What did you sing in the school choir ?

Subject: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Seaking
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:20 PM

After 38 years I've managed to track down a CD copy of 'Hiawatha's Wedding Feast' which I sang (Soprano!) in the school choir and was curious to hear again - OK it's not folk but there wasn't much of that around the music rooms of a Liverpool Grammar school back then.

Anyone else sing (or play) anything they'd like to hear again from all those years ago ?

Chris

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: GUEST,Tunesmith
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:37 PM

The only song I can remember is "The Minstrel Boy". I can't remember anything about the arrangement, or whether I sang the melody or a harmony line.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: RTim
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:44 PM

I don't remember any of the songs we sang with the choir - but I do remember the Gilbert & Sullivan Operas I was in - Trial by Jury and The Mikado (both in the chorus) and I was going to have a lead part in HMS Pinefore but left school early, so didn't get to do it.

Tim Radford

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Georgiansilver
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:44 PM

I sung with the Totnes Grammar School choir at Paignton in the South West Regional Schools Championships but it's so long ago I can't remember what we sung........age is a wonderful thing aint it?

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: kendall
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:46 PM

HMS Pinafore, and Finlandia.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Rog Peek
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:48 PM

50 years ago I sang in the Cirencester Parish Church choir. I don't remember what we sang, I was doing it for the money. Sixpence as far as I remember.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Deskjet
Date: 15 May 07 - 04:55 PM

One that I often think of is the Dirge from Cymbeline..Fear no more the heat of the sun...
As an eleven year old child I was really moved by it, and if anyone can suggest a good recording of it I'd be grateful.
Thanks for the question.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Geoff the Duck
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:14 PM

They didn't let me sing in the school choir.
Sods!
Quack!
GtD.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Linda Kelly
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:17 PM

The Daniel Jazz -great stuff and the Walrus and the Carpenter and then an awful lot of Berholt Brecht -it was a very odd choir.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Wolfhound person
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:18 PM

I got thrown out of the ladylike school choir for singing too loud. Must have been the floorspots I was doing around the same time (which were probably cringeworthy - luckily I don't remember).

The next year the choir were disqualified in a local music festival for singing a non-folksong in a folksong class.

Paws

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: SussexCarole
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:18 PM

You're in good company Geoff...they wouldn't let me sing in the school choir either

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Willa
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:35 PM

Nor me, Geoff and Carole!

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Polly Squeezebox
Date: 15 May 07 - 05:58 PM

'Westering Home With a Song in The Air' - it still lifts my spirits whenever I hear it. It is only with this thread that I realise how lucky I was - we sang almost exclusively folk songs. Plus, we had a sports mistress at that junior school who was so keen on folk dance it was compulsory, also the option to stay after normal school hours for the Country Dance Club. I was very proud to be in the Country Dance Display Team. I wish I could remember that teacher's name - she laid the foundation for a wonderful lifetime of enjoyment of folk dance, music and song. I'd certainly raise a glass to her.

Although I went to school in Chippenham, this happened before the onset of the Chippenham Festival so obviously that didn't have a bearing on the large part folk played in school life. But I now wonder whether that grounding for so many pupils had a bearing on the continued success of folk music, dance and song in Chippenham, and hence the Festival?

Polly

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Surreysinger
Date: 15 May 07 - 06:08 PM

Primary school - I can remember singing versions of Schubert's "The Trout" and something from the Magic Flute - obviously a classy primary school choir - in a competition. Then at grammar school I belonged to all the various choirs going - I can remember performing Britten's "Ceremony of Carols" in Guildford Cathedral, the angelic chorus from Mendelssohn's "Elijah", a fiendishly difficult song "The Bluebird" (by Elgar? not sure) and any number of hymns in the Assembly choir - and Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" (appropriate since it was written for a girls' school) - which was recorded. I finally heard the LP of the recordings some thirty years later (and it didn't sound a bit like I remembered it!). After that I moved on to big SATB stuff with a local choral society, doing all the big stuff with large orchestras like the RPO, the LPO and the BBC Concert Orchestra , and in venues like the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall- and making radio recordings, and records for Hyperion and Albany.... stopped doing that about five years ago when I was concentrating more on the folk stuff!

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Herga Kitty
Date: 15 May 07 - 06:18 PM

Handel, because my school was on the site of the palace of the Duke of Chandos, and Handel was the Duke's Master of Music from 1717-1720 and played the organ in the local church (St Lawrence's).

Kitty

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Cats
Date: 15 May 07 - 06:22 PM

I wasn't allowed in the school choir as the music master at Oxted School, one Mr Oram, told me that singing with my family wasn't singing and if I didn't sing in either the primary school choir or the church choir I was not singing. That was my first week at grammar school. A couple of weeks later he heard me singing in the playground and wanted to know why I wasn't in the school choir. I took great joy in telling him he had told me I couldn't sing and when he insisted I join the school choir I took even more delight in saying no!! OK so I was bolshie then as well!!! I do remember them singing Old Abram Brown is Dead and Gone, though. They also did loads of Gilbert and Sullivan and Blow the Wind Southerly.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Commander Crabbe
Date: 15 May 07 - 06:25 PM

The welsh hymn Calon Lan. This was at first difficult for an english speaker, however, because all the welsh students had to learn English they made all the English students learn welsh for three years.

I thought that was pretty fair and I can still speak it "dippin bach" (a very little bit) and sing Calon Lan (even though I don't know what all the words mean).

CC

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Janie
Date: 15 May 07 - 06:29 PM

We sang so many different kinds of music I don't know that I could pick one. However, a fragment of one still plays through my head after 38 years that I am forever wishing I could remember. I don't think it was a trad spiritual, I think it was modern, and the bit that still circles round the old brain is
O-oh Ma-a-ry,
Where is your ba-a-by?
They done took him from the cross (crah-au-oss)
And carried him to the throne.

I squeaked along with the sopranos my first few months in 7th grade, then was moved to 2nd alto where I stayed for the next 5 1/2 years. (now I'm down to 2nd tenor.)

Janie

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: GUEST,Gerry
Date: 15 May 07 - 09:32 PM

Hey, kendall, you weren't Fieldston High School Class of 1968, were you? We also did Pinafore in our first year there, and we studied Finlandia in music class (although I don't think we sang it).

I was only in school choir in 9th grade, and don't remember any songs from it, but at assembly we all sang the school song and the school anthem. Only many years later did I learn that the tunes were taken from various hymns from a different religious tradition than mine. When my daughter started primary school, I recognized the tune of her school song as Deutschland Uber Alles....

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Jim Lad
Date: 15 May 07 - 09:58 PM

School Choir: The first two were "Mavourney's the Flower of Killarney" & "Kelvin Grove".
There were of course, other choirs.



Jim

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Neighmond
Date: 16 May 07 - 12:39 AM

Hark! I hear the harp's eternal
ringing from that far off shore;
As I near the swollen waters,
with their deep and solemn roar!

Two or three more verses, as I recall.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 16 May 07 - 01:07 AM

Gregorian chant - I loved it.
And if we were good at it, we got out of class to go to funerals.
-Joe-

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Mo the caller
Date: 16 May 07 - 01:45 AM

Old Abram Brown
Torrents in Summer
Ceremony of carols (we thought that was wierd, till we got used to it)
Shepherds farewell (from L'enfance du Christ)
Custard on the brow (from Masters in this Hall - according to the audience)

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: MBSLynne
Date: 16 May 07 - 03:00 AM

Gosh Joe...Gregorian chant in a school choir? There's posh.

Of the nine schools I went to only one of them had a choir and that had only just formed. I joined it, we sang "Bless this House" and "The Riff Song" and something else I don't remember, then we moved house and I left the school

Love Lynne

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 16 May 07 - 03:10 AM

Joe - I have to keep telling myself what sort of school you went to... otherwise I'd be recommending therapy.


Actually ... given what school you went to, therapy might not be a bad idea!!!

Primary school (5-11yrs) Singing Together - a BBC radio for schools programme. The majority of the Singing Together classes were old folk songs, I too, remember 'Westering home' and 'Yellow Bird'. Funny, I've not heard 'Yellow Bird' sung since I left school. Manitas has been known to slip it into tune sessions where people are left with a vague sense of knowing the tune but not knowing what it is. Oddly enough, I didn't realise I could sing properly until my first junior year (aged about 8) when a wonderful (didn't think so then of course!) teacher suggested that she'd "heard [me]make more noise in the playground", so I let rip and deafened her. Scared half the class too!

The class choir did a fantastic, non-Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, for which I stole the libretto and might still have it somewhere. It's good that I did, because I later 'borrowed' one of the tunes for my Grammar school music class where we had to 'compose' a tune and harmonise it.   

Grammar school (11-16yrs) Music lessons were synonymous with goofing off and torture in equal quantities. The Dutch teacher was as mad as the proverbial kipper in a privet bush, given to outbursts of violence and chair flinging, a Donna Summer fixation and the most eclectic music tastes I've ever experienced outside my own. We spent an entire term picking apart DS's song 'Love's unkind', it even featured in our end of year exams. Singing was from a fantastic book which I'd love to be able to remember... it contained many folk and folk style songs from the US, UK and Europe. I remember it had 'They built the ship "Titanic"', 'Old Abram Brown' and 'Red River Valley' amongst others.

We also used 'The National Song Book' which contains lots of great folk songs from the UK, of which I managed to "acquire" a particularly ratty copy. I still use it for reference and source material today in my latest incarnation of school choirs, the Adult choir at Limpit's school.

Our latest project for that was a Music Hall, lots of good old singalong stuff gleaned from various sources. In the past we've done songs from 'Sweet Charity', 'Phantom of the Opera', various seasonal carols, '60 and '70's pop, you name it, we'll have a go at it!

All in all, what which church, school and formal chorus, I've been in an organised choir for 33 years.

LTS

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Seaking
Date: 16 May 07 - 05:06 AM

I'm sure I've got 'Yellow Bird' on an old Spinners album. Vaguely remember trying to play it when I first started learning guitar and finding out that the first chord change wasn't quite as straighforward as it initially sounded.

Chris

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: MBSLynne
Date: 16 May 07 - 05:54 AM

As far as singing in class goes, I can remember heaps of the stuff we sang. I was surprised when I got into folk, to find that a lot of it was traditional folk song.

In England we sang Boney was a Warrior, Oh No John, My Love's an Arbutus, I Vow to Thee My Country, Early One Morning, What Shall we do with the Drunken Saior, Camptown Races, Michael Finnigan, Jamaican Rhumba, Wouldn't it be Lovely (Not the My Fair Lady one) and loads more.

In Australia we sang some of the same ones plus Song of Australia, Botany Bay, Click go the Shears, Santa Lucia, I Love a Sunburnt Country, Carol of the Birds,Bush Carol....

Love Lynne

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: GUEST
Date: 16 May 07 - 06:37 AM

My music teacher must have been a folkie cos we learned and sang Turpin Hero and Dirty Old Town among a lot of the usual school stuff.


Dave

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: GUEST,RamblinStu
Date: 16 May 07 - 07:20 AM

I know this is a bit tenuous but, when I was at secondary school in Bungay Suffolk, I sang in a choir from the MAYC youth club at The Royal Albert Hall. We sang on the Saturday and Sunday of a special week end thing they had, and the song was, "Go tell it on the mountain"

I still play and sing but strangely enough the quality of the venues has gone steeply downhill from there, and the choice of material is also different. Next week, some forty years later, I am playing at a beer festival in Dover. Hey ho.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Essex Girl
Date: 16 May 07 - 08:28 AM

Linden Lea, Rose of England,The Wild Brown Bee, Panis Angelicus (still a favourite)and yes Seaking, we also did Haiwatha's wedding feast. Graduated to the Messiah & the Creation and many many more. I still have wonderful memories of 5 years of competing at the Langollen International Eisteddford

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 16 May 07 - 09:02 AM

Carmina Burana, Byzantine chants, Messiah.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Maryrrf
Date: 16 May 07 - 09:43 AM

I tried out for the school choir, and they rejected me. Told me I couldn't sing!

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Mooh
Date: 16 May 07 - 09:46 AM

I remember singing in school (it wasn't popular) but regret to say I don't remember a formal choir. Luckily I sang from a tender age in the church choir (and still do, well over 40 years now) and was raised by a choirmaster.

School choir is just a thing of my unfulfilled dreams.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: sian, west wales
Date: 16 May 07 - 09:59 AM

Crikey moses, George. That's a hard act to follow.

The good old Port Colborne High School Glee Club used to do quite an amazing range of stuff ... and I seem to recall winning various Ontario Provincial Kiwanis Club competitions, so I guess we were good. And we had a great choir master - Bob Wood. I still make sure I say hello to him when I visit 'home'.

I liked Healy Willan stuff (O Sacred Head was one of them), also Handel, and ilk. Don't know who wrote "With a Voice of Singing" and "O King All Glorious" but I loved singing those. I liked "Who is at my Window Who" as well.

But we also did a LOT of arranged traditional songs: Lonesome Valley, Sourwood Mountain, We'll Rant and We'll Roar, Black is the Colour, etc.

And, as this was in the 60s, we did Sound of Silence, Age of Aquarius, etc.

As to the 'flip side' of this, was there ever a high school choir which DIDN'T sing No Nobis Domine???? There was a school choir performing in the foyer of Cardiff's Millennium Centre (concert hall) a few months ago and it seemed that half of the passers-by (including myself) were singing along ...

sian

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: GUEST,Northerner
Date: 16 May 07 - 10:00 AM

Um, "The lark in the morning" (still a good song), something about "The hag is astride this night for to ride" and "Massa's in the cold, cold grave". And "Trial by Jury".

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: kendall
Date: 16 May 07 - 10:08 AM

No, Gerry. I attended school in Machias Maine. I think i was 13 when I sang in the chorus of Pinafore, and in high school when I sang in chorus. I graduated from high school in 1952.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: HouseCat
Date: 16 May 07 - 11:56 AM

We sang alot of Benjamin Britten, and our choirmaster was a huge fan of spirituals so we sang "I Want Jesus To Walk With Me" and "Soon I Will Be Done With the Troubles of the World." At the same time (high school) I was singing at folk festivals and I used to constantly pester him about songs for us to sing. I won out a couple of times with the small girls' ensemble he also taught, of which I was a member. We sang "Fair and Tender Maidens" and made our principle cry over it at a school assembly, which we considered a great triumph as she was know as a true hard-nose.
I still remember the soprano parts to so many songs we sang. I think I recall stuff more readily from that time than I do from yesterday.
:~(. Old-timer's setting in perhaps?

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Grab
Date: 16 May 07 - 12:36 PM

School choir was just carol service stuff. But I did do Mozart's Requiem ("Di-es! Irae! Di-es! Irae!") with my folks' choral society when I was 18. My voice never really broke, so I've always been a slightly reedy tenor with a bit of capacity for falsetto.

Graham.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Mary Humphreys
Date: 16 May 07 - 12:49 PM

We competed in all the Urdd Gobaith Cymru Eisteddfodau, so all the competition songs were in Welsh. Suo Gan - a Welsh cradle song, Dere Di ( a Welsh version of the Elizabethan madrigal "Come Again")etc. Also lots of Welsh hymns in harmony- we had hymn practice once a week for the whole school.I loved that.
We did some English classical stuff too - I remember "Drink to me only with thine eyes", and Purcell "Fairest Isle".Also some English translations of Hungarian folk songs arranged by Matyas Scheiber. I didn't like them at all....
I don't remember much English folk song, if at all. But that is not surprising in a Welsh school.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 16 May 07 - 12:53 PM

I started as a soprano in school choir, moved to alto, then tenor. I recall that we did the Halleluia Chorus, Bye Bye Blackbird, and a bunch of songs from West Side Story. There was a ton of other stuff too, but I can't remember it.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Seaking
Date: 16 May 07 - 02:12 PM

We sang Louis Armstrong's 'What a wonderful world' in primary school. When it got to the line 'They're really sayin' I Love you', we had to sing 'I like you' instead, which spoilt it a bit. Can't say I understood the reasoning then or now.

Chris

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 17 May 07 - 02:48 AM

OOh... I remembered! I was in a choir in my grammar school and I'd blanked it from my mind!!! We did odd little chorus bits from various places, none of which I remember except one that went 'he was a Chinese Mandarin' something something 'in a golden palanquin'... 'I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls' and some other syrupy gush about small boys.

We did some Shakespeare stuff too and provided the chorus for the odd school play.

Thanks for reminding me, I'd totally forgotten it!!

LTS

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: George Papavgeris
Date: 17 May 07 - 02:57 AM

Sian, it was luck; we had a new, young, keen and talented music teacher (he had the whole school sight-reading music within a year!), who wanted to stage ambitious performances. Ten years later he became the director of the Greek National Choir. In that context, Carmina Burana and Messiah were inevitable. We loved him for it, of course, it was something to have us 13- and 14-year olds showing off at national choir meets and competitions with works like that, and it proved in our eyes that being young didn't mean necessarily we had to do kids' stuff. Bless you, Mr Theo!

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Barry Finn
Date: 17 May 07 - 03:07 AM

I can't believe how many singers were told they couldn't sing. I finally feel like I'm in decent & good company, I thought that the nuns only did that to me. Bastards! It took me well over a decade before I thought I had a voice & used it.

Barry

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: ragdall
Date: 17 May 07 - 03:18 AM

We must only have had singing groups for the school Christmas concerts, or I've forgotten the rest? I remember singing "Silver Bells" and some other songs in a girls' ensemble, about 1956, and several Christmas songs in German in 1964 when I was in a German choir at college.

In school music classes the songs varied from "traditional" Canadian Folk songs in elementary school to songs from musicals in upper high school.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: alanabit
Date: 17 May 07 - 05:51 AM

I sang in a church choir at St. Mark's, in Ford, Plymouth in the mid sixties and later on in the school choir at The Royal Hospital School, Suffolk. As the latter was a miniature Royal Navy type establishment, run on that type of discipline, it was possible for the choirmaster to achieve quite a lot. We did stuff from the requiems by Mozart and Faure´, lots of Händel (the favourites were probably "Zadok The Priest" and "Halleluja Chorus", bits of Bach, Haydn, Schubert and Mendelssohn. There was Purcell, Vaughan Williams and Britten to boot. As Benjamin Britten was still alive in East Anglia at the time, I guess that was inevitable. One of the best bits was the annual visit to the National Seafarers´ Service at St.Paul's Cathedral. I still recall it as a wonderful place. We were a good choir, but those lads sang like gods. The other good bits were when we were "hired out" to local choral societies, to sing the tricky bits of Benjamin Britten in Bury St.Edmunds Cathedral. We were really proud of that. Singing in the choir at RHS is about the only part of that life, which I recall with any pleasure.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Scorpio
Date: 17 May 07 - 06:24 AM

My memories of the school choir are limited to my (compulsory) audition. Being short of volunteers, the music teacher decided to do the volunteering for us. He played a note on the piano which we had to copy. No amount of faked tone-deafness was accepted as an excuse. "You're in the choir."
"But Sir!"
"One hours detention!"
"But Sir!"
"Two hours detention!"
What my life might have been without such tender nurturing of my musical talents at such an early age.

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Liz the Squeak
Date: 17 May 07 - 10:07 AM

Smug moment..... The teacher who auditioned me for a school choir fluffed her playing and I sang the note she was supposed to play. I then told her that the piano was out of tune... I was right. The tuner came the next week and found it almost a half tone out.

LTS

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: Flash Company
Date: 18 May 07 - 07:19 AM

In Primary School we had a Headmistress who was a marvellous singer herself, though none of us appreciated it at the time. She tried to coach us to sing Nymphs and Shepherds, but was doomed to failure with the bunch of rustics that attended that school.
When I moved on to Sir John Deane's GS, we had Andy Horrocks. No singing voice of his own, but a marvellous pianist and organist and a really inspirational teacher.
I don't think he was a folkie, but we did learn Turpin Hero, a bowdlerised version of The Crab Fish, And Benjamin Bowmaneer. He also introduced me to G & S, Bach, and a lot of classical music, and once played a duet of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring with me, he on piano, me on harmonica!

FC

Subject: RE: What did you sing in the school choir ?
From: MBSLynne
Date: 18 May 07 - 08:11 AM

Barry you are right! It makes me really cross when I ask a non singer (and often a non folkie) to sing and they say "I can't" then when you talk to them you find that they THINK they can't because they were told so at school. Ok, to be in the choir perhaps you need to be able to keep on key, but ordinary singing in class should be inclusive and done for the children to enjoy. It shouldn't be something that puts them off singing for life. Especially since, like every other excercise, the more you do it the better you get (up to a limit of course!)

Love Lynne