University College Oxford Record 2020

FROM
THE
The academic year at Univ
ended in a rather different way
than anyone could have guessed.
Instead of writing to you about our
achievements and successes over a
three-term period, the year had two
conventional terms, and Trinity Term saw no
students in residence at all.
That shaped the College’s musical offerings
beyond all recognition, but more about that later.
The year began with the usual scramble in
Welcome Week; auditions for the Chapel Choir,
UCMS trying to discover which incoming firstyears
had musical talents, overt or otherwise,
Freshers’ Fair and Freshers’ Flu. The Chapel Choir
lost many strong singers at the end of Trinity 2019,
and the new-look choir was put through its paces
due to the Director of Music’s pledge to schedule
music by women composers at each service, both
in an ongoing bid to redress the heavily malebiased
imbalance in choral music, and to coincide
with the College-wide celebrations of the 40th
anniversary of the acceptance of women to the
undergraduate body.
Over the year, until March 2020, there was
music by a woman in every service, and almost
every concert. The Choir performed pieces
by Amy Beach, Kerensa Briggs, Diana Burrell,
Sarah Cattley, Janette Fishell, Imogen Holst,
Sasha Johnson Manning, Sarah Macdonald,
Cecilia McDowall, Roxanna Panufnik, Anna
Thorvaldsdottir, Judith Weir and Janet Wheeler,
with some of these composers being represented
more than once. This commitment means that
the music collection owned by the College is
slightly more balanced, and these pieces will
become core repertoire for the generations of
singers to come. The challenges of rehearsing
and performing this music though, are many.
DIRECTOR
OF MUSIC
Much of these pieces have been
written in the last 40 years and
some of it is of a difficulty level
sometimes beyond what is the
norm for a choir such as Univ. Judith
Weir’s Illuminare, for example, had many
of the choir scratching their heads, but they
came to love it once they were able to sing it!
Corporate memory is a factor never to be
forgotten with choirs. The fact that two thirds of
a group may know a piece makes it easier for the
others to learn it. And the cycle continues from
term to term, year to year. This will be one of
the fundamental challenges presented to choirs
when they come out of lockdown in the coming
months; collective knowledge will have been lost
between March and October.
The first concert of the year was given by
current Univ graduate student Sofia Vaz Pinto
(piano) who was joined by Sofia Sousa (viola) in a
recital of music by Rebecca Clarke, Schubert and
Brahms. It was an intimate affair in the Master’s
Lodgings, but started the year off wonderfully,
with the Clarke a particular highlight.
The Chapel Choir and The Martlet
Ensemble joined forces, along with the choir of
St Edmund Hall, to present a concert of music
for Remembrance Day. Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem
is one of the most-loved works in the choral
repertoire, and it has long been on the agenda to
stage it at Univ. It was performed in the original,
harp, low strings and organ version, with soloists
Maryam Wocial (Lincoln) and Giles Underwood,
conducted by Christopher Bucknall, Director of
Music of St Edmund Hall. The first part of the
concert consisted of unaccompanied choral
music by Briggs, Douglas Guest, Edward Elgar,
Johnson Manning and Charles Villiers Stanford,
conducted by Giles Underwood.
University College Record | October 2020 47