Music creator Fraz Ireland details the workshops they did with Blackheath Choir as part of Adopt a Music Creator 2023. A workshop is a time to...
Music creator Fraz Ireland talks about the final preparations for the premiere of their piece with Blackheath Choir as part of Adopt a Music Creator 2023.
Early December of last year, I was on a train to another rehearsal with the choir – well, not just another rehearsal. This one was the last one, and the first time we’ll be joined by the orchestra and I’m really hoping it’s going to pull everything together.
It was a late rehearsal so everyone was a bit tired to start with, but it was really promising. This one was mostly adding the strings and and familiarising the choir with the much bigger accompaniment. I had also hedged my bets a little on several moments where I wasn’t sure if I wanted the strings to play and double the choir, or if I wanted it to be unaccompanied, so I wrote the optional bits into the string parts labelled 'play if needed' which I often find to be a very useful trick, especially with limited rehearsals.
Something that I have been noticing is that though there are sometimes slips and sections that don’t come together, these are often in different places and rarely are exactly the same issues happening in the same moment each time – so there aren’t any specific points that are ‘too hard’, but rather that the whole thing is just slightly tricky and requires concentration throughout.
Finally the big day arrived – both the recording and premiere concert! We started with the recording in the afternoon; it was tight for time as we had to record everything twice – as advised by the sound engineer - to allow us to use the best take each time and in case anything happened as we were going that we didn’t notice in the moment – like a siren outside.
We began the recording with the accompanied movements (four to seven), then went back to do the first three which don’t need the strings. We were able to run through these all in one block rather than stopping between them, so did two quick takes of this before taking a well-deserved break before the concert.
Music creator Fraz Ireland posing with Blackheath Choir at the premiere
Only a few hours later, it’s time to start the concert, opening with my piece, which is very much designed as a good opener (whether at the start of the concert or the first thing after an interval). It begins with several big breaths that really unify the choir and then opens with some warm-up style material to ease the choir into it. One thing I hadn’t anticipated is the fact that those opening breaths really make you aware of the way the choir breathes together, so the first few breaths they have once they’re started singing sound really powerful and effective.
It was nice to have a chance to speak to people in the interval and several members of the audience told me that they enjoyed the piece and liked the humour or thought it was really fun. There were also a few people who normally sing with the choir but were watching and they also spoke a bit more about how it was a challenge to learn at first, but it paid off! For the second half of the concert, we were treated to Benjamin Britten’s Saint Nicholas cantata.
Overall I’m really happy with the piece and I hope that other choirs may also want to have a look at it and try out some (or all!) of the movements. One thing I was really pleased with was all the feedback from the choir and audience – lots of people picked out specific moments that they especially liked, and those moments were spread throughout the piece. Every movement is really quite different from one another and I set out to make a piece which might have something for everyone (or at least most people), so I’m really pleased at the breadth of moments that were special for people.
Find out more about Fraz Ireland on their website and follow them on X (Twitter) / Soundcloud
Find out more about Blackheath Choir on their website and follow them on X (Twitter) / Facebook / Instagram
