In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on May 31, 2009

Right now, most of my attention and time is focused on music.  In particular, the Ottawa Bach Choir in which I sing 2nd Bass, is getting ready for our third European tour.  As with our two previous tours, we will be choir in residence at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig (Bach’s old church) and, let me say, that if you are into Baroque music, this is THE place to sing!

A sense of place

The Thomaskirche is an amazing place to sing not solely because of its historical significance but, rather, because of the effects of singing Bach’s work there.  Okay, I will admit that it is über cool to sing in the place where Bach lived and worked, but the real effect isn’t the ego-boost; it is the understanding.

One of the things that many people forget is that music was always composed for a specific venue to take advantage of the specific acoustics available.  These acoustic properties of a location inevitably change how a work is performed which, in turn, affects the emotional message of the music in a whole variety of ways ranging from the tempo of the piece to, in some cases, the actual notes that are perceived by the listener.

The first time we sang there, back in 2005, one of the things we noticed was that many of the recordings of Bach’s Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden are wrong.  For one thing, many performances of it use too many people – Bach’s choir never really got beyond 30 or so, and yet many performances of his work involve choirs of 70-100 singers.  Another thing that became apparent was that too many people pushed the speed without realizing that it was designed to take advantage of the architecture of the church to create specific harmonies based on the reverberation rate.  Sing that was the motet we were touring with, we ended up in the intriguing situation of having to modify the speed to match the acoustics of each new performance venue based on what we knew it should sound like.

A sense of time

In Canada, our surrounding built environment is relatively recent; say 500 years for the oldest.  While at the national culture level, we tend to have a bit more “time sense” than the US, it really is not that much more, and is nothing when compared with the time sense of most other places on Earth.  This is probably one of the reasons why so many Canadians travel to other countries (our “homelands”) – to tap into a deeper time sense while, at the same time, trying to gain some emotional feeling of “groundedness” and/or “belonging (what Turner called communitas); it is a secular pilgrimage.

This tour is one of those secular pilgrimages, a pilgrimage that will tap into three different, but related roots.  The first part will be a return to the Thomaskirche, a locale that has, over the years, come to be synonymous with the height of Baroque choral music at its most intricate.  The second part goes to some of my own family roots – we will be singing at St. Paul’s Catherdal in London; the conservator of the Anglican choral tradition that I was raised in.  The final part (all good rituals come in three parts after all), will take place in Paris when we sing at both the Paroisse de la Madelaine and Notre-Dame.

Three different Christian traditions (Lutheran, Anglican and Roman Catholic), three different national and musical cultures, but all part of the overaching cultural melange that is “Western” culture.

Bloging during the tour

I am going to try and blog at least once from each locale and, hopefully, more often (no guarentees though).  After we finish in Paris and while most of the choir heads home, I will be heading back to the UK for a symposium on Culture in Conflict at Cranfield University.  I am honestly expecting to experience a rather short, sharp bout of culture shock in shifting gears mentally from the 17-18th century and the 21st; from music to the military.  I have already warned the organizer that I, as a muddle-headed academic, might just show up to present wearing my concert dress .

Category: Music
Tags: Ottawa Bach Choir