Blast from the past

I don't have a Song of the Day for you today, although I am excited to share tomorrow's with you - it is of course a song for Guy Fawkes Night.

But today I thought I would share my very first foray into writing for choirs. I was 17 years old, studying for my A-level Music. I had spent the last 9 years singing in a traditional church choir where we sang the usual hymns, anthems and monthly Choral Evensong.

So, when I was considering what to write for the composition part of my A-level Music I decided I would write a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. The Magnificat has a solo soprano part sung here by Joanne Appleby, who would go on to study opera at the Royal Northern College of Music. She then won a scholarship from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company before embarking on an operatic career. In 2002 she was signed by Sony BMG as an original member of the opera group Amici Forever. 

The Nunc Dimittis has a solo tenor part, ably sung by one of our Music teachers at the time, Kevin Matthews. Kevin also studied at the Royal Northern College of Music as well as the London College of Music. His career took him to Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Opera North, Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera and Royal Ballet And Opera.

How lucky was I to have these two operatic stars singing my teenage attempt at writing for choirs!! 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Song of the Day - 11th November

Image
Today's Song of the Day is a tribute to Martinmas, a beautiful celebration known as the Festival of Compassion. St. Martin of Tours (died 397) was a Roman soldier who was baptized as an adult and became a bishop in Gaul. He is best known for the tale whereby he cut his cloak in half with his sword, to give half to a beggar who was dressed in only rags in the depth of winter. That night Martin had a vision of Jesus Christ wearing the half-cloak. For this special festival, I have chosen a moving poem titled “Compassion” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It beautifully captures the limitless compassion of Christ, reflecting the very essence of Martin's noble actions. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850 – 1919) was an inspiring American author and poet. Her works include the collection Poems of Passion and the evocative poem "Solitude," which reminds us, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone.” Her autobiograph...
Read more

Adele stole my song title!

Image
I don't have a Song of the Day for you today but I thought I would share a story from back in 2009. I was engaged and thought it would be a sweet idea to write a song for my husband-to-be and have it professionally recorded. So I wrote this song which I called "Someone Like You." I practised it and perfected it, and organised musicians to play the guitar and drum parts, got it all recorded, even taught it to my youth choir so they could sing it at my wedding, and then found out some young upstart named Adele had also written and released a song called "Someone Like You"! Ah well, it's not like you can copyright a song title—which is a good thing because if she sued ME for breach of copyright I am not sure how to prove I thought of it first. I don't even know if I DID think of it first!! It's a bit different from the Songs for all Seasons, but I hope you like it. Who knows, if my music gets published, this song might get picked up by some famous balla...
Read more