The choir I have belonged to for the last fourteen years is one of a group of French choirs. Each year, the Paris choirs of this group organize a Choir Workshop. One of the choir directors chooses a composer or a type of music he or she enjoys -- often outside the usual repertoire of our choirs. About 40 or 50 people practice this music for 5 or 6 weekends and give two concerts in April.
I learned in September that my choir director would be in charge of the Workshop this year and had chosen to have us work on the Anglican Choral Evensong. Since Adam is British and went to a school connected with the Anglican Church, I thought it would be interesting to learn this music from someone who knew it well. And particularly fun to sing Anglican church music with a group of French people. But I got much more than I bargained for.
The first rehearsals this fall were as shaky as first rehearsals always are. But already I smiled. The music Adam had chosen for us definitely belonged to the Established Church of the British Empire.
I imagined Miss Marple nodding approvingly as we sang “My Soul there is a country”.
Surely, Lord Peter Wimsey would have been moved by Ireland’s “Greater Waters Cannot Quench Love”. And both would have totally approved of “Jerusalem”, perhaps better known to the non-British among us from the film “Chariots of Fire” (listen to the end of the clip to hear it).
Margaret, an English woman, who, like me, has lived all her adult life in France, was in the alto section. We’d occasionally catch each other’s eye and smile in delighted complicity at the utter Englishness of it all.
As the year progressed, other memories popped into my head at odd moments. I remembered the stately, Victorian St Jude’s Church in Oakville Ontario where I spent every Sunday morning of my childhood listening to similar music.
My father sang in the choir but I could not. The organist and choir master believed the only true church choirs were adults and boy sopranos. If it was good enough for Oxford, Cambridge and Saint Paul’s, why would Mel Evans’ standards be any lower?
Despite not being a boy, it was from Mel Evans that I learned to love choral music, for he was also the Music Superintendant of the elementary schools in Oakville. There, the choirs were mixed and I was a proud choir member from the age of 9.
Marcel Proust speaks of “the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison”. His example of his memory-evoking madeleine is a classic of French literature. But I can now tell you that other senses hold memories that enclose our past.
The Workshop Choir was proud of our two April concerts. (Though we no doubt didn’t sound like the choirs in the clips under the hyperlinks, we felt like we did on that weekend)
But the broadest, most tender smiles were on the faces of Adam and Margaret and me as the pleasures of the present mingled with our” Remembrance of Things Past”.
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