A proud member of the International Federation for Choral Music for more than 30 years

Andrea Angelini, ICB Managing Editor, conductor and composer

Dear Anton, you have now been conducting the St. Olaf Choir for 30 years. How did you get in touch with them?

I was 16 when my pastor, Rev. Robert Hawk, told me that the St. Olaf Choir was performing at the Lincoln Centre in Manhattan. Knowing my love for excellent choral music, my pastor naturally assumed I’d be interested in this concert, but I had tickets to see the Moody Blues at Madison Square Garden.

He wasn’t one to take no for an answer. Rev. Hawk went to my parents, and my mother vetoed the English rock band. The St. Olaf Choir put on a memorable choral concert, and the image of the iconic purple robes worn by the choir stayed with me.

A year and half later, I attended a Lutheran College fair on Long Island looking to strike out on my own and find a school far from New York. There were long lines of students waiting to talk to representatives of my top choice colleges. Growing up in New York has left me with a distaste for traffic, so when I passed—for the third time—a college booth with no line, I accepted an invitation by the admissions officer, Bruce Moe, to learn about St. Olaf College in Minnesota. I remembered the St. Olaf Choir and its purple robes. The college appeared to have everything I was looking for: an inclusive Lutheran tradition in which vocation was important, and a mission that incorporated a global perspective and fostered the development of the whole person in mind, body, and spirit. Its academics were excellent, and it had a strong religion department, a thriving music department, and great choirs.

But there was still one thing I wanted to know, “how many black students go to your school?”

Moe got a glint in his eye. “You’d make one more.”

I thought that was a really honest answer, and I put St. Olaf on my list of colleges to visit.

Can you tell us about your background? Where did you study music and why?

My parents, Esther and William Armstrong, supported my interest in music. They made extreme financial sacrifices for me to pursue my interest in music, including lessons, private schooling and being a member of the American Boychoir.

Carol and Carl Weber (graduates of Westminster Choir College) were the musicians at my home church who started a children’s church choir when I was in kindergarten. If it wasn’t for Carol, a major part of my musical journey would never have happened. She gave me my first solo when I was six years old – which I can still sing – and provided us with incredibly wise training. She also introduced me to the American Boychoir.

Singing in that choir lit my fire for choral singing. While there were only three or four African American boys in the choir at the time, we were treated equally and were valued for our talent and how hard we were willing to work. It was a transformative experience and established my standard for excellence in choral music.

Then of course came my time as a student at St. Olaf, where I learned from my predecessor,

Dr. Kenneth Jennings, and conductors Dr. Robert Scholz and Alice Larson. I still remember the first time I heard Alice conduct the St. Olaf Manitou Singers. I’d never heard women sing like that. It wasn’t this little girl sound; it was a rich, womanly sound. I remember witnessing the way that Kenneth Jennings would take his hands, and in an instant a phrase would just turn. Finally, there’s Bob Scholz, the most pastoral of my teachers, who cared deeply for the music he made, but even more for the human beings who created it.

I was also fortunate to be guided in my years of graduate study at the University of Illinois and Michigan State University by inspirational mentors such as Dr. Harold Decker, Dr. Charles Smith, and Ms. Ethel Armeling. Perhaps the greatest gift of my Illinois years was meeting my dear friend and colleague of nearly 42 years, Dr. André Thomas.

Conducting a choir, especially at as high level as you do, includes not only knowing the technique, but it’s also necessary at times to be a life tutor, a friend, a psychologist. What advice do you give to young conductors who want to start a career in this field?

As a young conductor, I tried to create a perfect choral performance. Throughout the years, however, I have learned that perfection is impossible. Instead, I seek excellence as we share our voices together in communal song.

As an adult, a person whose influence has steered my life professionally is Helen Kemp, professor emerita of voice and church music at Westminster Choir College. Her mantra, “Body, mind, spirit, and voice – it takes the whole person to sing and rejoice” has stayed with me for more than 40 years. I credit her with shaping my calling as a vocal music educator and conductor.

For young conductors, emphasis should not be placed on the subject, it has to be on the person. We use music as a means of grace to reach the inner soul of those we have the duty and delight to lead in our choral ensembles.

Do you think that choral music can be not only a form of art, but also a way to find something greater than us, whether you call him God, interior peace or something else?

For me, the art of choral music is an expression and praise of thanksgiving for God, or whatever people call that infinite being.

Throughout my career, music of the church – sacred music – has been the vast majority of the music I’ve performed with choral groups. Part of my roots growing up as an African American in the United States were developing a faith in God, care of neighbour, and care of creation. Also, a desire to serve in the world while not expecting that you were owed something in return. Finally, faith in a God that would walk with you through whatever challenges you face in life.

Throughout my years as a conductor, that experience has guided me as I’ve tried opening the world of the infinite creator to people of all ages. I realize there are many ways to experience that infinite creator, and for me, that God. I often feel closest to God while singing or conducting choral music.

Speaking about choral repertoire, to which repertoire do you feel closest?

A large part of my work as both a singer and conductor has been rooted in the Western choral canon of Europe and North America. Consequently, music of the church has been a strong component of that, but I’ve also explored secular music.

I’m also drawn to folk music from throughout the world, especially the negro spiritual. The negro spiritual speaks about the human condition – of pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, and triumph over the worst indignities that can be put upon another human being. These elements are what’s made this genre of choral music so beloved throughout the world, and why I have especially enjoyed sharing it throughout my international conducting engagements.

In a previous edition of ICB, there was a discussion about ‘the culture of a conductor’. To explain this thought better, having culture is not only having perused many books or listened to many choral pieces, but being part of these ‘webs of significance’. Now, we cannot deny that the bulk of the repertoire of choral music comes from western music. It would be unfair to hide this kind of self-evident truth. Some say that many conductors, because of their place of birth and cultural upbringing, are not and never will be part of this kind of tradition in the deepest sense. Do you think that any choir, no matter their cultural and geographical origins, can perform any kind of choral music?

Your question raises an issue that is currently on the minds of many vocal music educators in the 21^st century, namely one of cultural appropriation. I don’t think you must be of a certain race or culture to do music of a certain race or culture. However, I do believe as we are rigorously trained to understand and perform music of Western choral cannon, those same aspects of study and performance practice must be applied to music outside of one’s own culture.

Conductors must take the time to study the culture of a piece, aspects of its performance and music style, the use of language and dialect, in order to pay proper homage to the people from which this music emanates. If this is done well, I believe music can be performed from outside one’s own culture.

The International Federation for Choral Music (IFCM) is a world choral network. In your opinion, what should be its main goals and tasks?

I have been a proud member of the International Federation for Choral Music for more than 30 years and have had the opportunity to attend every World Symposium on Choral Music since the original in Vienna in 1987. I was sorely disappointed the 2020 Symposium in New Zealand was cancelled due to COVID-19.

IFCM is an important bridge to build relationships between choral communities from across the globe. At the symposiums I have been a delegate, lecturer, masterclass instructor, and choir conductor. These gatherings have been some of the most important events organized by IFCM, providing invaluable networking and exposure to choral music from around the world.

I also value the continuing research of IFCM and its work in developing nations. In the more recent years, its ability to bring people together through the internet has been crucial to developing communal song throughout the world.

You travel a lot as guest conductor and clinician. Where do you feel at home? Which foreign country is closest to your habits and your ideas about the performance and practice of the repertoire you conduct? And why?

My international experiences have helped me learn that our work can help build bridges and heal wounds. The songs we sing from different parts of the world are often the way we enter a cultural experience very different from our own. If we can treat that music with respect and do our best to understand how and why that music originated, we start to understand the people who created it, and we find a commonality in how we exist together. Once we begin singing together, our differences of gender, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, religious expression or not, sexual orientation, and socio-economic standing don’t disappear, but instead cease to become barriers.

I must admit that wherever I’ve travelled in the world, I’ve felt welcome. This has only strengthened my opinion that when we sing together, we break down the barriers that can divide us. I’ve spent a great deal of time in Norway and South Korea, and both of the countries have become like second homes to me. Through the gift of choral music, I’ve made friends throughout the world, and this has been one of the great blessings of being a conductor.

Anton, I would like to ask you a question as an ‘Italian director’. Italy, especially Rome and Venice, are considered the cradle of Renaissance polyphony. Why is this music, even in the 21st Century, still so admired and performed?

The music of the Renaissance is noted for the beauty and independence of the vocal musical line. This music also affords the singer and the listener to create beautiful harmonies. There is also a close interweaving between the text and music of these pieces that captures emotions of the human soul. That intersection touches us at the very core of our being.

Going back to the St. Olaf Choir, what are your next projects with them?

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned our world and any plans I’ve had for the St. Olaf Choir upside down. We certainly are facing a new paradigm shift in how we’ll even exist as the St. Olaf Choir in the near future. However, I hope that, despite this pandemic, our future aspirations will come to fruition.

One great dream of mine is to bring the choir to Africa. I’m also eager to resume projects with several of the wonderful music organizations here in Minnesota, including the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, VocalEssence, Magnum Chorum, and more.

Finally, as I look ahead at my final years as conductor of the St. Olaf Choir, I consider the possibility of new recording projects, in whatever forms that might take place. I also want to explore more the role of choral music as an advocate for social justice in the world!

Life is also made of dreams, some of them are probably impossible to fulfil. If you had a special power, what would you do to make the world better through choral music?

This might be an idealistic aspiration, but if I had the power to do so, it would be that all people throughout the world be encouraged to use their God-given skills of singing. The voice is the most human of instruments. Through it, we find common ground between people, share each other’s songs and lives, and find a common path of humanity.

This has been clear to me during the 23 years I’ve been part of the Oregon Bach Festival. Through this 50-year-old festival, founders Helmuth Rilling and Royce Saltzman have vividly showcased how people throughout the globe can make music with each other, come together, build bridges, and create enriching, life-long relationships through the art of choral music.

Finally, if you were not at St. Olaf, what else would you be doing and where?

I started my career at Calvin College (now Calvin University), conducting choirs at the institution and within the community. More than most people might understand, it was a very difficult decision to leave there when I assumed my current role at St. Olaf in 1990.

However, I feel a vocation, a vocāre, to St. Olaf.

The college is not perfect, but it is a place where people come to study, work, and strive to have a place of belonging. We live in a world that is so divided, where people are so quick to find the things that separate us. One of the great things about working in music – especially choral music – is that we can all find a place of belonging and a place where we can express ourselves and find community with those around us.

Also, St. Olaf has been a community that has aspired to nurture and lift up “servant leaders” in whatever our calling in life may be. For me, this sense of calling – “vocare” has been powerfully carried out as a member of the St. Olaf College community and especially through the work and mission of the St. Olaf Choir.

Edited by Mirella Biagi, UK/Italy

by Aurelio Porfiri, composer, conductor, writer and educator

I have been working with choirs and choral music for almost forty years, long enough to be able to say that working with choirs has taken up most of my existence. And so now I need to reflect on the situation we are living through, created by corona virus: a situation that has surprised us all, embittered us, frightened us, but also made us ask how we will be able to begin again once this nightmare is over. And we do not even know when will be over, because the “experts” are very good at terrifying us almost every day.

Beginning again will not be easy, since we are now terrified of being close to each other, of being exposed to the famous droplets and perhaps being infected by someone who does not show even the slightest symptom. We now see all of these things as potential dangers, and ourselves as a potential danger to others. Singing together in a choir is not the safest activity in these circumstances, since it requires physical proximity between people who are emitting sounds that also carry with them emissions of the famous tiny droplets. If you are singing in a choir of 40 or 50 people, how can you ever be sure that none of them will be exposed to this virus? Then we should also consider that – thanks be to God, from one point of view – in many of our choirs there are quite a few older people. But how can we protect them from someone who involuntarily, without any symptoms, could be a carrier of the corona virus that is much more dangerous for the elderly, as we now know? This is a problem perceived by many choral conductors nowadays, who have found themselves suddenly without a job. The problem concerns everyone, old or young, because anyone can become infected and spread the virus to family members who may be at risk because of age and health conditions.

These would have seemed absurd questions even only two months ago. Yet this cataclysmic event has turned our whole lifeves upside down and threatens to also upset our future. We need to think hard about how to protect ourselves until this virus is finally defeated, as we all hope it will be. Of course we do not want to stop all our choir singing, which is so important for so many of us, as a means of praising God for some, and of socialization for others. As I have said many times, choirs are little communities where friends meet, people meet their future life partners, and we all meet people who may become important fixed points in our lives. Certainly we do not want to renounce all this, so we must find a way to face the psychological block created in these months in which we have been terrified by the idea that physical closeness can be dangerous, not only with strangers but even within our own homes.

I have seen some attempts at creating a virtual choir, using the instruments offered by technology. This is certainly something to reflect on, a type of activity that opens up interesting possibilities for a future in which technology will be ever more present in our daily lives. But these new possibilities must not replace meeting people and singing as we stand side by side. Even if we do not want to admit it, we truly need each other in all aspects of our lives: we need to encounter others, to laugh with others, to sing with others, to speak with others. We are social animals, and choral activity is part of this. We must think how to continue to do what choirs have always done in all parts of the world: singing together and creating the experience of the beauty of choral music. We must overcome the trauma that has cut us off from one another and not allow our fears to become an obstacle to building community with others. Let us be honest and admit that this is not easy. I am not sure if it is happening where you live too, but here in central Italy where I live, even though the virus has not seriously affected my city, you can see how people are very careful to avoid each other, always thinking that the danger may be everywhere. We have been strongly affected psychologically, and this will stay with us much longer than the virus.

We have to go back to meeting others, we need to find a way to be what we have always been. As is often said, the importance of certain things is understood only when these things are taken away. And now is the time to understand how beautiful it was to meet our friends in the choir, to sing with them, to be able to meet them on Sundays for worship or for a concert or a choral performance of some sort. All this has now been denied us, and we cannot hide the fact that we feel its loss and we want it back. We cannot give corona virus the upper hand; we cannot permit that in 2020 a virus can dictate the way in which the entire human race has to live. We consider this to be a temporary interruption, a phase which took us by surprise and during which society did not respond adequately; and so we must try to begin normal life again, including the area of choral music, which – let us not forget – involves millions of people. Therefore, taking all necessary precautions, we need to put this terrible time behind us. Fear is a bad teacher. But if we are forced to wear face masks for safety reasons, this will be another obstacle to taking up our choral activity again, because singing with masks on is obviously not the same thing. We must think seriously about how we can maintain our choirs without placing ourselves and others in danger. The situation is extremely complex since at every minute we are prey to a steady stream of alarming news that is fed to us by the media.

We must not allow fear to chain us; we are greater than fear, and the noble purpose of preserving choral activity will help us to find creative and effective solutions which can be implemented safely and in such a way that no one will feel threatened by simply making contact with other people. This will not be easy to begin with, because we are coming out of a very difficult time of trial, during which our collective psyche has been subjected to almost intolerable pressure. But we will do it; I am sure that we will do it; for the sake of the respect that we owe ourselves and those around us, we must do it.

Aurelio Porfiri is a composer, conductor, writer and educator. He has published over forty books and a thousand articles. Over a hundred of his scores are in print in Italy, Germany, France, the USA and China. Email: aurelioporfiri@hotmail.com

Translated from the Italian by Giuseppe Pellegrino

Edited by Gillian Forlivesi, Italy/UK

by Aurelio Porfiri, composer, conductor, writer and educator

Some weeks ago, out of the blue, I learnt of the death of the British composer Colin Mawby. He was one of my very good friends, but in recent months we had not really been in touch, so I was not aware of the recent developments in his life. I just learnt that he passed away on 24 November 2019, at the age of 83. I felt truly sorry because I did not get the chance to talk with him before this fateful event.

I had been in contact with him on several occasions. He was a collaborator of my publishing company and generously sent me his music for publication. He was always very eager to collaborate and indeed we got along very well. He was also in juries in choral competitions where I was the director of the jury. And finally, when I was working in Macau, I had the chance to invite him as visiting professor to the university where I was working, so we spent several days together in Macau, China. On that occasion, I also carried out an interview with him, resulting in around 4 hours of audio, where he spoke about his life and ideas. I hope that soon I will be able to publish that interview in a book format, as a memory to this wonderful man.

Yes, because he was a wonderful man, very British (with that kind of British aplomb we identify, perhaps wrongly, with this name) but also very approachable and friendly. He was fond of life and its pleasures. He loved good food, good wine, beautiful women, and that for me is always a good sign of someone that knows how to enjoy this short pilgrimage we have here on earth.  

He was also deeply religious, and we had many conversations about this topic, conversations that revealed our personal struggles and desires. For him of course, faith was a different matter compared to me. Even if we were both Catholics but being Catholic in the UK is certainly different from being Catholic in Italy. He had great respect for the tradition of sacred music and indeed he was also very careful in identifying the strength and weaknesses of the British choral tradition, as there are in any tradition. This does not mean he did not appreciate the great achievements of British choirs, but sometimes he found the sound of those choirs a little ‘cold’, and he was more appreciative of the sound of choirs from Latin countries, that were often not so perfect from a technical point of view, but certainly had a more expressive sound. As an example, let us see what he said in my blog Il Naufrago, that I coordinated years ago, and to which he was a contributor: “England has had a great influence on European performance but we need to understand its problems. Take what is good and discard the remainder.” I think this is quite a courageous statement from a British conductor, because let us not forget that he was not just a normal conductor: he was in charge of the choir of Westminster Cathedral for several years and then also managed other prestigious choirs. He tried to be very honest with his ideas and feelings about music, even if he deeply appreciated his own choral tradition. And he did not intend to discuss Anglican or Catholic traditions, he was just giving general assessments on the quality of the choral sound. When you really and honestly love something, you are also in the position to see the good and the bad, as I am sure is true for musicians all over the world.

Nevertheless, he certainly also admired some parts of his country’s choral tradition, and even more he loved the choral music tradition of the Church, a tradition that he contributed to a lot with his own compositions, the most famous of which is Ave Verum that is sung all over the world. Indeed, it was for that piece that I first contacted him by email many years ago. But then I discover other pieces by him: he published hundreds of pieces among which there are authentic gems of choral music. As I have said, he really loved choral music and its use within the Catholic tradition. This is what he said in another post for my blog: “On Good Friday I attended ‘Tenebrae’ at the Brompton Oratory in London. A superb choir was singing the wonderful Responsories by Victoria. The solemnity and dignity of the occasion was gripping and deeply moving. The Gregorian chant was beautiful and hearing the Lamentations sung in the ancient tone was transfixing. Truly the prophet Isaiah was again speaking to us from a distance of over two thousand years: I was listening to a chant that Christ would probably have heard. Although the liturgical reforms have had fine effects, we have also lost a lot. The sense of spirituality and reverence has been sadly diluted. We need to make an appraisal of what has been lost and restore the best of it to the liturgy. The souls of worshippers cry out for the sense of mystery: liturgy must be God centred and not man centred.” We should not forget that the role of Christianity in the development of choral music was huge, fundamental. He was a very good herald of this.

What kind of composer was he? He composed lots of choral music, mainly sacred music. Music that always had that kind of beautiful spiritual character. His way of composing was mostly harmonic – we often discussed about this. He was not really into the kind of counterpoint writing that probably is most used in countries like Italy, at least in the past and with some composers. We often talked of my late teacher, Domenico Bartolucci, for whom he had a deep admiration. There is also an interview he did with him and I think it is still available to see on YouTube. But his style, as I have said, was more harmonic, while still being very interesting and full of pathos and enriched by the deep knowledge he had of the choir. He really knew how to write for choirs in a very meaningful way. I think his music should certainly be performed more around the world because it is deeply inspired and deserving of better appreciation. Also, in some of his publications he re-harmonised chorales from the Christian tradition, that are also very interesting, and I am sure students would learn a lot from these publications because it is here that we can really experience his superior sense for good harmonic solutions and alternatives.

As I said at the beginning, he was a good and cheerful man. From our conversations, I felt he had not had an easy life, but he never lost that joie de vivre even later in life. In the field of choral and sacred music, he will certainly be missed, because he was a protagonist and he left a great heritage of his own compositions that can be performed by choirs with different technical abilities. As for me, I lost a dear friend and someone with whom I had a higher spiritual connection. It was one of the lucky encounters of my life, and certainly in my heart he will never be forgotten.

 Aurelio Porfiri is a composer, conductor, writer and educator. He has published over forty books and a thousand articles. Over a hundred of his scores are in print in Italy, Germany, France, the USA and China. Email: aurelioporfiri@hotmail.com

Exploring more opportunities for people to discover their talents and create possibilities for a better life

By Xu Qian, General Secretary of the Shenzhen Chorus Association and event organizer

An impressive performance by the Vienna Boys’ Choir at the Shenzhen Concert Hall thirteen years ago touched the hearts of the Peking University alumni. It was an awakening to music’s potential to conserve cultures and transfer them through the medium of choral singing. Our country of many nations is rich in traditional culture and music. But with the onset of urbanization and civilization, many traditional cultures are on the verge of being lost.

The performance that warm spring night sparked a lively discussion, culminating in the decision to launch a public charity foundation. The Shenzhen Green Pine Growth & Care Foundation would serve as a central entity, enabling schools from various nations to form their own choir groups and continue singing the traditional songs of childhood. The project’s name was Fly over the Rainbow. With the establishment of the Shenzhen Concert Hall that same year, the culture of China’s youngest city turned a new page, and the advent of the new choir project led to the realization of a multitude of colourful future dreams, changing so many people’s lives and gracing the city with much more than anyone would have imagined.

Just one month after the foundation began, the first Fly over the Rainbow children’s choir formed on 6 June 2007 in Tibet. Years later, on the 7th night of November 2019, the Green Pine Foundation presented the first national children’s choir festival in Shenzhen, hosting 36 member choirs from 28 different ethnic groups in nations throughout China, including the Taiwan province. In the final moments of the concert, the foundation’s organizers could hardly hold back their emotions. The event brought back the countless failures and moments of doubt and even the risk of the project’s running aground. But in those final moments, it had all become worth it.

Over the 13 years of hard work, Fly over the Rainbow has cultivated a healthy group of loyal sponsors for each of the ethnic nations’ choirs. The project’s first donors consisted of a group of enterprises owned by Peking University alumni. More enterprises, institutions and even individuals joined in as, one by one, additional choirs appeared, and the project’s significance became clearer. It was more than a cause for charity but rather an increasing sense of shared responsibility to protect human heritage. Now, each choir would have one or more associated enterprise as a regular sponsor that would make frequent visits to promote understanding and a sense of purpose. This distributed system of donors resulted in a more stable and efficient sponsorship for the project’s continuation.

Fifty-six separate nations exist in China. The majority of these are Han nations, which as a whole make up more than 91% of China’s population and one of the more enduring nations in the world, lasting for more than 2000 years. The remaining nations reflect the minority, which exists in all parts of China. However, only those populations that live deep in the mountains or in villages are likely to retain their unique languages and cultures. Through the course of history, many minority groups have lost their traditions and begun to take on the customs of the Han nations. Urbanization has also caused many people to lose their lands and immigrate to the city. Lifestyle changes bring cultural changes.

The Fly over the Rainbow project itself originated in Shenzhen, a municipality that transformed a small village into an international world-class city in only 40 years. A legend within the country, Shenzhen distinguishes itself as the “Silicon Valley” of China and a destination representing high potential for the future. Millions of talented people immigrate to Shenzhen, and more than 15 million now live in a city where the average age is only 26. Ironically, one of the most important projects to conserve China’s oldest cultural heritage was born in a city with the youngest of populations.

The secretary-general of the Green Pine foundation and director of the Fly over the Rainbow project, Ms Wang Fang states: “Teaching orally has been the way of Chinese traditional artists in past centuries. We are the first to bring it to a school”. An interview with the director brought further insight:

Bringing traditional arts education to the classroom is a breakthrough.

In China, most people in villages share the same family lineage and name. This ancient form of society, based on passing traditions on to subsequent generations, is an important part of life in small villages. For example, a talented dancer may develop a group of capable dancers. Through generations, dance becomes a significant village tradition. The original dancer relied on oral instruction to teach students or family members during the process of daily living. It has been a typical means of transferring traditional arts in China for over 1,000 years.

The significance of a family name, however, has not remained as an important part of modern life in recent decades, especially when most of the younger generations give up their lives in hometowns to find a new life in the city. But, because their previous poor standard of living in traditional agriculture and their minimal educational background make it difficult to find better employment, their new lives in the city start from zero.

During the past 13 years, the Green Pine Foundation has been among the first to recognize people who possess special talents in traditional arts and bring them on as teachers. The foundation may have discovered them working as masons in urban construction or washing dishes at a restaurant in a railway station, but it’s because of these new arrivals that some of the traditional arts have survived.

And life changes for them as well. They acquire new jobs and receive a regular salary from the sponsors, but most importantly, they come to realize that their jobs are meaningful. Over years of teaching, they develop a strong sense of dignity and pride in their work. A teacher here is considered to be “the inheritor of traditional culture” and a treasured resource.

The teachers’ lack of formal education, however, has led to difficulties in teaching students in a logical way. To overcome this hurdle, the Fly over the Rainbow project has extended its plan to include teachers’ training. Nevertheless, for some of the artists, study at one of China’s musical conservatories can negatively affect their self-confidence.  A highly-popular teacher from a Kazakh national children’s choir with unquestionable musical talent can find it particularly embarrassing to struggle when first presented with a musical score in Prof. Wu Lingfen’s classroom. Everything that appears at first to be a given is fraught with inherent complexities.

Despite difficulties, many people have offered their assistance over the past 13 years, including professional conductors and music teachers from all parts of China who work with the ethnic choirs as volunteers. In collaboration with the “inheritors of traditional culture”, these volunteers experiment to find the right path forward in education.

The long path ahead in education.

In the process of urbanization, rural areas become separated. Many children must remain at home with their grandparents while their parents work at jobs 1,000 kilometres away to provide better income for their families. The children often only meet their parents once a year at most. The younger generations in those areas have no option but to suffer increasing loneliness, sensitivity, lack of self-confidence and fear and insecurity.  They make a great sacrifice for the sake of the country’s urbanization.

At the same time, an increasing concentration of high-quality educational resources is found in big cities. To bridge this gap in child-fostering resources, Fly over the Rainbow carries a special mission. The Fly over the Rainbow volunteers are more than a group of famous teachers and conductors. The high-quality arts education they provide also serves as grounding for psychological self-improvement and healing of the heart through the intrinsic qualities of art.

The conductor of the Shenzhen high school Lily Girls’ Choir, Ms Manxue Hu explained: “I began as a volunteer teacher in the Yunnan province in 2014. At the time, I found it quite difficult. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what I should teach. Conducting class in the same way I taught in Shenzhen definitely didn’t work, but I also knew nothing about the local culture. What I could do was inspire them and let the process go at first, find a balance and let them find a better way to sing beautifully and hear each other. I had to discover a solution step by step. And each step might be an unexpected challenge. Despite this, I felt I had gained much more than I had given during my stay. I really appreciate this project!”

It was definitely a life-changing trip for Ms Hu. The project fascinated her, and she has continued to visit at least one ethnic choir every year since. In the process, some very precious things that might otherwise have been lost were regained: the blooming vitality of a person at the beginning of life, the heartfelt sense of music, the expression of a nation’s character in a way that could never be achieved through language.

If you’ve known about the Lily Girls’ Choir, you will have noticed the choir has changed a lot in recent years. Not only is Ms Hu an active contributor, but she is also a beneficiary of the project. Those amazing works in shining performance by the Lily Girls on the international stage were inspired by her trips. Ms Manxue Hu has become one of the leaders on the Fly over the Rainbow artistic board, and she retains great enthusiasm for her career.

For years, a lack of good works has plagued musical education in China. At the same time, thousands of good compositions remain hidden in the rural areas, destined to eventually to be lost. Fly over the Rainbow hosts a group of master composers who have begun recording the precious melodies. They’ve started saving the unique instruments and collecting the musical elements to ultimately render amazing musical pieces.

Mr Liu Xiaogeng is one in their company. His hometown is in the Yunnan province, a region in which 26 different nations live together, 15 of them unique to Yunnan. His primary life’s work is to explore and conserve folk music, and his cooperation with Fly over the Rainbow is legendary in the Chinese choral world. He started composing folk music when he was young, but after collaborating with Fly over the Rainbow, his career reached new heights. Hundreds of his works have not only been used by the local children’s choir but are also popular in the whole of China at the moment. A 2019 review to discover which songs were performed most often by choirs in China revealed Mr Liu Xiaogeng as the undisputed champion. His work is a remarkable contribution to Chinese arts education.

Identity and respect

If you ask the teachers what constitutes the most difficult part of their jobs, they don’t always respond that it comes down to the teaching method. Nowadays, the advent of the television has opened a window to the outside world. But for these young children, television is a strong influence when parents are not around, which could potentially lead in bad directions. The astonishing truth is that many local children have felt ashamed of their own traditions. They prefer jeans to their own “ugly” traditional costumes; they like pop songs more than the traditional songs; they admire the popular lifestyle. It’s hard for the volunteer teachers to persuade them to avoid these paths.

In 2008, the first Fly over the Rainbow concert dedicated to multi-nations children’s choirs, “Harmony between Mountain and Ocean”, took place in the Shenzhen concert hall. Since then, the concerts are held regularly in Shenzhen every year. Each time, with cheering and applause, the Shenzhen audiences show great and sincere admiration for the performances and even a curiosity about the participants’ lives in their respective hometowns. It’s a thrill for the children as well. They come to realize that perhaps jeans do not have the same appeal or convey the beauty of their own ways, that their music and culture is mysterious and that they are something special!

Exchange and communication are always a good form of education. The participants have found self-identity through communication with the outside, and Fly over the Rainbow remains hopeful that the choirs will, one day, perform on the international stage and represent not only China but a colourful China!

At its heart, Fly over the Rainbow is the process of enabling everyone to reflect back on their homelands and recognize the genealogy of their cultures.

China has made great strides in the eradication of human poverty in the past decades. It’s an unbelievable accomplishment for a country of over 14 billion people. However, though we have achieved fantastic results, we must confess that alleviation from spiritual and educational poverty is far from adequate. The wide gap between urban and rural areas still exists, and the road ahead promises to be very hard and long. That Fly over the Rainbow – a completely non-governmental organization – has taken the first step in these unbalanced circumstances is unusual in China.

You’d never imagine that little kids from Lu Quan (a small town in Yunnan Province and home to the Yi and Miao minority groups) could continue rehearsal for 8 hours without feeling tired at all. But life for them is already tough enough. Suffering through daily work is much harder than rehearsal. Arts education brings balance to their lives and spiritual power, and that holds great significance! “What we can do is explore more opportunities for people to discover their own talents and create possibilities for a better life”—Ms Wang Fang (director of Fly over the Rainbow)

In 2019, the Shenzhen Concert Hall hosted the first Fly over the Rainbow multinational children’s choir. Two hundred seventy-eight children from Shenzhen city were recruited that year to sing in the choir, which will continue to work regularly with various choirs from ethnic nations to produce a concert each year. Ms Manxue Hu is the choir’s current Artistic Director.

In a gesture of mutual learning, children from Shenzhen and the border areas will join in collaboration. Generally speaking, people from developed areas have the natural advantage of standard education, but here, the children from Shenzhen will be asked to learn from the ethnic nations’ group, including its language, dance and songs. Whether on a proactive level or out of circumstance, the intent is to equalize the terms.

For the kids from Shenzhen, there really is no practical necessity to learn the Tibetan language, but on a level of respect, it’s very necessary. They live in a developed city and naturally have more access to resources than others, which presents an inequality. It’s an obligation to let them know that, the more you have and the stronger you are, the greater the responsibility in the world.

The “Sounds from Ancient Lands” – the highlight of the first national children’s choir festival – was a milestone in the Chinese choral world. The audiences came from all parts of the country, and the tickets sold out very quickly. The veteran fans and new friends alike shared 2 tearful hours, moved beyond words.

For most western countries, it’s very hard to see a complete picture of China. Although people know there are 56 nations in this land, what they most likely see are the similarities from a narrow perspective. It’s of great value to us to go deep into each ethnic group and dig into the historical lineage of its culture to help the world recognize that China is a unified and diverse multi-cultural country.

Human beings have music. It’s like a rainbow that transcends the distance between time and space, breaks down the barriers of language and allows wisdom and civilization to flourish. If you want to know how far it is from my heart to your heart, the answer is: the length of a song!

Note：The “Sounds from Ancient Lands” concert in Shenzhen Concert Hall, 9 November 2019.

Nine choirs from different nations performed together. Thirteen cultural inheritors came to the stage to sing and dance. The Shenzhen Concert Hall Fly over the Rainbow multi-nations children’s choir and the Shenzhen Senior High School Lily Girls’ Choir also joined in the performance. It was a highly-creative concert, in which could be heard the ancient tone of the Naxi from 1,000 years ago singing together with “Days of Beauty” by Ola Gjeilo. The amazing songs sung by the 87-year-old singer known by the local people as the “Goddess of Snow Mountain” pierced the sky. The performance of a whole village of more than 100 guitar players was the distant outcome of a western missionary who lost his way in the mountains and stayed on at their village for 30 years and taught the whole town choral music and guitar. The Lily Girls’ Choir also performed some specifically-composed songs from distant nations. The Lily Girls also plan to perform this special list of programs at the 12th World Symposium on Choral Music in New Zealand.

There were many wonderful stories that touched many hearts in this absolutely kaleidoscopic concert of Chinese traditional culture. We hope these photos can convey some sense of that unforgettable night!

Xu Qian is in her tenth year of work as an organizer of choral events. From 2011 to 2018, she worked as project director at the Interkultur China office and head of the education department as well. She organized hundreds of international choral directors’ workshops & masterclasses in over 20 cities in China. She also served as the committee member for more than 10 international choir festival projects. Since 2019, Xu Qian has been elected as General Secretary of the Shenzhen Chorus Association. She has received high praise from the Shenzhen government for her work as the director of international affairs & PR for the committee with the Shenzhen choir festival. She started the Shenzhen Xinghan Culture and Arts Development Company, working for the benefit of choirs in the China worldwide concert tour, involving such groups as the Shenzhen Star Bright Choir, the Shenzhen senior high school Lily Girls’ Choir, the Shenzhen middle school Golden Bell Youth Choir and the Peiyang Chorus of Tianjin University. In addition to her business in Shenzhen, Xu Qian is also the artistic consultant for different events, including the Hainan Maritime Silk Road Choir Festival and Hunan Huanglong choral arts week, and she has received an invitation to serve as the international academy office director for the China Choral Association’s online choir college. Her majors in college were English Language and Business Management. After graduation, however, her work have been primarily directed toward Choral events organizations. ­­ Email: qianxu999@hotmail.com

Edited by Joel Hageman, USA

Interview with Roxanna Panufnik

Franziska Hellwig, Coordinator for Communication & Development, IK President‘s Office  

Roxanna Panufnik, one of the most prestigious British composers of our time, unites the world in her very own way. Through her music she tries to bring people and religions closer together with her unique feel for the musical languages of different cultures. In an interview, Roxanna Panufnik talks about her love for the world and choral music and her current projects.

FH: You bring people together in your very own way through your compositions. Why do you think it is so important to bring religions and cultures closer together? And is there an international encounter that is especially memorable to you personally?

RP: When 9/11 (the attack on New York Twin Towers in 2001) happened, I was pregnant with my first child and it left me terrified about what kind of world I was bringing her into. I felt powerless to do anything about it until someone reminded me that Christians, Jews and Muslims all believe in the same one God. This set me on a mission to find ways of emphasizing what we all have in common and also to share the beauty in the music and chants of all these faiths and cultures.

Your compositional style is shaped by your passion for world music. Where does this fascination come from?

When I was 19 years old, my father gave me a beautiful old book of Polish folk melodies. I was intrigued by how you could already hear hints of Eastern modality in these short tunes and this led to a fascination of what it is about each country’s music that makes it sound unique to them.

For Interkultur and the Rundfunkchor Berlin you composed a piece for 10 international choirs – Ever Us. It will be premiered on May 1, 2020 in Berlin during the “Fest der Chorkulturen”. Tell us about it. 

The Rundfunkchor Berlin & Interkultur have invited nine choirs from Brazil, Lebanon, Philippines, Belgium, Belarus, Singapore, Sweden, USA and Tasmania to come and celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday in a concert at Berlin’s Philharmonie. They have commissioned a 45-minute piece from me to showcase all these different choirs who will also sing together! The guest choirs will sing in English and the Rundfunkchor, who are the hosts, link the different choirs and endorse what they sing (in German). The words are from the great composer himself and some of his favourite writers (inc. Schiller, Goethe and Kant). These have been beautifully assembled and “poeticized” by Jessica Duchen and cover four main aspects of Beethoven’s life, finishing with Jessica’s own moving “Ode to Beethoven”. Some 400 performers are taking part – too many to fit onto the Philharmonie stage, so we have opera director Karen Gillingham who will be supervising logistical manoeuvres and also creating some beautiful visual effects in the process.

You compose many vocal pieces and have already published numerous works for choirs. What inspires you about choral music?

When I was growing up I sang in many fantastic school choirs – this instilled a love of choral music. My big “breakthrough” moment in my career was Westminster Mass in 1998, and this seems to have generated mostly choral commissions. I love the intense emotionality and directness of choral singing.

Roxanna Panufnik (b. 1968 ARAM, GRSM(hons), LRAM) studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music and, since then, has written a wide range of pieces – opera, ballet, music theatre, choral works, orchestral and chamber compositions, and music for film and television – which are performed all over the world. She has a great love of music from a huge variety of cultures and different faiths, whose influence she uses liberally throughout her compositions.  2018, Roxanna’s 50^th birthday year, saw some exciting commissions and premieres for the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms and a co-commissioned oratorio “Faithful Journey – a Mass for Poland” for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Poland, marking Poland’s centenary as an independent state. 2019 included a new commission for two conductors and two choirs, premiered by Marin Alsop and Valentina Peleggi with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and 2020 will see the world premiere of “Ever Us” for 10 choirs and a  symphony orchestra commissioned by the Rundfunkchor Berlin’s 2020 Beethoven anniversary celebrations.

Edited by Tadhg Gleeson, Italy

A choral endeavour for the sake of music

By Davide Grosso, IMC Project Manager

In September 2019, representatives of the global music ecosystem gathered in Paris for the 6^th IMC World Forum on Music to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the International Music Council (IMC) together. The Forum was based on the theme: “Give me Five! The 5 Music Rights in Action” following the motto of the roadmap adopted by the members of the organisation during the 36^th General Assembly held in Morocco in 2015. The choice of Paris was not a coincidence as the IMC took its first steps in the Ville Lumière in 1949 under the aegis of UNESCO.

Back then, the idea was to create an independent organisation bringing together the entire music industry to develop sustainable music industries worldwide, to create awareness about the value of music, to be a voice for music, to make music matter throughout the fabric of society, and to uphold basic music rights in all countries.

The Five Music Rights are the core values of IMC and they inspire every action the organisation and its members undertake across and for the music industry. At the same time, they inspire thousands of projects and serve as a fundamental basis for advocacy actions all over the world.

セルフフェラ

The Five Music Rights are firmly rooted in a series of international conventions such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), especially in articles 22, 23 and 27, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) as these generally state that the ability to express, learn, access, participate in and contribute to cultural life without any discrimination are among the basic human rights.

The current wording was officially adopted by the General Assembly held in Tokyo in 2001, but the message they carry has been present in the DNA of the Council since its foundation. It can actually be found already on the first page of the IMC statutes approved in Paris on January 28, 1949.

Over its long history, IMC and its members have contributed to the advancement of these rights in a large number of ways; be it with projects like the International Rostrum of Composers or the African Music Development Programme; with the creation of specialised networks such as the International Society for Music Education (ISME) or the International Music + Media Centre (IMZ) or by its active contribution to important documents and conventions such as the  Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist (UNESCO, 1980) or the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (UNESCO, 2005).

Beyond IMC and its network, there are thousands of projects around the world promoting the Five Music Rights. Therefore, since 2009, the IMC Music Rights Awards have been given every two years, to programmes or projects that support one or more of the Five Music Rights  in an exemplary way. The contribution of the choral world was highlighted many times with outstanding projects such as Hearts in Harmony (Spain), aimed at including people with various disabilities in choral music making, or the Social Projects of the Fayha Choir (Lebanon), offering a “safe haven” as well as access to music and music education to marginalised populations of refugees, among others.

In 2016, in a bid to scale up the promotion of the Five Music Rights, IMC appointed Arn Chorn-Pond (Cambodia), Dame Evelyn Glennie (United Kingdom), Ramy Essam (Egypt) and Tabu Osusa (Kenya) as Music Rights Champions with the objective of making them known to a larger audience. Since then, these outstanding personalities of the music ecosystem have been raising awareness about the rights by promoting them at concerts, public appearances and interviews. Their presence and contribution at the 6th World Forum on Music in Paris was therefore very important to re-affirm once more their engagement.

In the 71^st year of IMC’s existence, the music ecosystem needs these rights to be affirmed more than ever. And they are incredibly relevant to the choral world! Think about it: even in so-called advanced countries many people still do not have the freedom to sing, to learn how to do it, or to participate in music activities, and many artists do not have access to the tools they would need to develop their careers and live off their own art…

The choral world is an essential part of the IMC family and it is well represented by local, national, regional and global organisations, which on one hand, bring IMC values closer to their members and on the other, continue to demonstrate what a powerful and relevant tool choral music making is for the music ecosystem.

The International Music Council is today the world’s largest network of organizations and institutions working in the field of music. It counts some 150 direct members representing over 1000 organisations in some 150 countries with a potential outreach of 600 million persons eager to develop and share knowledge and experience on diverse aspects of musical life.

Something that, in other words, can be easily described as a choral endeavour on a global scale for the sake of music.

Ethnomusicologist, five music rights activist with a strong background in journalism and media, Davide Grosso has carried out extensive field research in Indonesia about music and society. He joined the International Music Council in 2012 where he is in charge of project management. Among other projects, he coordinates the International Rostrum of Composers and since 2015, its “big brother” Rostrum+. He also curates the edition of the newsletter Music World News and the communication campaigns of the IMC. Outside the office he composes electronic music for a contemporary puppet theatre company and writes about music and politics for various magazines and blogs. Email: d.grosso@imc-cim.org

Edited by Taylor Ffitch, USA

A window on the new repertoire for liturgy and not only

By Richard Mailänder, Professor and Choir Conductor

In September 2019 a new contract for the composer’s competition “Musical Sacra Nova” was signed between the Archbishopric of Cologne, the Freundeskreis der Abtei Brauweiler, the Musica Sacra Association Warsaw, the Polish Chamber Choir, the University for Church Music of Regensburg, the Associazione Musicale MusicaFicta and the Papal Institute for Church Music.

The competition now has two categories:

A: A cappella works with a Latin Christian text for up to 16 voices

B: Works with a Latin liturgical text for 4 to 6 voices and organ ad lib.

The competition has been greatly developed with new partners and a new orientation. This year 78 compositions were presented in the competition, almost twice as many as in 2019, by participants from 18 countries, also more than twice as many as in 2019. They came from Indonesia, the Philippines, Russia, Brazil, USA, Canada and many European countries.

The jury (the photograph in this article shows the jury members before the opening of the envelopes at the Papal Institute for Church Music, from left to right: Msgr. Vincenzo de Gregorio (Rome), Prof. Vaclovas Augustinas (Vilnius), Prof. Dr. Enjott Schneider (Munich), Dr. Andrea Angelini (Rimini), Eriks Esenvalds (Riga), Stephen Layton (Cambridge) and Prof. Dr. Pawel Lukaszewski (Warsaw)) voted for the following works:

Category A:

1st Prize: Aleksander Jan Szopa (Poland) for Ubi caritas

2nd Prize: Paolo Orlandi (Italy)  for Ave Regina caelorum

3rd Prize: Steven Heelein (Germany) for Lux et origo

Category B:

1st Prize: Fé Yuen (Hong Kong) for Ave maris stella

2nd Prize: Joanna Widera (Poland) for Agnus Dei

3rd Prize: Johannes X. Schachtner (Germany) for Missa brevissima

One very special topic has to be mentioned: The winner of the first prize in category B is just 9 years old – nobody would have guessed. As can be seen from her curriculum vitae, it was not the first prize she received for her compositions.

The prize winner’s concert for category A will take place at Brauweiler Abbey (Germany) on 16 May at 8pm. The works of category B will be performed at Gdansk on 30 May. The concert in Brauweiler will be recorded and later broadcast by Deutschlandfunk.

Schott will publish all prize-winning works in the specially created series entitled “Ausgezeichnete Chorwerke”.

Richard Mailänder studied church music, musicology and history at Cologne Music College and at the University of Cologne. He started work as a church musician at St Margareta’s in Neunkirchen, and from 1980 to 1987 he was Cantor at St Pantaleon in Cologne. On 1 October 1987 Richard Mailänder started working at diocesan level within the Archbishopric of Cologne. In 2006 he took full charge of music in the Archbishopric. After a spell teaching at the Robert Schumann College in Düsseldorf, in 2000 he started teaching at the College of Music and Dance in Cologne, where he performed numerous works of Pärt, some of them first performances in Germany. Furthermore he has published numerous articles and books for the teaching of church music and is (co-)editor of many anthologies of choral music. E-mail: richard.mailaender@erzbistum-koeln.de

by Rubén Villar, Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV)

In the little Spanish city of Zamora, a vocal ensemble became famous in the Spanish musical scene primarily between 1925 and 1950. It was the Coral Zamora, created by the musician, conductor, and composer Inocencio Haedo Ganza, who was a key pillar of the city’s musical life in the first half of the 20^th century.

Inocencio Haedo was born in 1878 in the Spanish city of Santander, where he began his musical education in the city’s band. In 1892, he was engaged there as a professional piccolo player,[1] and he combined this job with harmony, violin, and piano studies.[2]

Haedo left Santander with his family and settled in Zamora in 1895, a city where he remained the rest of his life until his death in 1956. In these early years in his new city, Haedo worked as a pianist, flute and violin player, arranger, etc.[3] He began a career as a composer as well, his early works dating from the last years of the 19^th century. Soon he developed a deep interest in the province of Zamora and its folk music, which served as the basis for most of his vocal compositions.

The composer founded his first noteworthy music group in the year 1900: a male vocal ensemble called Orfeón El Duero.[4] In 1906, he was appointed music professor at the training school for women teachers in Zamora,[5] and a year later he also became music teacher at the local orphanage,[6] where he created a wind band called Banda Provincial de Zamora.

In 1925, Haedo founded his most important and notable ensemble: Coral Zamora, a 6-voice mixed choir that became the composer’s main occupation during the following years (although he never abandoned his teaching activity). The project for this new ensemble had begun to take shape in 1922.[7] This choir maintained the four male voices schema of its predecessor, El Duero but now incorporated two feminine voice sections (soprano and alto), thus taking the form of a 6-voice mixed choir.

The début concert took place at the Nuevo Teatro of Zamora (now the Teatro Ramos Carrión), in July 1926.[8] After that first performance, the ensemble began an intense concert tour throughout Spain, soon reaching the entire country. In 1927, after it had given some concerts in Madrid, Queen Victoria Eugenia gave the ensemble the honorary title of Real (royal),[9] and so the choir’s official name was changed to Real Coral Zamora until the advent of the republic in 1931.

In 1929, the same year in which the ensemble toured Barcelona and other cities of Catalonia, a contract was signed between the Coral Zamora and the Columbia Graphophone Company to record 6 shellac records containing part of the chorale’s repertory.[10] The recording sessions took place in a dance hall in Zamora,[11] where 11 pieces were recorded, sung by the Coral Zamora and conducted by its creator, Inocencio Haedo. Most of the recorded works were compositions by Haedo himself.

We can consider the decade between the ensemble’s first concert in July 1926 and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 as the chorale’s golden years. During this period, more than 60 concerts were performed, and activity outside Spain began to take shape in 1935, when the ensemble was able to visit Lisbon, giving three concerts there, one of which was attended by the President of the Portuguese Republic, António Óscar Carmona.[12] The tour was partly financed by the Spanish Government[13] and hosted by the Casa de España in the Portuguese capital.[14] A trip to Paris had been in the works two years earlier,[15] but it never materialised.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, with Zamora’s city in the zone dominated by the Fascists right from the beginning of the conflict. Because of this, the Coral Zamora was used by the new government as a political tool, incorporating Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or German Fascist songs and hymns into its repertoire.[16]

The first concert during the Spanish conflict was held in January 1937 in Salamanca,[17] where General Franco had established his headquarters and where the Allied countries had their embassies. This concert featured the première of the choir’s new political repertoire and was attended by many representatives of the Francoist government, as well as the ambassadors of Italy and Germany.[18] Until the end of the war in 1939, the few public appearances of the Coral Zamora were mostly political.

After the war, the ensemble had lost many members, some of whom had been incarcerated, executed, killed in conflict, or had emigrated. Thus, in 1940, Haedo restructured his choir by adding new members (Calabuig 1989, 197).

Between 1941 and 1943,,the Coral Zamora was absorbed by the Francoist cultural institution called Educación y descanso, which monopolized the official cultural activities in Spain during Franco’s dictatorship.[19] Under this institution, the Coral Zamora ceased to exist as an independent and autonomous entity. After that, the number of the ensemble’s purely musical performances (the usual activity of the prewar Coral Zamora) decreased, but its participation in political performances increased, becoming the most common activity of the postwar ensemble. Nevertheless, the choir still had the opportunity to make a few more concert trips during the 1940s, among them participation in two choral competitions organised in Madrid by Educación y Descano, in 1944 and 1946,[20] a concert in Oviedo in 1945[21], and a tour to Santiago de Compostela and La Coruña in 1948.[22]

The last concert tour of the Coral Zamora was a trip to Seville in 1951.[23] Two years later, in 1953, the75-year-old Haedo retired from his job as music teacher and band conductor, but he continued working with his choir until 1956, when his increasing health problems, in the form of frequent fainting and severe deafness, forced him to finally leave his ensemble.[24] A few months later, in August, the musician died in his sleep from a heart attack.[25]

After the composer’s demise, a new conductor for the Coral Zamora was chosen by Educación y Descanso. It was the Valencian military musician Salvador Roig Olmedo,[26] who occupied this position until 1958, when he was appointed conductor of the Toledo Infantry Academy Band.[27] No public performances were given by the choir with Roig as its conductor. After that, news about the ensemble practically disappeared from the newspapers. What happened then is unclear, but it seems that the choir was dissolved or almost completely disappeared.

At the same time that the choir apparently dissolved, a new ensemble was created by old members of the Coral Zamora: the Coro Haedo, whose aim was to keep alive Haedo’s choral work.[28] This new choir, conducted by a former member of the Coral, Emilio Antón, lasted barely a year, giving only a couple of concerts. The most noteworthy was the one performed in Madrid in February 1959, organised to raise money for the victims of the tragedy that had taken place in Ribadelago (Zamora), where a dam on the Tera river had broken, killing 144 people and destroying the whole town.

Shortly after this concert, the Coro Haedo disappeared, but in 1959, the Coral Zamora was reborn.[29] Only a few members from Haedo’s era were present in this new group, which was also conducted by Antón. Under Emilio Antón, the ensemble enjoyed its final years during the 60s. In what we could consider an epilogue to the ensemble founded by Haedo, only a few minor performances were given in these years, the last known one in 1964.[30] The choir lasted until around 1970, when it was definitively dissolved.

What gave the Coral Zamora its own personality was its repertoire. Part of this repertoire consisted of standard works varying from the Renaissance to the early 20^th century, but the major and most distinguishing part of the Coral Zamora’s repertoire, which really identified this ensemble, was the series of short a capella works composed by Haedo, all of them based on folk songs from the province of Zamora. Unfortunately, these choral works were gradually abandoned by the ensemble after its creator’s death in 1956, so that in the choir’s final years, during the 60s, Haedo’s works were no longer performed.. Moreover, these works were never printed, and the composer himself was not prone to copy them for other ensembles, because he thought that other choirs and conductors wouldn’t be able to perform them in the way he would like. As a result of this, only handwritten copies of some of Haedo’s works are available nowadays, in varying states of conservation. Many of them are third-party copies, or incomplete ones, and in some cases they are lost. This has been a handicap in the retrieval of a complete set of works, although during our research we were able to recover most of them, leaving an almost complete set available for future studies or performances.

Rubén Villar has a higher degree in viola from the Conservatory of Vigo and a master’s degree in music research from the International University of La Rioja. In addition, he obtained a teaching degree at the University of Salamanca and a degree in German philology at the University of Valladolid. Currently, he works as viola teacher at the Ávila Conservatory of Music, and he is writing his doctoral dissertation about Inocencio Haedo at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Email: rvla55@hotmail.com

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Calabuig Laguna, Salvador. (1989). El Maestro Haedo y su tiempo. Zamora: Diputación Provincial.

Calabuig Laguna, Salvador. (1987). Cancionero zamorano de Haedo. Zamora: Diputación Provincial.

Casares Rodicio, Emilio (edit.) (2002). Diccionario de la música española e hispanoamericana. Madrid (SGAE).

Newspapers and magazines

Zamora’s official gazette

Heraldo de Zamora

Imperio

La Opinión de Zamora

El Adelanto

El Dardo de Plasencia

A Voz

O Século

Diário da Manhã

Merlú

Ritmo

Other documents

Datos biográficos del Maestro Haedo (1878-1941) (1941)

Coral Zamora concert programmes (1926-1951)

Designation of Haedo as class 3 musician by the Santander City Council (24/03/1892)

Contract between Coral Zamora and the Columbia Graphophone Company (1929)

Letter from Haedo to Teodoro Sánchez, organist in Santander (1935)

Letter from Salvador de Madariaga to Higinio Merino (18/05/1933)

Letter from Henri Collet to Inocencio Haedo (21/04/1933)

Letter from Inocencio Haedo to Nicolás Gonzalez (1956)

Annexation document between Coral Zamora and Educación y Descanso (27/02/1943)

Edited by Richard Kutner, USA

[1] Designation of Haedo as class 3 musician by Santander City Council (24/03/1892), private collection.

[2] Ritmo (30/06/1930), p. 6.

[3] Examples in Heraldo de Zamora (07/12/1897), p. 3; Heraldo de Zamora (08/02/1899), p. 3; Heraldo de Zamora (04/08/1899), p. 3.

[4] Heraldo de Zamora (18/05/1900), p. 3; Heraldo de Zamora (22/05/1900), p. 2.

[5] Datos biográficos del Maestro Haedo (1878-1941) (brochure with Haedo’s biographical data from 1941), private collection.

[6] Heraldo de Zamora (/1907), p. 2.

[7] Calabuig, S. (1987). El Maestro Haedo y su tiempo. Zamora: Diputación provincial.

[8] Heraldo de Zamora (04/07/1926), p. 1; concert programme  (04/07/1926), private collection.

[9] Heraldo de Zamora (22/05/1927), p. 1.

[10] Contract with the Columbia Graphophone Company (30/08/1929), private collection.

[11] Datos biográficos del Maestro Haedo (1878-1941) (brochure with Haedo’s biographical data from 1941), private collection.

[12] A voz (26/03/1935); Diário da Manhã (27/03/1935).

[13] Datos biográficos del Maestro Haedo (1878-1941) (brochure with Haedo’s biographical data from 1941), private collection.

[14] Heraldo de Zamora (14/02/1935), p. 1.

[15] Letter from Salvador de Madariaga to Higinio Merino (18/05/1933), private collection; letter from Henri Collet to Inocencio Haedo (21/04/1933), private collection.

[16] Examples found in original scores located in Haedo’s personal archive: Imperio (10/01/1943), pp. 3, 6.; Heraldo de Zamora (20/01/1937), p. 2.

[17] Heraldo de Zamora (20/01/1937), p. 2.

[18] El Dardo de Plasencia (14/07/1903), pp. 1, 2.

[19] Imperio (08/05/1941), pp. 1, 2; Annexation document between the Coral Zamora and Educación y Descanso (27/02/1943), private collection.

[20]” Imperio, (14/04/1946), p. 3; Imperio, (26/04/1946), p. 3.

[21] Concert Programme (07/05/1945), private collection.

[22] Imperio, (10/08/1948), p. 3; Imperio, (12/08/1948), pp. 1, 4. Imperio, (13/08/1948), p. 1.

[23] Concert Programme (05/10/1951), private collection; Imperio (05/10/1951), pp. 1, 4.

[24] Letter from Inocencio Haedo to Nicolás Gonzalez (1956), private collection.

[25] Imperio (30/08/1956), pp. 1, 2.

[26] Imperio (04/12/1956), p. 6.

[27] Concert programme with curriculum of the Toledo Infantry Academy Band (07/10/2017), private collection.

[28] Imperio, (23/05/1958), p. 5

[29] Imperio (27 November 1960), p. 7.

[30] Merlú (yearbook from 1965), p. 40.

As you all know by now, and to our deep regret, the 12th World Symposium on Choral Music in Auckland,
New Zealand, had to be cancelled because of the COVID19 pandemic.
We would like to express our profound and sincere thanks to all the people involved in the preparation of
this event. They did an outstanding job which, we believe, will not have been in vain. Their experience will
most certainly be of use in future IFCM events.
IFCM President and Board

The article below was written (and translated) before the cancellation of the event. However, we decided to
publish it because it gives a good picture of the spirit and program of the symposium.

*****************

By Christine Argyle

Choosing the theme for a world symposium on choral music must typically involve lengthy debate over a multitude of possible topics. But for John Rosser (Artistic Director of the 12^th World Symposium on Choral Music) and the New Zealand Choral Federation, the choice for WSCM2020 was not a difficult one. You might say it came naturally.

‘He tangata / He whenua – People and the Land’ is derived from tangata whenua (literally ‘people of the land’), the name the indigenous Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand use to refer to themselves. The term tangata whenua is widely used and understood by New Zealanders of all cultures, and implicit in it is the concept of kaitiakitanga – the guardianship and protection of sky, sea and land. In the Māori world view, land gives birth to all things, including humankind, and provides the physical and spiritual basis for life.

A statement on the Symposium website reads, “In WSCM2020 we want to explore through choral music the relationship humans have with the land that supports them: the sense of identity they derive from it and the tensions that arise out of it. We believe this is a theme that touches all of us in some way, calling to mind such notions as family, nurture, identity, place, community, culture, celebration, nationalism, colonialism, dispossession, alienation, partnership, freedom, development, interconnectedness, environmentalism, urban living, the natural world, the seasons, stress and healing, beauty, nostalgia, utopia…”

One need look no further than the great Romantic composers to find a rich repertoire of choral works inspired by nature and the human condition, and there are numerous examples from the eras before and since. But many of the choirs travelling to New Zealand for WSCM2020 have chosen to commission new works exploring the relationship between people and land, while others have delved into the traditional music of their country’s indigenous cultures for inspiration. The rich and varied responses to the theme have resulted in innovative and thought-provoking programmes that cannot fail to engage and delight delegates and audiences of all backgrounds and tastes.

A newly-commissioned work to be performed by the Stuttgart Chamber Choir under Frieder Bernius is The Silent City by Michael Ostrzyga, one of the featured presenters at WSCM2020. This a cappella piece evokes the awe-inspiring landscape of Bryce Canyon and explores the human response to this unique environment, including a reference to the creation myth of an indigenous Paiute tribe. Ostrzyga employs a text-collage ranging from words in Paiute to contemporary poetry and incorporates overtone singing by Anna-Maria Hefele (also presenting at WSCM2020).

Dominick DiOrio, director of NOTUS Contemporary Vocal Ensemble, has responded to the theme with two very different works of his own. He writes, “When I began to think about ‘People and the Land’, I could not help but consider that so many people at this time in our world history are being displaced from the lands that they have long called home. Refugees across the world are in crisis, fleeing persecution in their ancestral home to seek out new homes elsewhere. It is impossible to sing about the land without considering this plight.” He describes his piece You Do Not Walk Alone (2014) as “a reassuring balm for those that flee”. In A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (2010), DiOrio says “the vast expanses of nature are front and centre, with the poetry of Amy Lowell evoking images of the sea, the stars, and the mountains as representatives of our great Gaia,  the Earth”.

The concept of Gaia – the ancestral mother of all life – is a recurring theme in WSCM2020 programmes. My Mother the Earth by Frank Harvøy (presenting at WSCM2020) brings a Nordic perspective to the notion of Mother Nature in the programme of the Norwegian National Youth Choir and Nordic Voices, while Mexican ensemble Voz en Punto will open their full-length concert with Xochipitzahuatl, a song to Mother Earth in the language of the Aztecs. Ensemble Vocapella Limburg’s programme will include Papatūānuku by New Zealand/English composer Chris Artley. In the Māori creation myth, Papatūānuku, the earth mother, had many children with the sky father Ranginui, but they loved each other so much that earth and sky remained locked in an embrace that kept all light out. Eventually their children forced them apart so that light and air could allow forests, seas, birds, fish and animals to flourish.

The New Zealand Youth Choir looks not to Māori legend, but to Māori history and battles over land in a moving choral arrangement by Robert Wiremu (a WSCM2020 presenter) of Tuirina Wehi’s Waerenga-a-Hika. The piece commemorates an episode in New Zealand’s land wars: the 1865 siege by colonial forces of a fortified Māori settlement, which resulted in significant loss of life and the capture and deportation of those that survived.

Similar events across the sea in Australia inspired Paul Stanhope’s Jandamarra: Sing for the Country. The work honours an Aboriginal resistance hero from the 1890s who fought white settlers and police in order to protect his native Bunuba people and their country from invasion. The final movement of the work, ‘This is our Home’, features in the programme of Australia’s Gondwana Children’s Choir, along with Songs of the Torres Strait Islands, traditional songs of the inhabitants of the archipelago that lies between the northernmost peninsula of Australia and New Guinea.

Africa and its people are represented in concerts by the Nairobi Chamber Chorus – from songs of the Luo, Digo and Giriama communities in Kenya, to traditional songs from Namibia, Nigeria and Liberia – while the Müller Chamber Choir of Taiwan has a diverse programme that ranges from Seppo Paakkunainen’s Dalvi duoddar luohti, based on a Yoik melody from Finland and incorporating traditional throat singing, through to a hunting song of the indigenous Bunun tribe in Taiwan, known for their improvised polyphonic vocal music.

The Houston Chamber Choir’s director Robert Simpson says, “People and the Land is a theme that has deep meaning for those in Texas. Traveling through its 268,597 square miles, one finds forests, wetlands, rolling hills and plains. Rich in Native American and Hispanic culture, Texas also identifies strongly with the heritage of its many German, Czech and Polish settlers who came to establish ranches and farms. The land is part of the people of Texas.” The choir will sing a work dedicated to them by American composer Pierre Jalbert called Desert Places, featuring texts by Robert Frost, Sappho, and Walt Whitman that speak of the human soul’s interaction with forces from the outside world. 

Ethan Sperry, director of Portland State Chamber Choir, has used the Symposium theme as the inspiration for two quite different concerts. The first, titled ’Legends of Rebirth‘, features his own choral arrangements of pieces inspired by the cycle of seasons and the cycle of life from Native American, Hindu, and Haitian Voudo traditions, as well as a work by Ēriks Ešenvalds based on a Hindu creation myth. In their second concert, the choir will present a major work: The Consolation of Apollo by Kile Smith. Sperry says, “In 1968 the world watched in awe as the Apollo 8 spacecraft broadcast the first images of the Earth rising over the moon. This new choral piece combines the words of the Apollo 8 astronauts, as they rounded the moon and saw Earth rise for the first time, with text by the medieval scholar Boethius contemplating humanity’s place in the universe. The work culminates in the Genesis creation text, which the astronauts read to the world as humanity gazed at the Earth for the first time via a television transmission.”

German vocal ensemble Pop-Up Detmold will present a concert of jazz, pop and ethno-styled music titled ’It’s all about Nature‘, with songs ranging from Kerry Marsh’s choral arrangement of Woods by Bon Iver to the wordless Gøta by Peder Karlsson, written in response to the beauty and loneliness of the Faroe Islands in the Northern Atlantic. They will also include the Take Six arrangement of Manuel Grunden’s Noah. Pop-Up’s director Anne Kohler suggests that the story of a giant flood threatening the extinction of people and animals may resonate deeply with audiences today… 

Humankind’s treatment of our precious environment is considered in a performance by the Hamilton Children’s Choir of Kasar mie la gaji – The earth is tired – a work that Venezuelan composer Alberto Grau wrote “for an international mobilization to save the Earth and a conscientious effort regarding the problems of the environment”. But the theme of People and the Land is perhaps best summed up in the words of a short song that appears on the programme of the Cantabile Youth Singers of Silicon Valley, This We Know by Joan Szymko:

This we know, the Earth does not belong to us.
We belong to the Earth.
All things are connected,
Like the blood that unites one family.
Whatever befalls the Earth,
Befalls the children of the Earth.

This piece first appeared in Choral Journal and permission to reprint was provided by the American Choral Directors Association.

Christine Argyle is Chief Executive of the New Zealand Choral Federation and was previously on the Board of the NZCF, serving for a time as Chair. She has been a member of Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir since its formation in 1998 and is a choral director, clinician and adjudicator. Ms Argyle was the founder-director of two prominent Wellington choirs: Nota Bene chamber choir and Wellington Young Voices children’s choir. Prior to working in arts administration, Ms Argyle was a classical music broadcaster and documentary maker for Radio New Zealand Concert and hosted the network’s daily music news programme Upbeat. Email: christine.argyle@nzcf.org.nz

Edited by Sam Hemsworth, UK

Interview with Philip Lawson

By Andrea Angelini, conductor, composer and ICB Managing Editor

AA: Philip, you had a wonderful career in the King’s Singers, one of the most acclaimed vocal groups in the world. What is your current approach to the amateur choral world?

PL: I absolutely love working with amateur choirs (it’s one of things I did before I joined The King’s Singers, being quite late into the group, aged 36) and fascinated by the levelling effect it has – people from all walks of life working on equal terms to achieve perfection in something other than that which they normally do, and are there because they love being there: the literal meaning of “amateur”. I now have my own choir, a good chamber choir based in Romsey near Southampton, and I apply all the choral techniques we used in The King’s Singers to my work with them, as I try to do with every choir I work with, either as guest conductor or in a workshop situation. My choir members enjoy trying to attain the precision for which we all strive, and I expect total commitment from them when they’re with me: we all owe it to our audiences to prepare well and communicate fully, whether amateur or professional. We have a laugh too: I’ve amassed quite a collection of funny stories from my life in music so far, though I suspect they may have heard some of them more than once, but are too embarrassed to tell me to stop repeating myself!

AA: Let’s start from the beginning of the adventure… Do you remember how you first came into contact with choral music?

PL: Yes, it was almost by chance: my parents are not at all musical so I did no music to start with. Like many boys of my age I was in the Boy Scouts and after one of my friends left to join a local church choir he came to me and told me that the choir was much more fun than Scouts. So I did the same, and it literally changed my life! Though it was only a parish choir we did trips to cathedrals every year, usually Chichester or Guildford, and I loved the way loud final chords echoed through the building, which of course they didn’t do in our relatively small church. One of the other choristers lived on our street and his mother turned up at our doorstep one day and told my parents that they really ought to buy me a piano, if only to stop me going round to her house all the time and asking to play theirs! My parents did as they were told and bought me a rather old upright (actually not-so-upright!) piano. It was just what I needed, and I spent hours playing around with chords and melodies and started composing pieces, mostly choral but one or two piano pieces as well. I still have them, and they’re all utter rubbish, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

AA: Conducting, singing, composing, arranging… four different aspects of a musician who wants to devote his/her life to choral music. Is it possible to become a true expert in everything or is it maybe better to pursue only one thing?

PL: I think it’s fine to do all those things together, and actually beneficial to experience music from a number of angles. Being active in a variety of disciplines can definitely help each one to develop, and if you were to ask me which of the four I found to be most beneficial in my own experience my answer would be singing. Singing is the about the most directly physical of musical activities, and even if you have not got a particularly good voice, I believe you should try to sing, and through this learn about resonance, harmonics, phrasing, word energy and tone colour, all the things you need to have knowledge and experience of if you want to conduct, or compose/arrange for choirs.

AA: The choral repertoire is huge: from polyphony to contemporary music through baroque, romantic, lyric, gospel, serial music. Should choirs attempt to do everything or, if they specialise, what should be the criteria for choosing the styles they perform?

PL: My simple answer to this is do what you feel comfortable doing. People often said to us as King’s Singers “You do everything”. Not quite true – we did a lot of different types of choral music, but never gospel, for instance, or rap! The sound of the group is not set up for those genres, and it would have been foolish to attempt them just for the sake of doing everything, and actually maybe a bit disrespectful to the many experts that work in those fields. That said, it is interesting to put a different slant on some genres, and give audiences a fresh take on familiar styles. An example of this would be The King’s Singers doing lower voice German Romantic repertoire by Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn etc. These pieces would mostly be performed by fairly large male voice choirs in Germany, but doing them with well-blended solo voices gives them a different and, we thought, attractive colour. It reminds me of when we recorded Tallis’s 40-part motet “Spem in alium” multi-tracking in the studio with just 6-voices: it’s hardly authentic, but it enabled us to perfectly balance the voices and hear nuances in the harmony which are so difficult to achieve when trying to record 40 different parts in a “live” setting. We needed headphones and playback to record this piece, and it was interesting and slightly weird when occasionally you would sing suspensions and even false relations against another part being sung by yourself!

AA: Again about the repertoire. There is often a debate about the way to compose choral music today. Sometime it looks like composers do not have the possibility to affirm their style but mostly they need to follow what the music market is asking for. To elaborate on this: 90% of the choirs are amateur; this affects the possibility to perform very complicated music. Are we losing the music of our time?

PL: As long as there are groups around like The King’s Singers, The BBC Singers etc. who can perform these difficult contemporary choral pieces we haven’t lost them, and also not every composer is capable of writing really challenging music that is worthy of performance: I know I can’t! The King’s Singers commissioned many wonderful pieces that are beyond the capabilities all but the finest amateur choirs: Ligeti “Nonsense Madrigals”, Berio “The Cries of London”, Maxwell Davies “The House of Winter” to name but a few, but that doesn’t mean great composers should not be attempting music like this, and the repertoire is enriched by such wonderful pieces as these. History as usual will judge the merits of music from the contemporary scene, and for this reason I feel it is better for lesser composers (such as myself!) to stick to what we can do, i.e. write more accessible music as best as we can rather than attempting “challenging” music just for the sake of so-called progress.

Choral music is a tool by which people come together to exercise both body and mind, share a common goal, and put aside, if only temporarily, any differences they may have.

AA: In your opinion, is there a right place for each kind of repertoire? My friend Peter Phillips (the conductor of the Tallis Scholars) once told me me that there is no specific connection between the text and the venue at which a choir is singing. Is it possible for you to make singing a sacred motet in a concert hall attractive?

PL: I agree with Peter – a concert hall with excellent acoustics is a great place to hear sacred music, especially polyphonic pieces whose nuances are otherwise lost in the wash of reverberation of a vast cathedral. Similarly churches can be good places to hear arrangements of folk songs and spirituals. We can’t always choose our acoustics of course, and if you find yourself in a very dry, very large space the most important thing is to get a homogeneous, well balanced and well tuned texture from the choir, with everyone matching vowel sounds and dynamics, and then the enhanced harmonics will do the work of projecting the block of sound into the space.

AA: Choral music is a big net. There are a lot of organizations that are building bridges between countries to make the world a better place through choral music. You know, there have been examples of singing revolutions even up to thirty years ago. Recently, England has decided to exit from the EU. Two different attitudes? What is your perception?

PL: I am sad and disappointed about the result of our 2016 referendum, especially as there was such a large number of liberal-minded people (alas not quite large enough) who wanted to remain in the EU. However, it is a political not an artistic union, and art and politics are two very different things – what we need is for governments to stop cutting subsidies to the arts: that is potentially more damaging than the question of whether UK artists need visas to work in the EU, and vice versa. Music knows no boundaries, and we need to continue to use choral music and art in general to find the common ground which binds us all together as individuals. I am determined from my own point of view that the UK leaving the EU should have little or no effect on my work, and I can continue my relationship with the many European countries that I have loved visiting and working in over the years. Vive L’Europe!!

AA: The last question, the most complicated probably. What is choral music?

PL: Choral music is a tool by which people come together to exercise both body and mind, share a common goal, and put aside, if only temporarily, any differences they may have. In The King’s Singers we often disagreed about many things, not just musical but also to do with the running of the group. However, I always remember and cherish the fact that whenever we walked out on stage all of that was temporarily forgotten, in the interests of making music to the highest possible standard and communicating to our audiences all the different emotions that music can summon up. Choral music may be just lines and dots on a piece of paper, but the fact that it has the power to enhance, even change the lives of both performer and listener, that’s pretty cool isn’t it?!

AA: Thank you Philip, this has been one of the most inspiring interviews I have ever done!

For 18 years Philip Lawson was a baritone with The King’s Singers, and was for most of that time also their principal arranger. Having replaced founder-member Simon Carrington in 1993, he performed more than 2,000 concerts with the group and appeared on many CDs, DVDs, radio and TV programmes worldwide. Philip contributed more than 50 arrangements to the repertoire of The King’s Singers, including 10 for the 2008 CD “Simple Gifts” which went on to win the GRAMMY for Best Classical Crossover Album in 2009. Before joining the group, Philip was Director of Music at a school in Salisbury, England, and a Lay Clerk in the cathedral choir there, and had previously worked in London as a freelance baritone, performing regularly with The BBC Singers, The Taverner Choir, The Sixteen and the choirs of St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. He now has a writing and consultancy contract with the American publisher Hal Leonard Corporation, for whom he holds the title of European Choral Ambassador. Philip has over 200 published arrangements and compositions, and leads regular choral workshops in Europe and the USA. He has also twice been Professor of Choral Arranging at the European Seminar for Young Composers in Aosta, Italy, sponsored by Europa Cantat, and Professor of Choral Conducting at the Curso Canto Choral in Segovia, Spain. He is on the staff of Wells Cathedral Specialist Music School, Salisbury Cathedral School and the University of Bristol as a vocal performance teacher and since 2016 has been Musical Director of The Romsey Singers. Email: lawson.philip@gmail.com

Edited by Selina Morsoni, UK