On a cold winter's evening, 14 June 2014, Forsyth Barr Stadium, All Blacks versus England. It was very exciting and a very special feeling to sing in front of the rugby crowd of 30,000! In honour of the English team we entertained with songs from mother England, and ending with a lovely Maori song for our boys in black:
Rule Britannia (with Ben Madden, tenor, taking the solo part), Jerusalem, I vow to thee my country, Land of Hope and Glory, and Tarakihi with Lizzie Marvelly.
(Photo courtesy of The Otago Daily Times.)
Friday, June 20, 2014
Sunday, June 15, 2014
A chapter in our history
Extracting Mr Wolf’s new Choral Society from its mythological future
Sidney Wolf |
Wolf began recruiting for his new ‘Dunedin ChoralSociety’ in June 1914. Although it took the name of the old society – and within a year was commonly referred to as a reconstitution of it – it was an entirely separate body, with a new style of organisation and very different musical standards. It was unquestionably Wolf’s – not the committee’s – society; the committee’s role was to support him, and admission to the choir was only by his acceptance on audition. Like his first society, excellence in performance, not the education of either members or the public, was the single primary aim.
One hundred years on, the idea of professional musical directorship, an auditioned choir, and high standards of performance of a variety of music seems quite normal, and it is easy to suppose that the Choral Society simply continued in the path which Wolf had set. The reality has proved quite different however, and the cyclical periods of poor administration, low musical expectations, and indifferent leadership seen in the earlier versions of the Society, have all recurred in the new. In spite of a major cull of performing members in 1969 to improve standards (echoing that of 1937), even in the 1990s a proportion of this choir could not read music, and there proved to be no effective mechanism for dislodging incompetent singers from its ranks. Extinction has come extremely close at times.
While some of the threads of the last 50 years have been beautifully laid out for the historian’s inspection; others have proved to be very tangled indeed. Most of the documents after 1980 have not been deposited in the Hocken, and although they came to me in dated files, none of the files marked from before 2003 proved to bear more than a chance resemblance to the label below the level of the first two items. Sorting, listing, and in many instances dating some 5000 documents has been a time-consuming business, as has marrying undated supporting documents to the correct set of committee minutes on contextual grounds. But as with the earlier years, this work has allowed a sense of the real History of the Dunedin Choral Society to emerge; without it, the later part of the History would be as much myth as the early part was when I began.
By Dr Jenny Burchell
Researcher and author of the choir's history book (in progress).
Labels:
history
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