in Indian classical music and uses a different rhythmic base and different scales from that used in Western music. In one song, “Underworld”, he improvises within his own style/parameters. Musically, this shouldn’t work – but it provides one of the most memorable and vivid sounds of the show. “He seems to tap into something which isn’t to do with chord changes at all,” explains Gough. “He comes from a tradition which doesn’t go in for chord changes as a basis for improvisation. There’s a bluesy kind of harmony going on and Yoga arises from somewhere deep inside this harmony and produces an amazing solo line which nobody else would have thought of.” You wouldn’t find this in any other choir. “Richard just said to him one day “Can you do something here?” and he came up with this extraordinary line. The choir can just conjure up things that Richard and I couldn’t conceivably think of.”
None of this releases the singers from the discipline of meticulous accuracy in choral singing. “I’m all in favour of assimilation,” says Gough. “It’s a political thing. It would be very possible just to use Yoga as a kind of exotic bird, but I’m also interested that he sings the kind of material that the rest of the choir sings as well. What he does as an exotic bird arises out of what’s already going on.” No surprise that the choir is widely praised for the almost uncanny precision of its sound, achieved without scores and without a conductor. In “Silence,” which comes late in the work, the company is spread across the stage as if they’ve fallen in their tracks at the end of a wild dance. They appear each in their own worlds, bewildered by their own very particular agonies and anxieties. But the music is entirely homophonic - the singers singing in rhythmic unison throughout – and is performed wonderfully in time.
“It’s very different from the first thing we hear in Tall Stories - sixteen people singing different folk songs,” says Gough. “Here we have them all singing in harmony. It’s a strange piece because it’s about being absolutely in your own world in your own head and yet having a collective experience. It’s as if there are 16 people in 16 houses all over the city who are all having the same thought at 4 o’clock in the morning.”
Given the musical complexity of the piece, it may seem foolhardy to be attempting to stage it as well. The brilliant director Rufus Norris, winner of this year’s Evening Standard Best Newcomer Award regards the project as “insanely ambitious.” Together with designer Katrina Lindsay, he has built a location and a shape within which the stories of the songs can exist. It is not a play. Not an opera. But it is undeniably dramatic.
For Orlando Gough, however, the very concept of the choir has always been dramatic. “It’s always seemed to me that there is an inherent dramatic potential in singing - particularly because one tends to be singing about things and as soon as you’ve got a song which is about something it has dramatic implications. Whenever I’m composing, I think of the people, I think of the theatre and the music is built on that.”
For the Shout, thinking of the theatre and thinking of the people is the same thing. Their scores are not marked with the names of the parts – soprano, mezzo-soprano, high tenor, bass – but with the names of the people who will sing them - Adey, Louise, Wills, Jeremy. That’s how it’s composed, that’s how it’s performed and – for most audiences – that’s how it’s remembered too.”