London and Paris
Posted By Marc on June 15, 2009
What can I say about St. Paul”s and/or Notre Dame? Well, for one thing, apparently we have been invited back again. More importantly, they are truly amazing places to sing in. Both are centres of their respective traditions and, even though I was raised in the tradition from St. Paul’s, I think I prefer Notre Dame. It is, however, hard to choose between them for way too many reasons.
St. Paul's
St. Paul’s is breathtaking as a venue – not only can you hear a pin drop, the sound reverbs for what seems to be several minutes. We sang an Evensong and a concert there, and both had radically different acoustics. For the evensong, we were in the choir stalls in a cantoris-decani formation (i.e. two lines facing each other, and quite separated). Since there were only 20 of us on this tour (plus one “part-timer” during our London stay), the lines were, needless to say, small. Still, from the reports we got afterwards, we did manage to fill the curch with sound.
The concert, on the other hand, was under the dome, which totally changed the acoustics: the sound swirls and, by the time it comes back to you, it has dropped in pitch. This totally changes how you sing, because it changes what you listen for. In our last tour, we had never tried singing in a large dome and didn’t have enough experience to handle it well; this time was different (luckily).
Notre Dame
Notre Dame…. “ah, yes” as Martin would say. It is hard to describe what, exactly, singing there was like. For one thing, the place is freakin’ huge! For another, there is always a constant “shuffle, shuffle, mutter, mutter” as literally thousands of tourists wear away another layer of internal paving stones.
There is something about Notre Dame that “stretches” one’s time perceptions. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, since construction on it started in 1163 and it wasn’t “finished” until 1345. When you consider that music has been sung there since, probably, the 5th century (give or take a touch), there is around 1500 years of music “in the ground”. Significant.
We only sang the one 11:30am Mass there (on Sunday, June 14th) – I wish it was more. I would really like to do a concert there!
Concluding notes….
I really haven’t gone into any detail – I’ll save that for face-to-face chats 
Also, I am really still in the process of recovering from the tour – trying to reintegrate myself so that I can present in a couple of days. I will, however, note that I found today quite jarring, outside of all the weirdness of my trip from aris to Swindon… it is the first day in 2 weeks that I haven’t been singing for at least an hour a day!
john on 
Marc on 
Johnny on
Thank you so much for this post. And i really enjoyed with this.