Gloria! Gloria!
May. 24th, 2019 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeI cannot finish singing 'Et In Terra Pax' from Vivaldi's Gloria without grinning hugely. Especially when after more than a month away from choir, I find I can still sing. Some of the learning sticks -- I've made serious progress up from terrible singer through bad to halfway decent, and this is satisfying. Especially when Robert Oliver agrees about the progress.
Robert is one of the great characters of New Zealand music. Once I was chatting with a stranger on a bus about this and that, and we were passing the choir's church, so we fell to discussing it. "Do you happen to know Robert Oliver?" I said, and she replied, "Oh yes, thirty years ago we started a string orchestra together." When I was visiting leaflemming three years ago, having just joined the choir, I mentioned a couple of times that the choirmaster's name was Robert, and eventually leaflemming said, "You don't mean Robert Oliver? He started the first choir I was ever in, at my school." Only, that would have put the Robert I knew in his seventies, and I was convinced he was younger than that. He isn't -- he doesn't even look especially young -- but the size of his singing voice made me age him low. A major aspect of his life has been causing choirs to sprout where there were no choirs before. Though this choir is university-affiliated, he doesn't call it the Victoria Choir because he doesn't want to indicate that people have to stop turning up when they graduate; he's a very good teacher, and he doesn't mind how well you sing, as long as you're attempting to sing better.
And I've just this minute discovered that he's playing bass viol and rebec at the midwinter feast I have tickets to. Neat.
I find it very easy not to go to choir in the evening, especially having got up at six thirty -- but so often once I have I walk home feeling that the world is glowing.
Robert is one of the great characters of New Zealand music. Once I was chatting with a stranger on a bus about this and that, and we were passing the choir's church, so we fell to discussing it. "Do you happen to know Robert Oliver?" I said, and she replied, "Oh yes, thirty years ago we started a string orchestra together." When I was visiting leaflemming three years ago, having just joined the choir, I mentioned a couple of times that the choirmaster's name was Robert, and eventually leaflemming said, "You don't mean Robert Oliver? He started the first choir I was ever in, at my school." Only, that would have put the Robert I knew in his seventies, and I was convinced he was younger than that. He isn't -- he doesn't even look especially young -- but the size of his singing voice made me age him low. A major aspect of his life has been causing choirs to sprout where there were no choirs before. Though this choir is university-affiliated, he doesn't call it the Victoria Choir because he doesn't want to indicate that people have to stop turning up when they graduate; he's a very good teacher, and he doesn't mind how well you sing, as long as you're attempting to sing better.
And I've just this minute discovered that he's playing bass viol and rebec at the midwinter feast I have tickets to. Neat.
I find it very easy not to go to choir in the evening, especially having got up at six thirty -- but so often once I have I walk home feeling that the world is glowing.
