The first choir session in Bedford was on Tuesday 9th October at Rutland Road church hall. A really nice group of people came along – all of whom are good singers and are interested in the project.  I started the session with a short talk about the idea behind the piece including how bats use sound, the idea of an open score, and ‘cellular automata’  – plus I played some music by Meredith Monk, Ligeti, some Throat singing and the ‘honda advert’ where a choir made all the sounds of a car.

We then started the session by trying out a range of vocal techniques I’d learnt from Victoria (in my singing lessons) – and then moved on to some exercises I had started to devise. The first was aiming to see if we could get ‘Ligeti-esque’ vocal textures : ) by asking people to sing ‘any note’ – stick to it – then choose another note at the end of each breath. This sounded really good for such a simple idea. The next task was to start on ‘any note’ then try to converge on one note by listening and on each new breath attempt to join someone else’s note. This was quite interesting, as different people aimed to converge one different notes, so it went into a ‘stable’ unison state – but then went off again elsewhere.

We also we tried out a ‘Hocket’  (inspired by Meredith Monk). Starting by sending a clapping rhythm around the circle, each person playing one ‘clap’ from the rhythm. This was quite difficult, but we did get the hang of it. The key is to always hear the whole rhythm repeating as it goes around the circle, then just insert your clap at the right time… We then had a very successful time singing a 2 part vocal hocket – just moving up and down major scale arpeggios. Both of these exercises were to start us all thinking about how we can work as an ensemble, pitching notes and placing rhythms in relation to each other – with listening to others being just as important as making sounds (if not more).

The final exercise we did was a piece based on the concentric circles idea I tried out with the Feral Choir. We called it the 'Target' piece – and you can see the ‘score’ in the image insert. This is a starting point for moving around the space, and adjusting what we are singing depending on where in the concentric circles we are standing. For the moment, we just used major scale chords – but we will progress with this into other territory.  Again –this piece worked really well and there seems to be a lot of scope to use the ‘concentric circle’ structure… I had a few more things planned – but the evening had zoomed by and we didn’t get time to do any more stuff!...

Overall, I was really happy with the session, and all the singers were up for it, interested, and came up with good suggestions for how we can progress, and also – sounded great. … hurray!