Here’s something I wrote in 2014 as part of the publicity for my novel. (If you’re following along at home, this was before the bad review and its long-running fallout.) It was on my publisher’s website for a while, but it’s no longer available there.
The piece is now nearly eight years old, a little self-consciously written, and obviously contextual to the publication of my book. Also, my comment about the Dublin choral scene being rooted in the Anglican church music tradition is excitingly out of date. The last decade or so has seen a great burgeoning and flourishing of Irish choirs — and if the bloody pandemic hadn’t put the kibosh on singing in groups we’d still be enjoying our harmonious renaissance.
Despite all that, there’s something here about choral singing (as distinct from solo singing, which I will also admit to loving a lot) that I’m glad to have articulated. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too.
You know how a really good choir produces a smooth carpet of sound — a continuous texture, blended but not bland, at once compelling and relaxing, flexible and surprising and sweet?
Now imagine what that’s like from the inside.
Singing with such a choir is like discovering a gateway into a new universe, a blazing world, where you take your place, firm as a standing stone in a circle of standing stones, and your instrument is your body and the bodies of those around you, and there’s nothing between you and the music. When it all goes right, when everything coalesces and the individual singers fling down their boundaries and work together towards a unified expression of beauty, the sensation — I mean the palpable physical rush — is astonishing. It softens the muscles, rinses out the brain, and leaves you feeling airily, racingly alive.
Or at least it does me.
The character of Cate Houlihan in my novel The Living sings with a really good choir, as do I. Cate’s choir is called Carmina Urbana (geddit?), and it’s loosely inspired by mine, a Dublin-based chamber choir called Mornington Singers. (I should say that Mornington is a better choir than its fictional offspring, because we’ve improved since I started writing the book. Check us out — we’ve won awards and everything.)
Music and I go way back. My earliest memory is of Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (I was born in the seventies, so don’t judge), which I remember from somewhere deep down at the base of my spine, well beneath any understanding of the lyrics. Circumstances suggest that this memory dates from before I was one.
Aged three, I’d lisp “Adeste, Fideles” — two verses, in the original Latin — for the amusement of my parents’ arts-graduate friends. Later, in primary-school music class, we mostly droned simple, boring songs in unison, but occasionally an enlightened teacher would break out the sean nós — traditional Irish solo songs with gnarled, intricate melodies and texts featuring pain, death, oppression, emigration, loneliness and broken dreams. Ideal fodder for small, earnest me.
I clearly remember the school music festival where I first noticed a choir sing in harmony. I must have been seven or eight, and these were slightly older children from another school. They were performing one of those simple songs, but when the chorus arrived they split without warning into two parts. The melody, when embellished with a descant, became unaccountably beautiful. I was transfixed. A vista of possibility opened up, and I spent the next several years honing my abilities as a compulsive harmoniser. I can stop any time I like, though.
Actually, I can’t, which is why I sing alto.
(That sound you hear is of choristers emitting knowing chuckles.)
I proceeded through secondary school, getting my harmony fix where I could. There wasn’t much available until I discovered the vast entity known as the Dublin Secondary Schoolgirls’ Choir, which in retrospect was maybe a tiny bit terrifying. (Six hundred Irish teenage girls singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair”. Just picture it.) I learned there that I don’t always have to love what we’re singing: I still love making a good sound with my voice to add to the texture of good sound.
While studying literature in Trinity College Dublin I immersed myself in the delights of the mixed-voice choir. I joined the Choral Society, the College Singers, the Chapel Choir, and whatever ad-hoc madrigal ensembles, backing vocal groups and project choirs would have me. I wasn’t choosy: I’d sing anything — alto, tenor, soprano, even bass if sufficiently rat-arsed. Sean nós too, at the end of the night. On leaving university I moved on to the harder stuff, spending a heady few weeks over two summers with the Irish, European, and World Youth Choirs. Along the way, I joined Mornington Singers, which was originally set up as a TCD graduate choir.
I know choirs, is what I’m saying. And almost as soon as I began to think about Cate and how she would change, I knew she had to be in one.
For a character of Cate’s background — Irish, Catholic, nationalist — joining a choir is already a cultural transition. The serious end of the Dublin choral scene is, with few exceptions, firmly rooted in Anglican church music. (It’s fair to say that choirs like Mornington Singers are waggling those roots now more than somewhat, but that’s a fairly recent development.) Even on the secular side, there’s no indigenous Irish choral tradition to speak of: what we have is imported, adapted, fused.
When Cate joins Carmina Urbana (and earlier, the explicitly Anglican TCD Chapel Choir), she is stepping out from the circle of her family into a more complex world, one where cross-rhythms and counterpoints make the simple, lonely melodies of her childhood harder to discern. She relishes the new richness, while not wishing to sever her connection to the structures of the past. She is literally finding her voice, learning how she can contribute, exploring her place in the tapestry.
Members of a well-functioning choir should be neither dependent nor independent, but instead should occupy that more mature space in the middle, interdependence. That’s where the strength of a choir lies, in the balance between personal responsibility and the willing relinquishment of autonomy, all in service of the harmonious whole.
You know what I’m going to say, but hey, I’ll spell it out anyway: isn’t that a fine metaphor for a modern, grown-up society?