So there I was, Redhill Town centre just after my dad's funeral in June, when I saw an invitation for singers to rehearse with the English Arts Chorale, a professional outfit whose leader also runs the Reigate Music Ffestival every year. This was to culminate in a performance of the full version of Carl Orff's 'Carmina Burana' in Latin, Old German, and Old French. As well as Bernstein's 'The Chichester psalms.' In Hebrew.

A month of rehearsals later, and I am pleased to say, peeps, that I DID IT! Dad must have been with me that day, because may I bring your attention to the following:
1) I sing - quite well - but mainly at karaoke or open mic sessions, mainly jazz and soul and ALWAYS in English. The other applicants all sang classical choral music in church, etc, and had fully trained voices. Mine is (mainly) self taught and no, I don't 'do' breathing exercises. Or any other kind of vocal exercise, come to think of it. I also don't 'do' operatic, unlike the people I was surrounded by.
2) I also don't do foreign languages - they all did, being used to such things as Brahms requiem and Beethoven's Ninth.
3) ditto, I don't read music. It was expected you didn't bother turning up to first rehearsal unless you could - and fluently.
4) I can't sing from memory either, as I tend not to listen to this stuff at home. Ever.
5) In other words, I was the only person present with my, ahem, unique experience - or lack of it.
6) Which, at least, gave me something to write about.
7) But I DID get a great buzz from the whole thing, the music, the way my voice 'suddenly' worked itself into the rest of the first alto section, the camaraderie and the professionalism. Especially doing the church production in front of a full audience - amazing sense of pride and achievement AND at £15 all in, the best value singing lessons I've ever had!

Why do I bring this up here? well, do you know what 'Carmina burana' is all about - including that famous opener and closer, 'O Ffortuna?' Double 'F' is deliberate, because the subject does fit in with this site rather well. Because it's THOSE verses, written in the 13th century by some randy old monk in Bavaria (supposedly) and entirely devoted to boozing ('In Taberna') Gambling ('O Fortuna') and sex (most of the rest of it) Orff even did a follow up, where the REALLY naughty stuff got written down!!!

Why is it an 'on topic' discussion? Well, what about the patron saint of Swindon, and his shennanigans two books back? (forget the name, you know who I mean) Boozing, womanising and gambling? He could have written the whole thing. In fact, thinking about it, I reckon he did. I mean, come on, I've got the English translation. Did they REALLY write verses that literally spoke of 'losing the shirt off one's back' all that time ago? Was the phrase even in use?

In the meantime, I reckon we could take this further, and rewrite 'Burana' exclusively for the Jasper FForde generation. You could leave out swans bemoaning the fact they're turning black whilst roasting nicely, and bring in such modern inventions as the motor car 'O Lagunaahh, velour inter-ee-aahhhh ....' It even scans!

We could put on a show at Swindon. Come on, everybody, on to that second song:
'Jasper Ffordus, bookus signus
Thursday Nextus Reading bound ...'

Despite the text, Carmina Burana is a fairly common choice for school performances in Germany. I even got to sing it in the choir twice during my high school career - age 11 as an Alto and Age 18 as Basso...Actually, we did not do the whole piece, but only some numbers, due to restrictions in the availability of solo singers, and because some numbers are just too complicated for a school orchestra.

A long time ago I saw a film rendition (this one, I think) of Orff's Cantata that captured its hedonist nature quite nicely - think a Fellini-like scenery with lots of ballet and papier-mâché. Especially the guy stuck in the costume of a roasted swan, singing about his plight "Miser, miser! modo niger et ustus fortiter!" stuck to my mind. If you can find it anywhere, have a look at it, it's really worth it!

Congratulations on the performance.

I'm also a jazz musician, and have dabbled in classical music. I discovered classical musicians can be just as pompous and stuck up as rock stars. I met some nice ones too, but on the whole they tend to focus on their genre and have no respect for any other.

I love classical music, but I like to improvise too much. Classical can never be my main passion.

Every jazz musician I have met, even the big names, have been very nice and encouraging too. No ego problems at all. Miles might be the only exception, but I never had the chance to meet him.

Congratulations! I did this a few years back with an excellent choir in Windsor. Great fun :-D

JSue, very very much congratulations!

A note on 'losing one's shirt' -- I am always surprised when I learn of a phrase still in use that can be traced to the 11th-12th centuries or even earlier. Just finished a book called "Life in a Medieval Barony" and oh yes, losing one's shirt was mentioned. Dicing was illegal in a lot of places but of course it still went on like gangbusters, and it was very common to end up playing for clothing by the end of the game!

Losing one's shirt...
...a bit of historical fact which actually turned up in that unlikeliest of places, A Knight's Tale.

Actually I love hearing the historical etymology of expressions like this.

Straight-laced has its roots in the way the Puritans laced up their clothes (straight across instead of criss-cross like most people).

Coming up to scratch is one that most people know of as being originally from boxing (I think Georgian/Regency era)

Anyone know where "pissed as a newt" comes from? I'd not have thought that newts were any more given to imbibing excessive quantities of alcohol than other amphibious creatures, really...

Woo hoo! Well done, congratulations! Sounds fab!

Maybe you shouldn't get too exited about that 'losing one's shirt' - I am not sure what Sue was refering to, as there are two songs where something like that comes up:

In "Ego sum abbas" is says: "...et qui mane me quesierit in taberna, post vesperam nudus egredietur, et sic denudatus veste clamabit:..." (and whoever searches me out at the tavern in the morning, after Vespers he will leave naked, and thus tripped of his clothes he will call out: - translation from [www.classical.net]). "Denudatus veste" here does not mean "stripped of his shirt", but "stripped of his clothes".

The next number, "In taberna quando sumus" goes like this: "Sed in ludo qui morantur, ex his quidam enudantur quidam ibi vestiuntur, quidam saccis induuntur." (But of those who gamble, some are stripped bare, some win their clothes here, some are dressed in sacks.) If you translate "quidam enudantur" literary, you get "some get disrobed".

So, no shirts mentioned, as far as I can see.

Congratulations on the performance. It is an amazing experience to be part of something like that. :-D



Shakespeare Wrote:
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>
> I love classical music, but I like to improvise
> too much. Classical can never be my main passion.

I don't know if you've come across Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble? They did a CD called Officium which is definitely one of my favourite CDs. It is Gregorian chant/ plainsong vocals with an improvised saxophone line over the top of it, pretty much recorded live in a monastery. It is breathtakingly beautiful and I thoroughly recommend it if you haven't got it already.

Do Philip Glass and John Cage count as classical composers?

"Do Philip Glass and John Cage count as classical composers?"

Answer: Yes. And so does Harry Partch.

Check out a Melbourne performer called Sun Wrae or Sunwrae (never rember which is which.
Interesting live- you almost float away from yourself.

JS, glad you enjoyed it - Burana is a lot of fun to sing! :) And having performed it, I did know what it was about. I remember being mildly shocked at the time, but makes it a lot more amusing, particularly when you know the audience is being very serious and mostly assuming that it must be religious 'cos it's in Latin!!! :p You have to wonder if the Old Spice people knew................

Mind you, it's hard to stop yourself making stuff up. Myself and some of the rest of the mezzo section got into trouble for turning one of the lines into "rigor mortis, I'm a tortoise". Apparently that, plus the helpless giggling, did nothing for the ensemble performance in rehearsal - and then everyone started doing it because it fitted so nicely. The director was NOT amused! ;)

xmorpheus, I've lost count of the number of times the lines have been changed in choirs I've been in... or inappropriate giggles we got for finding some obscure bit of innuendo in an innocent line. why is it always the mezzo section?
*whistles innocently*

It was also those of us who are usually in the mezzo section who, in Fiddler on the Roof, decided to liven up the "It was a horse!" "It was a mule" argument scene with cries of "It was a hamster!" "No no, it was a komodo dragon!" "Psht, you wouldn't know one if it bit you in the arse. It was a guinea pig." By dress rehearsal the director was getting a mite irritated because half the cast were starting to join in.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2007 04:37PM by arisv2007.

PrinzHilde Wrote:
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>
>
> So, no shirts mentioned, as far as I can see.

I think it depends on the translation. Mine was on the CD I bought from the secretary, and in that 'veste' was translated as 'shirt.' I wonder if, knowing the notoriety of the piece, they were trying to spice it up a bit! The references to sex were pretty tame, to be honest. The swan song was hilarious, if a bit sick - very Monty Python!

Pleasantly surprised to see so many fellow choristers writing in. Gosh, what a very classically educated lot we are! Final note - CB was great fun, but the Psalms were far harder to sing, despite only being a third of the length. Not so much the singing in Hebrew, but the music itself. Not only did the time signature seem to change on every damn bar, but NOTHING was in 4/4 time! I don't read music too well (in any language) so I need a steady beat to know where I'm supposed to be on the page. Beautiful sound though, especially when the ladies come back in with the counter-melody to 'I'm a radish, oo.' ...

Final final note. It does not help us novices at all, when we end up (as a result of over-stretching our vocal range in the first week) sitting next to the 'professionals' we THOUGHT we heard (from a distance) singing in flawless Hebrew. May I add these were entirely in the male sections? Us girls at least had a go. Come on, guys, 'tra la laaing' during rehearsals is all very well (Leslie, the leader, encouraged it, getting us to learn the tricky melodies before going on to the proper words) but doing the same thing on performance night is just sheer cowardice!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/10/2007 03:56PM by Jazz_Sue.