The Choir of Newman College

The Choir of Newman College
The Choir of Newman College
	Choir
	Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Newman College
Origin	Newman College
Founded	2002 (17 years ago)
Founder	Dr. Gary Ekkel
Website	Newman College Choir Website

Last updated October 17, 2019

The Choir of Newman College is a collegiate chapel and concert Choir affiliated with Newman College, a Catholic residential college of the University of Melbourne. Founded by Dr Gary Ekkel in 2002, the Choir consists of 27 choral scholars drawn predominantly from residents of the college and recent alumni. The Choir participates in a Choral Eucharist at 7pm on Sundays during the University semester as well as singing a Compline service on the first Thursday of each month.^[1]

Newman College (University of Melbourne) college of the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Newman College is an Australian Roman Catholic co-educational residential college affiliated with the University of Melbourne. During the university year it houses about 200 undergraduate students and about 80 postgraduate students and tutors. The college was named after Cardinal John Henry Newman, a former Anglican and major figure in the Oxford Movement who became a Roman Catholic in the 19th century. The college continues to commemorate the life of Newman through events such as the "Cardinal Newman Dinner" and the prominent positioning of his portrait in the dining hall. Although most strongly affiliated with the University of Melbourne, a small number of undergraduate students attend RMIT University, Monash University's Parkville and City campuses, and the Australian Catholic University.

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with approximately 1.3 billion baptised Catholics worldwide as of 2017. As the world's oldest and largest continuously functioning international institution, it has played a prominent role in the history and development of Western civilisation. The church is headed by the Bishop of Rome, known as the pope. Its central administration is the Holy See.

University of Melbourne Australian public university located in Melbourne, Victoria

The University of Melbourne is a public research university located in Parkville, Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in Victoria. Melbourne's main campus is located in Parkville, an inner suburb north of the Melbourne central business district, with several other campuses located across Victoria.

History

The Choir was established in 2002 under the Rectorship of Fr Peter L’Estrange when Dr Ekkel, who had previously worked with the choir of the nearby Ormond College,^[2] approached Newman College with the suggestion of forming a chapel and concert Choir. L’Estrange, a great patron of the Arts at Newman College, agreed and invited Dr Ekkel to form a collegiate choir to contribute to the liturgical and musical life of Newman College.

Peter John L'Estrange, AO, is an Australian Jesuit priest and historian. He was the Master of Campion Hall at the University of Oxford in England until 2008.

Ormond College is the largest of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne located in the city of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It is home to around 350 undergraduates, 90 graduates and 35 professorial and academic residents.

Since its inception in 2002, the repertoire of the Choir has predominantly focused on sacred music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods as well as 20th century music.^[3] Under the Rectorship of Fr Bill Uren, the Choir has transformed from being composed chiefly of non-resident scholars to being mostly resident scholars. Choral scholars of The Choir of Newman College have also gone on to perform in vocal ensembles such as Schola Cantorum as well as becoming founding members of TheRegional Victorian Byrd Choir.^[2]

Renaissance music is vocal and instrumental music written and performed in Europe during the Renaissance era. Consensus among music historians has been to start the era around 1400, with the end of the medieval era, and to close it around 1600, with the beginning of the Baroque period, therefore commencing the musical Renaissance about a hundred years after the beginning of the Renaissance as it is understood in other disciplines. As in the other arts, the music of the period was significantly influenced by the developments which define the Early Modern period: the rise of humanistic thought; the recovery of the literary and artistic heritage of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome; increased innovation and discovery; the growth of commercial enterprises; the rise of a bourgeois class; and the Protestant Reformation. From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular, the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school, whose greatest master was Josquin des Prez.

Baroque music is a period or style of Western art music composed from approximately 1600 to 1750. This era followed the Renaissance music era, and was followed in turn by the Classical era. Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and is now widely studied, performed, and listened to. Key composers of the Baroque era include Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Claudio Monteverdi, Domenico Scarlatti, Alessandro Scarlatti, Henry Purcell, Georg Philipp Telemann, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Arcangelo Corelli, Tomaso Albinoni, François Couperin, Giuseppe Tartini, Heinrich Schütz, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Dieterich Buxtehude, and Johann Pachelbel.

Concerts and Tours

Typically, the Choir’s Concert Series consists of three concerts per year performed in the Chapel of the Holy Spirit at Newman College. However, the Choir also regularly sings outside of this concert series in festivals such as the Organs of the Ballarat Goldfields where it has performed major works such as Biber’s Missa Salisburgensis and Bach’s St Matthew Passion .

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber Bohemian-Austrian composer and violinist

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber was a Bohemian-Austrian composer and violinist. Born in the small Bohemian town of Wartenberg, Biber worked in Graz and Kremsier before he illegally left his Kremsier employer, Prince-Bishop Carl Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn, and settled in Salzburg. He remained there for the rest of his life, publishing much of his music but apparently seldom, if ever, giving concert tours.

The Missa Salisburgensis à 53 voci is perhaps the largest-scale piece of extant sacred Baroque music, an archetypal work of the Colossal Baroque. The manuscript score of this Mass was rediscovered in the 1870s in the home of a greengrocer in Salzburg, Austria. It has been said to have narrowly escaped being used to wrap vegetables. In the late 19th century, musicologists, notably August Wilhelm Ambros and Franz Xavier Jelinek, attributed it to Orazio Benevoli, and argued that it had been performed in 1628; however in the mid-1970s, through modern methods of analyzing handwriting, watermarks, and history, Ernst Hintermaier "proved...definitely" that it was not by Benevoli. He also demonstrated that it must have been written for the 1682 commemoration of the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg. Hintermaier wrote in 2015 that the evidence rules out both Benevoli and Andreas Hofer, Biber's colleague, and concludes that "... the only possible composer of the Mass and the [companion] motet [for 54 voices, Plaudite Tympana] was Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber... both the sources and the stylistic analysis clearly point to Biber as the author of the works." The attribution to Biber is now universally accepted.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Western art musical canon.

In 2015, the Choir embarked on its first international tour taking Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers to the New Zealand cities of Auckland, Christchurch, Hamilton, Dunedin, and Oamaru.^[4] On this tour, the Choir collaborated with the New Zealand-based early music ensemble The Affetto Players.

Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, string player and choirmaster. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and the Baroque periods of music history.

Vespro della Beata Vergine, SV 206, is an extended musical composition by Claudio Monteverdi for soloists, choirs, and orchestra, for the evening vespers service on Marian feasts. Monteverdi's Vespers is an ambitious work of religious music in scope and variety in both style and scoring, with a duration of around 90 minutes. The settings of the introduction, five psalms, five concerti, a hymn and two versions of the Magnificat were published in 1610, leading to the name Vespers of 1610.

Auckland is a city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country, Auckland has an urban population of around 1,628,900. It is located in the Auckland Region—the area governed by Auckland Council—which includes outlying rural areas and the islands of the Hauraki Gulf, resulting in a total population of 1,695,900. Auckland is a diverse, multicultural and cosmopolitan city, home to the largest Polynesian population in the world. A Māori-language name for Auckland is Tāmaki or Tāmaki Makaurau, meaning "Tāmaki with a hundred lovers", in reference to the desirability of its fertile land at the hub of waterways in all directions.

Recordings

In 2010, the Choir released its first album Behind Closed Doors with the Australian viol ensemble, Consort Eclectus, and the College Organist, David Macfarlane. This album showcases music written and sung by English Catholics during a period “dominated by a more or less consensual and emphatically Protestant regime”,^[5] which witnessed the persecution of Catholics and saw Catholic composers such as William Byrd “sail... close to the wind”^[6]

Viol Bowed, fretted and stringed instrument

The viol, viola da gamba, or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Frets on the viol are usually made of gut, tied on the fingerboard around the instrument's neck, to enable the performer to stop the strings more cleanly. Frets improve consistency of intonation and lend the stopped notes a tone that better matches the open strings. Viols first appeared in Spain in the mid to late 15th century and were most popular in the Renaissance and Baroque (1600–1750) periods. Early ancestors include the Arabic rebab and the medieval European vielle, but later, more direct possible ancestors include the Venetian viole and the 15th- and 16th-century Spanish vihuela, a 6-course plucked instrument tuned like a lute that looked like but was quite distinct from the 4-course guitar.

William Byrd, was an English composer of the Renaissance. He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard, and consort music. Although he produced sacred music for Anglican services, sometime during the 1570s he became a Roman Catholic and wrote Catholic sacred music later in his life.

In 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations at Newman College, the Choir released the album Luceat Lux Vestra featuring music: set to texts written by the patron of the College, Cardinal John Henry Newman; tied to the Jesuit order who administer the College; and linked to the history and key figures of the College.

The Choir has also contributed to the CD Gallipoli: A Tribute, commissioned to commemorate the centenary of the ANZAC’s Gallipoli campaign.^[7]

Related Research Articles

A choir is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the medieval era to the present, or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm and face gestures.

The Brompton Oratory is a large neo-classical Roman Catholic church in Knightsbridge, London. Its full name is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or as named in its Grade II* architectural listing, The Oratory. The church is closely connected with The London Oratory School, a boys' school founded by the priests from the London Oratory. Its priests celebrate Mass daily in the two main forms, frequently conduct ceremonies for well-known people, as it works as an extra-parochial church, and two of its three choirs have published physical copy and digital audio albums.

Saint Thomas Choir School is a church-affiliated boarding choir school in Manhattan, New York, founded in 1919. The school is supported by the nearby Saint Thomas Church, an Episcopal church, continuing the Anglican tradition of all-male choral ensembles. Saint Thomas is one of three choir schools that exclusively educate boy trebles of the choir, and where all boys are required to board at the school.

The Radcliffe Choral Society is a 60-voice treble choral ensemble at Harvard University. Founded in 1899, it is one of the country's oldest soprano-alto choruses and one of its most prominent collegiate choirs. With the tenor-bass Harvard Glee Club and the mixed-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, it is one of the Harvard Choruses. All three groups are led by Harvard Director of Choral Activities Andrew Clark. The RCS Resident Conductor is Meg Weckworth. RCS tours domestically every year and travels internationally every four years.

The King's College Choir is a British choir. It is considered one of today's most accomplished and renowned representatives of the great English choral tradition. It was created by King Henry VI, who founded King's College, Cambridge, in 1441, to provide daily singing in his Chapel, which remains the main task of the choir to this day.

The Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge is a mixed choir whose primary function is to sing choral services in the Tudor chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. In January 2011, Gramophone named the choir the fifth best choir in the world.

The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge is considered to be one of the finest collegiate choirs in the world. It is part of the English cathedral tradition, having been founded to sing the daily liturgy in the College Chapel, though it is set apart from other English choirs of this tradition by the frequent inclusion of Continental works in its repertoire and its emphasis on polyphonic interpretations. Alongside the choir of King's College, Cambridge, it is one of the two most famous collegiate choirs in Cambridge, having had over 90 recordings published.

Elin Manahan Thomas is a Welsh soprano. A specialist in Baroque music, she sang at the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May 2018.

Boston Baroque is the oldest continuing period instrument orchestra in North America. It was founded in 1973 by the American harpsichordist and conductor, Martin Pearlman, to present concerts of the Baroque and Classical repertoire on period instruments, drawing on the insights of the historical performance movement.

Seraphic Fire is a professional vocal ensemble in the United States, led by its founder and artistic director Patrick Dupré Quigley, and based in Miami. Seraphic Fire's repertoire includes Gregorian chants, Baroque masterpieces, works by Mahler, and newly commissioned works by American composers.

"RAF Centenary Concert". London Concert Choir. 2017-08-01. Retrieved 2019-09-19.London Concert Choir (LCC) is one of London’s leading amateur choirs. The choir was formed in 1960, and the full-time membership consists of ca 150 singers of a wide range of ages.

Richard Andrew Sparks is an American choral conductor. He is one of the leading figures in choral music in the Pacific Northwest and in Scandinavian, especially Swedish a cappella, choral music.

The Magnificat Baroque Ensemble, or Magnificat, is an early music ensemble of voices and instruments specializing in the Baroque music of the 17th century under the artistic direction of Baroque cellist Warren Stewart. Stewart founded the ensemble in San Francisco in 1989 with Baroque harpsichordist Susan Harvey. Harvey resigned in 2000, and the group has remained under the sole musical direction of Stewart since then. The group derives its name from the first word of the Latin translation of the Canticle of Mary in the Gospel of Luke, Magnificat anima mea, "My soul magnifies the Lord", which is sung during the Roman Catholic evening prayer or vespers service.

James Oldfield is an English bass-baritone. In 2008 he was awarded a Sybil Tutton Award from the Musicians Benevolent Fund, and in 2010 he was given the Leonard Ingrams Award from Garsington Opera.

Music of the Baroque is an American professional chorus and orchestra based in Chicago, Illinois.

The City Choir of Washington is a 140-member professional-level volunteer mixed symphonic choir in Washington, D.C. composed of singers from throughout the Washington metropolitan area. The chorus is led by its founding artistic director Robert Shafer, Washington's Grammy award-winning conductor, educator, composer and church musician. The organization was incorporated in the District of Columbia in October 2006 and held its first performance in November 2007 at Schlesinger Concert Hall in Alexandria, Virginia.

Patrick Russill is an English choral conductor, organist and music conservatoire teacher.

Tenet, currently known as TENET Vocal Artists, is an early music vocal and instrumental ensemble based in New York City. They perform on period instruments, and specialize in one-voice-per-part singing. Called “a major force in the New York early music world", TENET maintains a flexible roster of professional musicians from across the US and the world. Their singers have garnered praise for performing with "an uncanny degree of precision”.

The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble are an early music group specializing in music for cornett and sackbut. Formed in 1993, they perform in early music concerts and festivals on period instruments.

References

↑ "The Choir". Newman College.
1 2 Wright, Simon. "Gary Ekkel - Australian recordings, performances". Move Records. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
↑ "CHOIR OF NEWMAN COLLEGE". www.choirsofmelbourne.com. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
↑ "Claudio Monteverdi 1610 Vespers". Eventfinda. Retrieved 2018-03-04.
↑ Patrick Collinson, The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics in Elizabethan England, 82.
↑ Kerman, https://search.amphilsoc.org//sites/default/files/proceedings/Kerman.pdf
↑ "Gallipoli - A Tribute, by Various artists". Gallipoli tribute. Retrieved 2018-03-04.

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[1] "The Choir". Newman College.

[Wright_2018-2] 1 2 Wright, Simon. "Gary Ekkel - Australian recordings, performances". Move Records. Retrieved 2018-03-04.

[3] "CHOIR OF NEWMAN COLLEGE". www.choirsofmelbourne.com. Retrieved 2018-03-04.

[4] "Claudio Monteverdi 1610 Vespers". Eventfinda. Retrieved 2018-03-04.

[5] Patrick Collinson, The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics in Elizabethan England, 82.

[6] Kerman, https://search.amphilsoc.org//sites/default/files/proceedings/Kerman.pdf

[7] "Gallipoli - A Tribute, by Various artists". Gallipoli tribute. Retrieved 2018-03-04.