Interview, Anna Lapwood on Celestial Dawn

Founded by the college's Director of Music Anna Lapwood in 2018, The Pembroke College Girls’ Choir's first recording project saw them joining forces with the Chapel Choir on All Things Are Quite Silent; their new album Celestial Dawn sees the girls striking out on their own with an equally eclectic programme encompassing music by Nadia & Lili Boulanger, Eric Whitacre, Wayne Marshall and John Dankworth as well as a newly-commissioned work by Kristina Arakelyan.

Amid preparations for the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition, Anna spoke to me about the challenges of keeping her young singers engaged during lockdown, the 'package-deal' which she offers to the Pembroke choristers, why the girls crave 'a varied diet of musical styles', and one particular moment on the new recording which reliably moves her to tears...

How much of a role did this recording play in getting some sort of normality going for the girls after lockdown?

The hardest thing was the uncertainty - we did a term entirely on Zoom, then after maybe four weeks of distanced services I remember being told about five minutes before a rehearsal that we were shutting down again…I cried all the way through evensong, because I found it so distressing knowing what an important role choir plays in the girls’ lives and helping them develop as people. They found it really upsetting, and there were tears on Zoom calls…

Even though it wasn’t the ideal set-up, choir was a constant for them through that time. I was conscious that they needed a project to work towards in order to feel that the Zoom rehearsals had a point and weren’t just a poor replacement, so I tried to introduce them to as much new music as possible - and when we came back again that music formed the core of our new repertoire.

So much of the repertoire on the album was learned remotely?

Yes, and it was a fun challenge to rehearse them without actually being able to hear them properly! You learn to predict what’s going to work and what might not, so you find yourself saying ‘Ooh, I think that’s a bit flat!’ simply because you know their voices. By the time we did the recording we had been singing together in person again, but COVID was still causing problems – we lost singers for this recording because they’d tested positive…

I think the first thing we sang together when we finally met up was Malcolm Archer’s Berkshire Service, which is one of their favourites: they know it so well that they can sing it off by heart. In fact if I’m ever in a stressful situation and need to go into a positive mindset straightaway, I just think of the girls singing that!

How much commissioning have you been able to do since the choir was founded?

I’m hoping to do as much as I can, though obviously COVID and budget-cuts have made it a lot harder…I’ve commissioned twelve new organ pieces this year, and am now moving onto the choral side of things. One commission on the new album is Kristina Arakelyan’s You Know Me; she and I were working together on an organ piece anyway, and I just realised what an amazing talent she is. Her skill at taking a brief and writing something that’s not only a fantastic piece of music but has at its heart a desire to be a pleasure for the performer and the listener is a total joy.

I asked her to write a piece for the girls when were having tapas one night in London and talking about the organ piece, and a week later I had the score in my hands! It arrived right before a rehearsal so I printed it out straightaway, ran over to the chapel with copies still warm from the photocopier, and we sang it straight through. It was incredible watching the girls’ faces light up at the fact that this piece had been written for them, and they adore it. There’s a moment after the first section where it splits from unison into harmony, and I specifically asked Kristina to do that because I know that the girls just love those moments!

Was Kristina able to come and rehearse with them?

Yes, and it was brilliant for them to see it as a work-in-progress as she asked them to experiment with this or that: it showed them that a piece isn’t a fixed entity but a living, breathing thing that can change based on the venue, circumstances and number of singers.

I try to do a sort of package-deal where I encourage the girls to compose and conduct as well as sing, so for them to meet and chat to a young female composer who’s not that far in age from the oldest in the choir was very powerful. On our next CD we’ve included three pieces which the girls wrote collaboratively, so it’s very much the heart of who we are as a choir.

Have many of your alumni gone on to study music at university or conservatoires?

I don’t think we’ve actually had anyone go into music as a career yet. But all of them have gone on to continue with it alongside whatever degree that they’re doing, and I think it’s crucial to remind them that you don’t have to be a professional musician to be a musician – that’s something that’s so easy to forget.

We purposefully started the choir with a big group from the 11-to-14 age-group, so that we’d keep them for a good number of years as opposed to getting loads of 18-year-olds right at the start. This is the first year where we’re starting to lose more at the top, and it was a tough final service. We said goodbye to two of our longest-serving choristers, one of whom was doing the solo in the Wayne Marshall Magnificat, and I couldn’t look at her because I knew that if I did I would lose it – she conducts beautifully and has gained so much confidence, and who knows when we’ll see each other again…

Have you managed to recruit many new singers despite the challenges of lockdowns?

Now that COVID is hopefully receding a bit recruitment is something that we need to ramp up, because the key thing for me is that I don’t want it to be limited to people who happen to have heard about it through the grapevine. I want to be reaching those people who perhaps wouldn’t have thought about joining a choir and showing them what a positive thing it is, and that just hasn’t been possible for the last three years. I have a big thing that the intake has to be 60/40 state/private, but we’ve never had a problem with that in Cambridge, because music-provision is so strong across the board that the divide really isn’t clear-cut.

We get a lot of singers who are apprehensive about the idea of being involved in sacred music, and it’s always interesting chatting to them about the role of a choir within worship and whether they have to believe it or not. Obviously the answer is ‘No’ – it’s up to them what they make of the music and the text and the meaning behind it.

How did you come across the wonderful Wayne Marshall canticles?

Aren’t they amazing?! When I do the music list every term I spent weeks doing random Google-searches and going down YouTube rabbit-holes, and I just stumbled across the piece online. Of course I know Wayne because he’s also an organist, and as soon as I found out that he’d written a set of canticles I just knew they were going to be fun! They’re so jazzy and they really stretched the girls – when we started learning them they’d never sung in four parts before and the harmony here is quite chromatic, but there’s something so accessible about the writing.

The first time we sang them we had the upper voices of the Chapel Choir to pad things out, but now they can crack them out from memory. Our sound-engineer knows Wayne really well and because we finished the recording ahead of schedule we ended up singing them to Wayne and his kids over FaceTime - the girls were so hyper they were practically bouncing off the walls!

And the Ely Canticles are such a contrast…

They’re really special to the girls because we sang them at our first-ever evensong. In our first rehearsal when they were all really shy I remember working on that bit in the Nunc which suddenly splits into thirds on the words ‘To be a light…’. That was the moment I first thought ‘These girls could be really good!’, and I have the recording on my phone to this day. And there’s another a bit in the Nunc where they spontaneously sway together as they sing – it’s the most wholesome thing, because they all move totally as one! Sorry, I’m welling up just thinking about it…

How much do you find that the girls’ voices alter over the course of their time with you?

They all have free singing lessons as part of the deal. We have one girl who’s seventeen (she does the solo in the Wayne Marshall Nunc) and her voice just keeps getting bigger and bigger… It’s now a really solid instrument, and it’s interesting experimenting with where you put that in a choir - if I put her next to certain people they’ll suddenly match her, and it’s like they absorb the sound and go ‘Oh, I can do that!’. The younger ones end up copying, then with the singing-teacher we work out how that’s going to come out physiologically, and so the overall sound goes up like a balloon inflating.

This term they did something in eight parts (the Holst Ave Maria) for the first time: there’s only eighteen of them in the choir, so the little ones have to work just as hard as the older girls because there’s only two per part. When you do something like that and then go back to unison singing it’s so exciting because the overall sound has expanded so much.

It’s obviously really important to you to expose the girls to a diverse range of repertoire, both in terms of musical styles and composers’ identities…

Young people are always talking about diversity - they can’t avoid or escape it, and they don’t want to avoid or escape it, so I don’t see how can choir directors justify running something for them that exists in a little bubble with its own rules. The girls are really proud that they sing diverse repertoire: when I introduced them to the Harry T. Burleigh (which we recorded for the first time) I was explaining to them how he was the first really successful African-African composer of art-song, and one of them said ‘This is so woke, I love it!’. That word’s often used quite disparagingly, but the girls use it in the most positive sense: their attitude is ‘Yes, we’re awake!’.

They love a varied diet of musical styles, and that’s what I’m trying to help instil in them: a realisation that you don’t have to sneer at any style of music, because it’s all valid in different ways and contexts. I think you have to be so careful when you’re working with young people, because in the same way that they absorb that sonic energy they also absorb opinions, language and attitudes. If you make an offhand comment like ‘Oh, we’re doing this piece because everyone likes it but ugh!’ then they think that’s how you should talk about music. And if you make a snide remark about a piece and one of those kids really loves it, then what does that say to them? You’re essentially telling them that their opinion isn’t valid, and we have to guard against that.

What are your plans for the coming year?

It’s going to be an interesting one because we’ve lost some strong singers, so we have to experiment with building sound in different ways. I’m hoping to take them on a little tour so that they experience the fun of living together for a couple of days, then we’ve got a Christmas album coming out in October, with the Girls’ Choir and Chapel Choir together.

There’s some beautiful stuff on the bill, but it’s very much focused on the gritty side of Christmas: we open with a bit of incredibly atmospheric unaccompanied chant by this wacky composer called Patricia Van Ness who’s obsessed with Hildegard von Bingen, and that takes you into Adrian Peacock’s Venite, Gaudete. It’s very eclectic, and the polar opposite of your standard Christmas disc!