Just last month, Croydon Minster was packed out for an evening concert which included Carmina Burana. It was very pleasing for everyone who had worked hard on the concert to see the Minster so full. After the concert, I reflected on why it had been particularly popular – even on a dark winter evening.
To my mind, we overcame the iffy problem – the barrier which prevents people who enjoy going to concerts from attending events which take place in church because, to them, church feels somehow iffy. A bit suspicious. Unknown. Possibly even slightly threatening.
Churches with active concert and event programmes need to:
Overcome iffy every time they promote an event
Reward people for turning up, with a great event
Build a relationship, gradually increasing the size and loyalty of audiences
Avoid proselytising unless the event-goer expressly opens a door
As I’ve mentioned in earlier blogposts, a CD and DVD is about to released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini - the little beans. It contains, among other things, two pieces of music for a phenomenal forty separate voices* (hence my attempt to get the #phenomenal40 hashtag off the ground – help!). One is called Spem in Alium (a well known piece to music boffs and people who generally don’t see enough sunlight), and the other is called the Missa Ecco sì beato giorno / ecce beatam lucem.
This is such a crazy, big, groundbreaking recording, I’ve gone out and bought a surround sound DVD system just to hear it at its best.
Composed around 450 years ago, there is a real connection through this music to an age long past, but which fascinates us still – the age of Tudor England, and our intoxication then and now with the elevated lives of royals and high society.
If you’ve seen the first of these two videos, you’ll know that last weekend I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth. In this video there’s a tantalising extract of the recording, you get a sense of what it is like to stand in the middle of these ethereal voices – choral and instrumental – and how it feels to be totally enveloped by Striggio’s mighty, long lost Mass.
If, like me, you learned a new word while watching the video. You’ll find the definition of “bifurcated” here. A day without learning, ey?
Because this recording is unlike anything so many people will have heard before, I really want to encourage you to share this video and blog post, to get news of the recording out there. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, Facebook ‘like’ it (up there at the top!) and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40.
On Monday, a CD and DVD is released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini – or the little beans.
It contains, among other things, two recordings of giant scale. They are two pieces of choral music composed around four hundred and fifty years ago. One – Spem in Alium – is well known to music boffs. The other – Missa Ecco sì beato giorno - has rested in a dark corner of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, undiscovered, for most of that time.
Both pieces are, in their own way, phenomenal. Both are for forty separate voices, seemingly doing their own thing, but wrapped around one another to construct the extraordinary whole. This is music the like of which you may have never heard. There is nothing in modern music to compare it with. Despite that, it’s not up there on a pedestal, it’s not the preserve of the posh. It’s coming out on CD and DVD on Monday, and you can pre-order it now for £9.99. I urge you to do so.
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini. We met in the stunning church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, South London. Standing in the middle of a set of surround sound speakers, won on eBay for £60, convinced me I have to share more about this recording with you. So here’s the first of two videos which we recorded that day in which he talks about the recording – where he was surrounded by performers – and how that was transferred to CD and DVD.
I hope this will go some way to persuading you to get this recording, and perhaps even to do as I did – and spend a few quid on a surround-sound system in the process. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40. I’ll be posting the second video – which goes more deeply in to the music – later today.
Two weeks ago my car inched its way through the rain-soaked streets of a run down corner of Ipswich, to pick up a particularly special set of eBay winnings – a surround sound DVD system, won for £60.
One week tomorrow, a spectacular CD and DVD by the vocal group I Fagiolini will be released. It is the first recording of a complex, vast, and yet somehow intimate piece for forty – and then finally sixty – separate voices. A huge choir. The piece is a mass entitled Ecco sì beato giorno (that blessed day), it was composed 445 years ago, but only very recently rediscovered – there is a Spectator article on the discovery here. I heard its first modern performance at the Proms a couple of years ago, and on the strength of that performance, I am filled with anticipation.
The piece was recorded in the round – with the listener completely surrounded by a circle of singers. That is why this lost jewel of a composition is worth buying a surround sound system for. In eight days from now, I will be able to be surrounded by this magnificent sound, hearing it travel the room around me. The only way, in my opinion, to listen to what should be a ground-breaking recording.
As an introduction to the piece, here is a video from the academic who rediscovered the score:
If you follow my Twitter timeline you may know that on each day of Advent I posted a video of a piece of choral music, in a series of blog posts tagged Choral Christmas.
I had an idea that this time of year was a perfect opportunity to share some of the music I enjoy – Christmas music and non-Christmas, sacred and secular. It also became an opportunity to find some new music. All told, about three days worth of effort went in to the series – watching, researching, writing blog posts, and occasionally recording an Audioboo or two. Each selected video was put in to a blog post, and scheduled to be posted each day. As it went up, an automated tweet was posted to Twitter, which was the main means of promoting the posts.
So was it worth it? Measured in terms of conventional web analytics, that has to be a big fat no. If I’d spent three solid days throwing eggs at passers-by I would have made greater impact (!), reaching many more people.
All told the posts averaged between five and fifteen views each, predominantly from clicks on the auto Twitter posts. Moving the posting time back an hour from 9am GMT to 10AM GMT had no noticeable effect. Unsurprisingly, the posts which did slightly better were those where I was a emotive in the subject line – The spine-tingling return of I Fagiolini performed best with 44 clicks over nine days, though I later chose to remove the much overused “spine-tingling” from the headline.
As the post titles were deliberately kept under 140 characters, they are not very well set up for ongoing search engine optimisation, so now the series has concluded I may go back and rewrite more titles with a view to Google rather than Twitter.
So was it a total waste of time then?
No. Not at all. In terms of conventional analytics it wasn’t a roaring success, but it was very satisfying to do, for a number of reasons:
The tweet advertising the Perotin post Rewind 800 yearswas favourited on Twitter by a couple of people, an understated gesture that they have enjoyed, or will enjoy later, your writing. Other posts also received favourites.
The return of I Fagiolini post attracted the attention of the ensemble leader, who wrote a full, informative comment enriching my understanding of a performance which I had loved, even if I had not entirely understood it.
Several people replied on Twitter to individual posts saying how much they had enjoyed them. Twitter comments lead me to change the final days selections.
As well as posting up favourites of mine, I discovered new music, and new performers, through clicking on related videos in YouTube. For example, though I knew the piece well, Voces8′s performance (and Voces8 themselves) of O Clap Your Hands was so enjoyable I played it on a loop for hours. I’ll very likely go and see Voces8 in concert as a result.
Next time, and I think there will be a next time, I will think through the promotion of the posts a bit more to see if the average number of views can be raised a bit. But on balance, I’m happy. As a series of posts it didn’t set the world alight, but it was a learning experience, it appealed to a few people and started a satisfying number of conversations, and it was an opportunity to listen to hours of great music.
