[A version of this article first appeared as a post on my blog From the Front of the Choir]
I find it hard to believe, but I started my choir WorldSong way back in October 1997. In 2007, we planned several events to celebrate our 10th anniversary.
One of these involved commissioning a song especially for the choir. In fact, it is exactly eight years to the day that our chosen composer began to write his piece: 1st April 2007.
We thought it would be great to try something really different, so we commissioned Klaus Santas, a well-known choral composer based in London, to write us an extended choral piece that is possible to learn without written music. Santas studied with John Cage in Frankfurt in the 1980s, and has composed several operas which are regularly performed in his native Paraguay.
We were very excited by this new piece written in German and Spanish which we started working on when the ink was still wet. The main difference for us was that we would be singing mainly without using our voices.
This presented particular challenges for a community choir who usually express themselves vocally. Another added difficulty was maintaining a strict tempo whilst remaining completely silent. I spent a lot of time developing particular warm-up exercises to help people keep time with each other by counting in their heads. At first it was almost impossible, but I found that by engaging the body the choir are became tighter and more accurate.
The new piece, entitled RUHE, is in three “movements”, each in a different key and each at a very different tempo. All three sections are in four part harmony, so there was quite a lot of new material to learn! Given that there is no actual noise coming out of the singers mouths, it proved to be very difficult to pitch the harmonies accurately, even though they are fairly traditional major keys.
One final challenge for us was the length of the piece: 4 hours and 33 minutes. We had hoped to premiere it at our grand summer concert in Coventry, but were slightly worried that we wouldn’t be able to fit enough other songs in to make for a varied evening of entertainment. In the end we decided to go ahead.
If you are interested in receiving a score of this piece so you can sing it with your own community choir, one will be available very soon. In the meantime, listen out for sound clips on our website.
Chris Rowbury
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