choral – echoing.life

It is strange to reflect that it has now been two years since the first lockdown measures were introduced by the UK government. Strange too is the sense that so much of the last two years has happened outside of normal time, in some other existence. As current events, all too harsh and disconcerting, seize the discourse of the moment, the fracture from the recent past seems all the greater. That time and all that preceded it seem a very foreign country indeed: their chronology has slipped and twisted, even as their threads have unwound.

As time goes, it has been both productive and immobile, time-escaping and ageing.

In 2020, a member of Calmus Ensemble contacted me to ask if I would be willing to write a short piece for their Mozaik project – a musical postcard from the age of the coronavirus. What emerged was ‘all our numbered lives’, a short, anger-inspired requiem for the lives lost to a disease that – had humans been able to acknowledge mistakes, to collaborate, to co-operate, to look beyond the day-to-day scraping by of business and economy and political chicanery and national (or personal) pride and playing the game – could have been entirely stopped.

For all the lessons we, our leaders, could have learned, about the value of compassion and care in human affairs, there is anger still at the failure to do so: national (and personal) pride stand us on the edge of total war; politically motivated parsimony will cast millions into unwarranted poverty; and, the four horsemen will continue to stalk amongst us for the sake of those who would be our leaders’ desire to win whatever games they deem important. Games in which people’s lives are tokens, numbered and counted and drawn into forecasts, charts, infographics, arbitrary borders, and imagined communities; games in which humans are weighed without humanity.

And so, here still, and still more relevant than I could ever have imagined, ‘all our numbered lives’.

Ten years ago, to the day, I was in London for the first public performance of my choral piece, Factum est silentium, at St. Paul’s Cathedral. As I wandered, taking in the atmosphere, the Shard was gradually stabbing higher into the sky, still under construction.

A black and white photograph showing St Paul's Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge seen from the South side of the Thames. The sky is clear, and bright sun falls on the bridge and the cathedral. — A photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral and the Millennium Bridge seen from the south side of the river. Taken by me in September 2010 using a Pentax ME Super with a 50mm prime and Ilford film.

I have been writing music since I was thirteen, choral music since sixteen; some of those early compositions are recognisably mine, but Factum est silentium marked a significant departure for more contemporary, and, to my mind, mature sounds – not just in the colouration of the chords, but in structure, tone and counterpoint. It was the first piece I entered, rather doubtfully, into a new music competition; to my still unending surprise, after being shortlisted, it won.

The text, in Latin, is short and sharp:

Factum est silentium in caelo dum comitteret bellum draco cum Michaele Archangelo.
Audita est vox milia milium dicentium: Salus, honor, et virtus omnipotenti Deo.
Alleluia.
Antiphonal response for Michaelmas.

In English, it can be rendered as something like

Silence fell in heaven when the dragon and the Archangel Michael made war.
A voice was heard, a thousand thousand crying: Salvation, honor and virtue to almighty God.
Alleluia
My own, rather idiosyncratic, translation of the above.

Written for double choir and organ, the piece takes an almost visually representational approach to the mythic struggle between Michael and the Dragon: the opening sets out a glittering parallel world, the scene of the drama; after a pause, contending sections of the choirs take the parts of Michael and the Dragon as the boys compete in an effort to rise above the clamour, to be heard as a single, jarring voice; eventually, the singers coalesce into brutally declamatory chords before the whole shimmers away in an echoing ‘alleluia.’ Like the story itself, the piece was never intended to seem part of a human soundscape; rather, it was intended to evanesce like the stirring flames of clouds as they open and close about the sun.

It was performed by a select ensemble at the final of the competition, held in the Crypt of St. Paul’s earlier in the month for an audience of judges, composers, and invited guests; I remember both a sense of mild embarrassment at finding I knew some of the other competitors and their cohorts and the tense, compressed excitement and nervousness of hearing the piece for the first time, the bone-gnawing uncertainty about whether it would work or not, aloud.

The piece’s first public performance, at a Michaelmas evensong for the Worshipful Company of Musicians, was an opportunity to hear it in less tense circumstances, in the space intended, and sung by the choir and organ it had been written for; a chance to find out if it really could fill the cavernous vastness of St Paul’s. Sat in the Mayoral stalls, I listened and watched the service from a position of rare privilege, both distant and involved.

After the service, I was taken to meet the choir; the boys were disbanding for the evening in a flurry of excitement at the end of their long day. Andrew Carwood, the Director of Music at the Cathedral, asked one of them in passing what he had thought of the piece: ‘It rocks,’ he blurted, as he dashed by. As feedback on my work goes, these two syllables never fail to make me smile.