May 2005
Church Music in St Patrick’s Dalkey	Show Menu

Ken Shellard, Organist & Choir Director

First of all some bare facts: St Patrick's Church is situated outside the village of Dalkey, on a height and overlooking a vast expanse of Irish Sea. The limitless supply of fresh air is but one of many factors giving one the feeling that "it is good, Lord, to be here". The only service in which music is involved is on Sunday mornings at 10.15 a.m. The monthly pattern is: 1st Sunday, Eucharist; 2nd Sunday, Family Service; 3rd Sunday, Eucharist; 4th Sunday, Morning Prayer. When there is a 5th Sunday, the Junior Choir takes over the function of the Senior Choir.

Both choirs rehearse on Friday evenings: Juniors at 6.30; Seniors at 7.30. The Senior Choir has a potential membership of twenty, the Junior Choir, sixteen. The instances of 100% attendance are rare, it being a quite normal occurrence that at our Christmas Carol Service (which would be one of our more ambitious projects) I have my first and only experience of having everybody together. But this is the real world and I do not grumble. In theory, the senior choir sings SATB. In practice that is fully achievable only on 'special' occasions such as Harvest, Advent, Christmas, Palm Sunday, but alas not Easter, because so many folk are away. Sadly, Pentecost, which I would love to celebrate musically, suffers from a similar fate. So, it will be seen that our tackling of ambitious music tends to be confined to the 'special' occasions referred to above.

My Rector leaves the choice of hymns and other music entirely in my hands. This is a weird experience for me, never having been thus involved, in a church musical career stretching back most of 40 years. It takes me three to four hours to fully prepare a monthly list, poring over collects and bible readings to find the closest relationship that I possibly can between what is said and what is sung. While, the Rector performs an editorial function on the finished list, he rarely changes anything! Whether this is because I do my job superbly well or because he is easily pleased I cannot tell. That is for others to judge!

As to the content of choir practices and how I conduct them, I will try to accommodate that aspect in a proverbial, if somewhat capacious, nutshell.

If we mumble words there is no experience, whereas if we resound them they come back at us and tell us whether or not we believe them. In the process of resounding there are attendant matters of demeanour and tone of voice. If what we say with our lips and believe in our hearts, is to be shown forth in our church services we have to make sure that the words we utter are corroborated by face and tone of voice. If, for example, we were to greet a fellow human being with words that expressed delight in the encounter, but at the same time delivered those words in drab tones and with expressionless faces then facial expression and tone of voice would invert the verbal expression of delight. Applying these concepts to church, then the Gloria (in which we celebrate God as being at the very pinnacle of our "hit" parade) will sound so different from the Agnus Dei (a cry for mercy). If this kind of differentiation is not made we are left with the feeling that every hymn has too many verses, because they all sound the same and all 150 psalms are repetitions of the same text because they all sound the same.

Yes, these are major preoccupations of mine at rehearsal or in service, preoccupations which have a huge impact on the notes we sing and on the way that we sing them; and so often experience has shown me that, when these matters concerning the close relationship of words, face, and tone of voice are ignored, we are left with something like what, I think, Aldous Huxley said: "Tedium Laudamus". Discussion of the implications of all this could continue endlessly. But, fortunately for the readers of this journal, the shadow of the editor (scissors in hand) looms large over any such tendencies on my part. I will conclude therefore with a comment on just two aspects of the problem of words and their rhythmical, intelligible and meaningful delivery.

At the age of 12 I had an English teacher, Maple Cook, who together with my Dad laid the foundations of the exuberant joy in words that has sustained me through life ever since. The class text for the year in question was called "Reading and Thinking" At one point there was a brief exposition of the importance of stress in deciding what a sequence of words actually meant. The proffered example read like this: "Jack hung his cap on the peg". The student was invited to accent each syllable in turn, to the exclusion of the others. What emerged yielded up almost as many different meanings as there were words!

Secondly, "The Barchester Chronicles" is one of the most wonderful TV series I know. In one episode there has been a garden party. As it nears its end, an elderly priest is seen subsiding wearily onto a garden-bench, where his daughter spots him and comes over to join him. (It is germane to what follows that father and daughter had arrived at the party in separate carriages and from different directions.) She says to him "Are you going home?" He says to her "Yes, my carriage is called." She then says, "May I travel with you?" to which he replies, "My dear, you always travel with me". Taking that reply of his, without looking for any subtleties of expression, it could sound like a mild rebuke. " But he, in his reply, puts an unstressed and lengthy pause on the second syllable of "always", thus: "My .dear, you always travel with me". What could have been a trivial rebuke is transformed by simple means into an expression of deep love of father for daughter. The words are unchanged but the message is elevated from mundane to sublime. Finding such moments of illumination in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs is what preoccupies us at choir-practices, and when, having sought, we find, then nothing is too long, and our joy no one takes from us. Almost as a postscript I might add that amid all this high-minded seriousness there is, in both choirs, plenty of room for laughter, fun, relaxation and social excursions. It is indeed ".....good, Lord, to be here".

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