When the Hilliard Ensemble became internationally successful in the 80s the group was increasingly asked to coach young ensembles. For a while we had a regular week in Kangasniemi (Finland) organised by the Sibelius Academy, coaching mainly Finnish groups and discovering smoke saunas, midnight barbecues, swimming in the lake and that Finnish beer made of French rabbits. We got the coaching bug and Paul Hillier suggested we start a Summer School in Lewes, close to where he lived. We had a visiting star each year, and Jordi Savall, Roger Norrington, Arvo Part and Bill Christie were among our first guests. It was a huge success and an administrative nightmare, initially taken on by Paul and his wife Lena, and subsequently shouldered by David James, catering to groups from all over the world. When Paul left the group we started again in Hertfordshire where we first met Selene Mills, and we followed her to Trinity Hall Cambridge where she set up a series of early music summer schools. Our guests there included Paul Robinson, Ivan Moody, Piers Hellawell and Gavin Bryars; several of our protégés, Singer Pur, Amarcord, Trio Mediaeval, went on to international success themselves. From the start we’d had many more groups from the European mainland, especially Germany, as well as singers from the USA and Japan. Costs eventually became prohibitive, and largely through the good offices of Werner Schüssler we were able to move to Schloss Engers on the Rhine, where the composers included Roger Marsh (whose Pierrot Lunaire was a summer school commission) and the jazz drummer Peter Erskine. Eventually Engers too succumbed to rising costs and soon after I left the group the Hilliards stopped the annual summer school, though I think they still coach from time to time. Looking back on it, the HE Summer School was a great thing: a galaxy of star composers and performers interacting with some exciting groups, many of which found inspiration and subsequent success, and many of whom are still firm friends.
Around the time I left the Hilliards I was editing the Cambridge Companion to Singing, and I decided to include an ensemble singing chapter as it was a topic I really felt confident to write about (unlike jazz, which I also found myself rambling about in the same volume when the original contributor disappeared). It was a good opportunity to summarise how I thought the whole process worked. We had mostly coached instinctively, had never been taught anything, and only gradually came to understand how we did what we did. It also seemed mad to me that there were so many successful professional ensembles and yet none of the conservatoires offered courses in ensemble singing (this is more complicated that it appears – one of the reasons so many ensembles are successful may be because they don’t start in conservatoires, but that’s another story). When I got to York I decided to run an ensemble singing MA, inspired by 5 graduates who wanted to stay on and work together as a group. They called themselves e-tone (for reasons I never fully understood) and under the Yorvox name gave the first UK performance of Gavin Bryars’ 3rd Book of Madrigals (recently recorded by the Italian Vox Altera Ensemble). They are all still involved in music (Anna Snow is a third of the vocal trio Juice). It was obviously going to be difficult for whole ensembles to come as a group, but there were successes in the form of the American groups UnCloistered and Bright Cecilia among many other ad hoc ensembles. It sometimes wasn’t easy to maintain the liberalising agenda in the more traditional academic environment, but I like to think that there are ensemble singers out there who transcended the ethos.
Almost since it started some 20 years ago, I’ve chaired the jury for the ensemble singing contest at the Tampere International Vocal Festival (Finland). This is a biennial event and has produced some stunning groups across the whole field of acappella singing, perhaps the most famous being Rajaton (one of the world’s most exciting and inventive ensembles). The Tampere week is one that I look forward to most, and the 2011 event, masterminded by Jussi Chydenius, promises to be one of the best yet. I now coach all over the place, not often in Britain – though I did have the pleasure of working with the Finnish ensemble Versio during their recent UK tour. They are a wonderful 12 strong group – a large number to manage as a ‘small ensemble’ – very creative and receptive to new ideas. We hope to meet again in Tampere next year.
When I proposed writing a history of singing for Cambridge University Press I was also intending to write a book on ensemble singing. The plan was to cover the whole acappella spectrum, much of which I’m not really qualified to write about; so I enlisted the aid of The Real Group’s Anders Jalkeus. Anders also sits on the Tampere jury and each time we meet we ask each other how our book is coming on. Trouble is, we’re too busy doing it, so it’s probably going to take a while yet…
