Holy Rude Scratch Choir

Three of us went to the RSNO's Come and Sing choir day on Saturday. We thought that we were prepared for the cold interior of the Holy Rude. But we all struggled. A slim soprano from St Margaret's was also there. She was frozen all day long.

When I arrived with Malky, I introduced us as 'the Gregorian Guys' and was met with warm grins, they were expecting us and I had a solicitous young lady asking me later if I was managing with the modern music notation. I wasn’t.

Ulsterman Christopher Bell was the conductor, he is the Director of the RSNO Junior Chorus and told us that his father is a Church of Ireland minister.

He is a very engaging teacher with a fund of amusing anecdotes. His account of how a Saint Matthews Passion in a similarly cold Cathedral had left him with permanent mental damage whenever he has to conduct the piece. A large American had shouted to his wife to 'get your fanny over here' so that she could warm herself on the radiator he had secured.
Two peoples divided by a common language, indeed.

We spilt into our teams, George and I as Basses, Malky as a Tenor.
Our Conductor, Chris, sympathised with the Altos as they took their places, reciting the Alto's Lament:

It's awful being an alto when you're singing in the choir,
Sopranos get the twiddly bits that people all admire,
The basses boom like big trombones, the tenors shout with glee,
The alto part is on two notes, or if you're lucky, three.

Several ladies joined in the last line, with feeling.

Next our Conductor led us in a vocal exercise that I remembered from our children's time at school.

When I was one, I'd just begun the day I went to sea,
I climbed aboard a pirate ship and the captain said to me,
We're going this way, that way, forward backwards. Over the Irish Sea
A bottle of Rum to fill my tum, And that's the life for me.

For several verses, with actions.

The plan was that we would rehearse the voices before lunch and then join with the RSNO musicians to practice in the afternoon. The climax was to be a public performance for friends and family at 6.00pm.

We began with Howard Goodall's Love Divine. The Sopranos sang the Ah-Ahs and we Basses were to hum. It is a lovely piece. Christopher had us spitting out the alternating phrases such as 'Finish Them' against each other. But he really went for it making us emphasise 'Changed from glory'. He was almost shouting 'Changed-fromCHANGED-FROM!' to get the two sequences working together (at 2.15 in the clip). We men had to get our CHANGED-FROM in there fast and clear.

Here's a school choir doing a better job than we did. (But they'd been working on the piece for months):







We began Faure's Cantique de Jean Racine in English. Christopher decided that our French pronunciation wouldn't be good enough. It was fun to sing and rather a deep prayer:

Word of God, one with the Most High,
in Whom alone we have our hope,
Eternal Day of heaven and earth,
We break the silence of the peaceful night;
Saviour Divine, cast your eyes upon us!

RSNO kept calling Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus, the Ave Verum. Which is meaningless. 'Hail True' isn't a prayer, while 'Hail True Body' is.
    Hail, true Body, born
    of the Virgin Mary,
    who having truly suffered, was sacrificed
    on the cross for mankind,

Haydn's Little Organ Mass was a real disappointment.
In one of our early Stirling Schola meetings, Alan had explained that a key difference between Gregorian chant and modern music was the importance of words over tunes. This point was very evident in Haydn's Missa Brevis. Both the Gloria and the Creed are incomprehensible because each part (now I know what STAB means) sing different lines in the prayer. They then come together for a few lines before going off into incomprehensible babbles again. The pieces end with elaborate AMENs, so not much time saved.
See here for an example:

The 6.00pm performance was great fun.
My wife thought that the Tenors were louder than the Basses. There were twice as many of us as them. Well done Malky.

LATER EDIT:
RSNO tell me that the abbreviation is SATB (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass).
From Army friends I know that STAB stands for Stupid TA B*****d (ARAB is the counter insult for Regular Army soldiers from the TA)