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Music rehearsal
Location: Buckinghamshire
On the 15th May Belinda Yates, choir leader, held the first rehearsal of the choir for the Waller Celebrations on the 9th September 2006 at St. Mary and All Saints Church, Beaconsfield.
9 September 2006
Waller Celebrations
Venue: St. Mary and All Saints Church, Beaconsfield
Music Rehearsal for Waller Celebrations
As part of the celebrations to mark Edmund Waller’s 400 anniversary which falls this year there will be an evening function at St Mary’s on 9 September . This will include a recital of some of his poems and Belinda Yates, a professional singer and former head of vocal studies at Beaconsfield High School, has researched the Waller poems that have been set to music.
Belinda has spent considerable time sourcing the music using several professional and academic contacts, the Internet, Sheffield University Music Library and the British Library. She found several solo songs by English composers who were contemporary to Edmund Waller, such as the brothers William and Henry Lawes, John Blow and John Hilton. In addition there are also solo and choral pieces set to Waller’s poems by later composers through the ages. The two choral arrangements presented for the workshop activity and to be performed on the 9th September are written by the French composer Charles Gounod and an English lady composer Alice Mary Smith, both from the latter half of the 19th century.
The first Waller music rehearsal with a choir of 10 was held on Monday 15th May at the Fitzwilliams Centre, Beaconsfield. The two songs rehearsed were’ The Dream’ by Alice Mary Smith (entitled ‘Say, Lovely Dream’ in the Waller anthology), and ‘Go, lovely rose’ by Charles Gounod. The choir comprised a group of Beaconsfield singers who had not sung together before, nor had they heard about Edmund Waller. It was therefore a double learning experience which they appeared to enjoy immensely.
Belinda undertook a similarly interesting and unusual project last year when she was invited by the international reference publishers, Thomson Gale, to put together and perform a 20 minute selection of solo songs, all of them set to Shakespeare texts. This musical presentation followed an excerpt from 'Twelfth Night' enacted by students from RADA and was performed at the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden, London, to launch their commercial release of a global online database entitled ‘The Shakespeare Collection.’
The Waller rehearsal on the 15th May was videoed by Mike Adams, who is also coaching a young photographer, Michael Potter, in the technicalities of video filming. The accompanying photograph was taken at this rehearsal.
Full details of the celebrations planned for September will be published shortly.
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