Category Archives: what I’m up to

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to, workshop leading

singing in harmony

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I was determined to start back strongly after the Easter break with the girls choir I conduct.  I’ve been experimenting with seating arrangements for the forty or fifty of them that turn up every week(!).  For a while there I arranged them in a circle to try and eliminate the talking in the back row phenomenon.  It sort of worked and certainly loosened things up a bit; I could walk around the circle and encourage sound production where necessary.

The sixth years have their conformation coming up – quite a big deal, I realised when the teacher produced the book of music they’d be singing.  I arranged them in as few rows as possible length-ways in the room where we rehearse and did a good hour’s work with them.  Starting with standing up (a huge challenge for some of them!), breathing and warm-ups – explaining why all these things were important – we progressed to the simple canonic Agnus Dei that was in the book.  The good thing about this music is that they all pretty much know it already.  Of course, that can also be a bad thing…we got into a discussion about what humility is (“…it’s like when you invite someone into your house…”) as I got them to think about how to sing the words.  The last note in the phrase is a semibreve on the word ‘us’, so we also had to think about where to place the ‘s’.

In contrast, we also worked on the refrain of the Gloria.  This had an optional harmony and, buoyed by our good work to this point, I forged ahead…  We sang the melody all together, then I taught them all the harmony line.  By alternating tune and harmony a few times we were eventually able to split into the two parts.  A great achievement for them – can’t wait for next week!

New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

New Dublin Voices win in Budapest

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This is still sinking in…!

Outside the Palace of Arts in Budapest
Outside the Palace of Arts in Budapest
Leading Irish chamber choir New Dublin Voices has won the Grand Prix at the prestigious Budapest International Choir Competition.
The choir’s founder and conductor Bernie Sherlock also scooped the award for best conductor at the competition which featured 48 choirs from 15 different countries.
New Dublin Voices was the unanimous choice of all ten judges for First Prize, the first time this has happened in 10 years.
The choir travelled to Hungary having just won the inaugural ESB Feis Ceol Choir of the Year at the RDS in Dublin last month.
In the first round, New Dublin Voices beat choirs from the USA, Hungary, Norway and Serbia to come first in the chamber choir class and go through to the Grand Prix Final on Wednesday night.
The Grand Prix featured the winners from each of eight classes (male-voice, female-voice, large choir, children’s choir, etc) in the first round. All ten judges voted to give overall First Prize to New Dublin Voices.
Prize monies totalling €6000 from Budapest and Feis Ceol will allow the choir, which as yet receives no public or private funding, to take up one of only eight invitations issued to adult choirs to compete at the elite Marktoberdorf International Chamber Choir Competition in Germany in June.
About New Dublin Voices
New Dublin Voices, formed by conductor Bernie Sherlock in October 2005, is a non-professional chamber choir of 25 singers. The choir gives regular concerts in leading Irish venues featuring fresh and adventurous programming. Competitive successes include National Choir of the Year in 2006 and 2008 (Navan Choral Festival), several awards at the Cork International Choral Festival, including National Choir of the Festival in 2006, and numerous prizes at Dublin Feis Ceol prior to this year’s inaugural ESB Feis Ceol Choir of the Year. The choir is especially interested in the music of living composers and has given many Irish and world premieres.
About the Budapest International Choir Competition
This was the 12th running of the Budapest International Choir Competition which has taken place every two years since 1981. It is part of the wider Musica Mundi organisation which creates and maintains choral competitions around Europe and which in 2010 will host the 6th World Choir Games in China. This year’s jury panel comprised esteemed judges from Italy, Russia, Greece, Germany, Indonesia, and South Africa as well as from Hungary.
For further information please contact Mike Dungan, 087 9902175, or Cliona Donnelly at clionadonnelly@hotmail.com
what I'm up to

Jazz trio

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Today was the fourth rehearsal of a jazz trio comprising me (on keys), Barry Rycraft (on bass) and Satya Darcy (on drums). We worked solely on original material this time, after having started on standards. The guys are both finishing the first year of the jazz studies degree course at Newpark and their enthusiasm is infectious.

We’ll certainly be looking into recording an album and doing some gigs over the next months.

songs for children, what I'm up to

Some cute cards from kids last week

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I did a project with a group of school kids last week in Offaly.  We wrote a song about the Pied Piper, ‘The Bargain’, which turned out rather nicely, ending with lots of angry faces and fist-waving!  I’m pleased with the middle section (“the rats were drowned…”) which has a bit of The Divine Comedy about it.  I taught it to the school choir I work with, too.

The mayor and piper, a bargain they made
“A fortune in guilders – five figures we’ll pay!
Get rid of the rats, they’re a plague on our heads.
They’re the curse of our town – play your pipe ’til they’re dead!”

He led the rats to the river bank
And he played his pipe ’til the last one sank
The rats were drowned, the town was free,
The piper returned to collect his fee…

“Dear Mayor,” said Piper, “a bargain we made.
A fortune in guilders you promised to pay…”
The hideous, flatulent, double-faced mayor
Said “Here’s fifty guilders – we feel that is fair.”

“You are a loser and I am a winner,
I am a saint and you are a sinner.
This is not the end!
This is not the end!
I will have revenge!
I will have revenge!”

We also did raps – here’s the one I did with my group:

Let me tell you ’bout those rats
Some of them were fat, some of them were thin
Some of them were tawny, some lived in a bin
One of them – he was bigger than a cat
Now what do you think of that?!
Another one – hmmmm, he didn’t look so good
And the smell of him was pretty rancid, too.
Let me try to explain
This smell was insane
Now that I think of it I’m in pain
This odour brought tears to my eyelids
Imagine a sandwich left years ‘fore you find it
Under the fridge or behind a chair
Ugh! I bet you’re glad you weren’t there!

Great fun!  When we’d done our final performance on the Friday, they presented each of us with a little bundle of thank you cards – very sweet 🙂

what I'm up to, workshop leading

Children’s music workshop at Rare Diseases Day

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I really enjoyed working with the children at the Mansion House today 🙂 We had quite a range of ages in the group of about a dozen kids and we had great fun making music together. We did some rhythm work, gradually building up from a simple clap to a brand new composition, the exclusive performance of which was witnessed by a group of lucky visitors to the Rare Disease Day event.

We composed a poem together, which we named ‘Spiel’, and which was inspired in part by the lovely room where we were working:

‘Spiel’

notebook
music twenty Lord Mayor nothing big space
(quiet)
tail’s gone Oisin dolly
pingy picture window mirror clapping RHYTHM
FLOWER

James Joyce would’ve been proud! We chanted the words in a specific rhythm, adding percussion instruments, chime bars, and my guitar to the mix.

Afterwards a few children and adults gathered around the very nice Petrof grand piano and did a little bit of playing, watching the hammers move and seeing how the pedal changed the way the dampers acted on the strings.

A delightful group of children and a lovely morning all round 🙂

what I'm up to

How to set up a Google account

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  • This is my most popular post – *sigh*! It describes how to set up a Gmail account and also how to have all the email sent to that account forwarded automatically to a different email address.
  • I wrote this to help all the members of the choir I was singing with to be on Google and therefore able to sign up for a Google group (an easy way to share info and clique-ish chat!).
  • Please let me know if this is useful, or if there is any other info you would like.

[original post follows]

A Google account is easy to set up and you can redirect all the mail that comes to it to your existing email address, so all will carry on as normal in your email world.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Go to www.gmail.com and click ‘Sign up for Google Mail’ at the bottom right.
  2. Fill in the form, choosing your spangly new email address.
  3. A screen will appear telling you about Gmail’s super-duper features.  Click ‘I’m ready – show me my account’ when you’re ready and want to be shown your account.
  4. Your new account shall appear.
  5. Click on ‘Settings’.gmail-inbox-1-newdublinvoicesgmailcom-mozilla-firefox-27022009-0122201
  6. Click on ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’.gmail-settings-newdublinvoicesgmailcom-mozilla-firefox-27022009-013751bmp
  7. Where it says ‘Forward a copy of incoming mail to…’, fill in your main email account.  (The button to the left of the line will automatically ‘switch on’.)
  8. My personal preference would be to change ‘keep Gmail’s copy in the inbox’ to ‘archive Gmail’s copy’.  Up to you.
  9. Click ‘Save changes’ at the bottom of the yellow box.
reviews and reports, what I'm up to

Hamlet’s launch in Whelan’s

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On Friday Hamlet Sweeney played his first gig of 2009, launching his release strategy on the world.  He will release a single every month this year – the first one being ‘I am a man’.  We recorded a handful of tracks in December with Karl Odlum (who has been the producer for, among others, Gemma Hayes) and some of these were then mastered at the iconic Abbey Road studios in London.

‘I am a man’ is one of the tracks that I’ve really enjoyed playing with Hamlet over the past year.  Hamlet had recorded quite a full demo version in his home studio that impressed me from the outset with the dark, unapologetic tone of the words and music.  It has a punchy riff – my keyboard version is different from his multi-tracked guitar original, which may get released on an anthology or B-side some day – and also now features a clarinet solo.  This was good fun in the gig, as I got to switch between the two.

Hamlet Sweeney in Whelan's (30jan09)
Hamlet Sweeney in Whelan's (30jan09) - photograph by Joanna Butcher

Playing with us on the gig were two excellent musicians, Gavin Fox and Binzer, who play together in the band Concerto for Constantine.  It’s always interesting when Dublin musicians get together, swapping stories of who they all know!  Binzer played on the initial recording sessions with Karl down in Wicklow (Karl was on bass) when we put down the basic tracks.  Gavin I hadn’t met before, but he came in and did a great job with the songs.  Which were:

‘Is she real?’
‘Sunshine’
‘Street lights’

These first three were just Hamlet and I, the guys joining us at this point.

‘Miss Inconsequential’

We played this at Bewleys and slowed it down considerably for this gig, helping the song find its natural groove, I think. It settled into a nice Del Amitri type feel.

‘Mr Slim’
‘Tie a ribbon up in your hair’
‘Canary in a coalmine’
‘Voices in my head’
‘The Una Molloy hangover song’
‘Hey girl (Ooh la la la)’

Dropped because of time restraints, which was unfortunate (’cause people really enjoy it).

‘El capitane’
‘Perfect day’
‘Buy this song’

This was great fun with the band!

‘I am a man’
‘The boogie man’

‘I am a man’, the first of twelve releases this year, is available for download now.  Here’s how:

  1. Text ‘music 2274’ to 57501.
  2. Enter the pin code you receive on downloadmusic.ie.
  3. Download the song.

This last step is very important.  If you don’t download it, it won’t register for the charts…

songs, togetherness, what I'm up to

Saint Brigid’s cross

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Last night I performed my latest song for the audience at Saint Brigid’s parish, Cabinteely.  New Dublin Voices were doing a concert to raise money for a charity called Preda that helps children in the Philippines.  The priest had suggested that it would be nice to have a new hymn composed for the occasion and I took on the challenge.

Saint Brigid's cross

I didn’t know much about Brigid, but quickly discovered that she is patron saint of four main groups: babies, farmers, travellers and a last set to do with creativity and fire.  This last group – comprising blacksmiths, poets, scholars and printing presses – was interesting to me.  Some of the ideas associated with Brigid’s day come from the ancient pagan goddess of the same name.  She was considered a goddess of fire and was thought to manifest herself through poetry (seen as the ‘flame of knowledge’ in ancient Gaelic culture), song and craftsmanship.  Brigid’s day (the first of February) is the first day of Spring in the Irish tradition and Saint Brigid crosses are made.  It would have been common in some households to burn the cross from the previous year in a symbolic act of renewal.

I wanted the song to be for the listeners, an invocation to think about the people, now and through the ages past, for whom Brigid was a source of inspiration and hope.  Consideration, appreciation and love of others is something we can all strive for and practice.  With or without words.

(click on the title to play…)

Saint Brigid’s cross

Burn like a mother’s love
For her newborn child
And its tiny beauty.
Pray – with or without words –
Oh, for the tiny children.

Burn like a farmer’s limbs
When the work is done,
When the day is over.
Pray – with or without words –
Oh, for the farmer working.

And the simple cross
Hanging on the wall
Can remind us all
Of springtime’s promise. (repeat)

Burn like the stars above,
Guiding trav’llers home
From a tiring journey.
Pray – with or without words –
Oh, for their safe return.

Burn like a great idea,
One that thrills the ear
And delights the mind.
Pray – with or without words –
Oh, for the truth to shine.

And the simple cross
Hanging on the wall
Can remind us all
Of springtime’s promise. (repeat)

(lyrics and music © Jonathan Wilson 2009)

music, New Dublin Voices and other choral singing, what I'm up to

New Dublin Voices on Facebook

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If you’re interested in keeping up with what New Dublin Voices are up to and hearing about upcoming concerts, then please become our fan on Facebook.

Our next concert is on Sunday 1st February in St Brigid’s church in Cabinteely, County Dublin.  It will feature some of our favourite pieces as well as some solo and duet pieces in what will be a concert to suit all ages.  Proceeds will go to the charity PREDA.

I hope to have completed a new St Brigid hymn for the occasion…