It was a complex arrangement of The Lord is my Shepherd that got me in, although I couldn’t remember a bar of it if I tried.
My mother, god bless her,1 had found a singing teacher who only swore that she only taught adults and somehow convinced her to teach me. She’d found the ad in the local newspaper that the girls’ school in my hometown was auditioning for choral scholars; a year 6 class for those who would be members of the school choir and receive free singing lessons alongside the scholarship. There was no way in hell we would’ve been able to afford it otherwise, so the decision was made: I was going to blow the audition out of the water and I was going to get in.
The audition itself took place in the school chapel, which awed me, and the director of music, Mr Andrews, sat at the piano and listened to me sing. I was asked if I could beat time, and I performed an approximate imitation of what I’d seen my choir leader do. It’s possible I was asked to sightread, or that we ran some scales, but I don’t recall. After that I was sat in a room in the school’s main building where I did an English comprehension and maths test. And some point after that we received the news that I’d successfully won the scholarship, which meant I had to leave my primary school a year before everyone else, thus began a habit of making my exits early and first.
We had a reunion last weekend. Around a hundred of us, all alumni of the choir, once again crammed into chapel pews being (jokingly) scolded for talking between songs. There were women in attendance who were students in the 1940s, current students who were justifiably to be spending their Saturday listening to a bunch of nostalgic saddos talk about the affection they had for a particular arrangement or which songs had been picked up and shelved between decades, and some of my cohort pulling faces at each other from across the church. Call me corny if you will, but the feeling of performing again and of being part of a chorus was like a light in my heart switching on. The soaring crescendo of Robert Parry’s I Was Glad or the final verse of When I Survey The Wondrous Cross performed by dozens of people who either know the songs inside out, or trust their peers to guide them through it, was a little like coming home. I found myself thinking “why did I ever stop doing this?”
In a quiet moment while some attendees shuffled out of the room to get some water and enjoy the sunshine, I approached Mr Andrews to try and explain how much the scholarship had meant to me and had changed my life for the better and promptly burst into tears. This was the school where I met some of my oldest and closest friends; where I’d learned to sightread music and spent several lunchtimes fucking around in the practice rooms making dark and moody covers of Tinie Tempah tracks,2 where I learned the joy of running a harmless scam for godssake.3 The choirs (before you could join the chapel choir, you had to first be in gallery choir and audition to join) were ran like the navy: rehearsals were frequent and they were hard going. We performed complicated music in competitions and sang for services in cathedrals, bonded by music and myriad tactics to sneak in a couple texts when the director wasn’t looking. We were there for the love of it - even as we bemoaned the loss of weekends and mornings before school - to learn how to sing as one voice and sound fucking incredible while doing it. It was fun, it was a game. It was perhaps the best musical training I could’ve hoped for.
I left the school and the choir before 6th form.4 The school was under new leadership and the way they awarded, and maintained, scholarships to a far more complex level not designed to encourage those of slender means. I was sad to go, I recall sobbing alongside all the other girls leaving school that year in our cramped pews during our last service together, barely making it through Abide With Me and wobbling something vaguely melody-like through the rest of the songs. I had a lot of fun in my last two years at another school, joining their choir and being fortunate enough to perform in places like the Royal Albert Hall as I exchanged terminally ugly maroon robes for dressing in black like a stagehand with a pink scarf for a ‘pop of colour’.5
I can’t say I ever really believed in God past my first holy communion. I used to look around the various venues in which we’d perform and wait for something to happen, or to feel something akin to faith, to no avail. But the music and art I could understand, that was where I felt a connection to something bigger than myself. Be it the Grade 1 listed church in which we would sing at Christmas and Easter, or the cramped chapel of a local village, the air ringing with voices in harmony is where some strange power lies.
Since the reunion I’ve been listening to the recordings and digging around on Youtube for shaky cameraphone uploads from parents of some of the pieces we would sing. I won’t link to any directly out of respect for the privacy of the others - and also because I’m visible in none of them, due to the fact that altos are always shoved to the back,6 but should you be curious, here are some songs from the oeuvre:
The eight part Ave Maria: we rehearsed this endlessly. When we first performed this we split into our eight groups and positioned ourselves strategically around the church so our voices would meet above the congregation. I could sing it in my sleep, I love it so much.
Stabat Mater: always enjoyed singing this because it was A) sad and dramatic and B) the altos got to do something interesting.
I Was Glad: thee choral banger. Feels like it goes on forever, has intervals that’'ll make you want to tear your hair out until you get it and the vision clicks into focus.
She’s not dead, but she may read my Substack and deserves praise for orchestrating all of this - hi, Mum!
We were doing slow, sad covers of popular songs that don’t work at all WAY before Love Island
My friends and I invented a bookclub so we could get packed lunches and spend lunch hanging out in a cozy reading room - the risk was worth one Kitkat and a packet of crisps a week
Told you: early and first
It’s famously against the law for choirs to be stylish
If a soprano isn’t the centre of attention for even a moment, she will eat her siblings out of stress. They’re like hamsters in that way