Full choir

We managed to field a full-strength choir on Sunday, for the first time in quite a while. 

Normally we get by with just a few voices per part - indeed on some days the ensemble is deliberately limited to just 2 to a part, which can be great fun (if a little scary).  But it was even better to see the choir stalls groaning with bodies on Sunday, because we had quite a lot of big two-choir music to do.

We even managed to field four tenors, which is a real luxury as we currently only have two full-time tenor layclerks (and for a while before Easter there was only one).  Thankfully our deps are top-notch, and are coming in regularly over the rest of this term to help fill in the gaps, until two more tenors arrive in September.

In my previous parish church existance, with an amateur choir, getting enough people to show up to do big music was always a problem.  The director of music could have put in months of preparation, but at the end of the day, he would be at the mercy of whether people could be bothered to get out of bed on a Sunday morning.  And so, many's the time in the past that we struggled through a piece with key people (and sometimes, entire sections) absent.  But you just got on with it - hoping all the while that it didn't get so bad that you had to cancel or change pieces at the last minute.  And with a few decent voices you can just-about get by.

But that kind of approach isn't obviously good enough for a professional cathedral choir.  The singers are paid to turn up, and if they can't make it, are expected to find someone else to deputise for them.  Which is quite refreshing for me - as I no longer have to worry about being asked to sight-sing the bass line at a moment's notice.  I don't have to worry about whether other singers are going to show up, and instead can concentrate on my own part.