ELORA – On an otherwise cold and quiet night in Elora last week, St. John’s Anglican Church was filled with warm, layered voices singing sacred choral music that echoed off the building’s 150-year-old walls.
Choir director Patrick Murray, pencil in hand, punctuated the air in swooping motions, seemingly drawing the notes as he led the church’s parish choir in a Dec. 11 rehearsal ahead of annual Lessons and Carols services on Dec. 21 and Christmas Eve.
Traditionally known as the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, the services are a popular Anglican practice this time of year, telling the story of humanity’s fall and redemption through Christian readings and Christmas carols.
“It’s a very British tradition,” Murray said. About half of the Dec. 21 service will be taken up by music; five pieces will be sing-along carols, with eight sung exclusively by the choir.
“They’ll get something familiar and something they’ve never heard before,” Murray said.
St. John’s Anglican Church parish choir director Patrick Murray.
Along with traditional compositions, the choir will sing Canadian composer Kathleen Allan’s rendition of I Syng of a Mayden, a Medieval carol about the virgin birth of Christ, and British composer Becky McGlade’s fresh melodic arrangement of What Child Is This?
It’s Murray’s fifth year directing one of the longest enduring professional church choirs in Canada, having taken over from former director John Wiens. Murray also directs London’s Chor Amica, and the University of Toronto Scarborough Concert Choir.
Professionalized in the ’80s, the group gained international renown under the direction of former director Noel Edison, following the releases of Psalms for the Soul and Psalms for the Spirit on the Naxos label in the early 2000s.
Although some faces have changed, the choir remains a draw not only for the church’s congregation but for musicians from Wellington County and beyond.
Some of the choir’s 18 members earn a living from singing professionally, and others work day jobs and sing in the evenings.
The parish choir is one of four at the church, including a volunteer ensemble directed by longtime organist Jurgen Petrenko; a compline (night prayer) choir, directed by Murray; and a children’s choir directed by parish choir member Kate Wright.
Members of St. John’s Anglican Church parish choir in Elora practice “Mass for Midnight on Christmas.”
“Have a little lightness and bounce to it,” Murray told the group last week, the second of at least three rehearsals.
The choir was working on Mass for Midnight on Christmas, to be sung Christmas Eve. It last made an appearance in the seasonal repertoire in 2018. Based on traditional French carol tunes, popular in the late 17th century, it has an almost sprightly, rhythmic melody in the composition’s texture.
Murray, a Yale-educated choral conductor and composer, effortlessly describes music in such a way.
His biggest asset, as with any conductor, is an uncanny ability to detect seemingly undetectable nuances in what sounds good to the ear.
He’s constantly listening for intonation, that is how different voices tune together, and making tweaks — volume, tone, notes, enunciation, breathing, crescendos, decrescendos — scribbled down by choir members in the margins of sheet music.
Four vocal ranges comprise the choir: sopranos at the high end carrying melody, altos and tenors in the middle bringing harmony, and bases and baritones at the low end forming the foundation.
Members of the St. John’s Anglican Church parish choir turn the pages of sheet music during a rehearsal.
Singing creates oscillating or fluctuating sound waves, which Murray stacks like layers.
“There’s a relationship between the rate at which different notes oscillate that sound pleasing to the human ear,” Murray said.
We tend to interpret simple mathematical ratios as sounding good.
“It’s about how we hear harmonies,” Murray said, adding, “it’s math.”
But of course choral music isn’t experienced as a mathmatical relationship — it’s felt.
“It’s not just a matter of singing one melody, but it’s four parts all singing simultaneously together and there’s just something pretty spectacular about that,” said baritone Michael Cressman.
Baritone Michael Cressman, far right, first joined the St. John’s Elora parish choir in the ’90s. He has sang in the choir steadily since 2006.
Cressman, an Elora-based hairstylist, has sang in the choir for more than 20 years; he originally joined in the ’90s, singing for a couple years, before a hiatus and eventual return in 2006.
Cressman has a degree in vocal performance, performs with the Elora Singers, and was brought up in the Mennonite church where he was first exposed to four-part harmony singing.
“I feel a definite connection with sacred choral music,” Cressman said.
He gravitates toward the “old chestnuts” — O Come, All Ye Faithful, Hark the Herald Angel Sing, The First Noel — that he said connect the audience with seasonal traditions and memories.
Tenor Lanny Flemming has sang with the choir at almost every Lessons and Carols service in the past three decades.
Like Cressman, Flemming has a vocal degree, and joined the choir in the ’90s.
He now teaches French at Elora Public School and calls St. John’s his home church.
St. John’s Anglican Church parish choir director Patrick Murray instructs parish choir members Marcel van Helden, Emily Burnett, and Jennifer Krabbe during a rehearsal.
The church itself, a Gothic Revival design constructed on Henderson Street in 1987, becomes a sort of instrument. The choir’s voices build in the chancel and soar into the large, open area of the nave where the sound amplifies among the congregation, resonating in the steep pitch of the church’s gable roof.
The congregation, singing with the choir, and backed by the organ, Flemming said, “really does make it feel like Christmas.”
Murray said it’s a transcendent experience that can be felt.
“Choir is about us, all of us, and brings us together in something that activates the human spirit,” he said.
“It’s uplifting, it’s transcendent, it’s out-of-the-ordinary.”
Lessons and Carols services are set to take place Dec. 21 at 4pm, and Christmas Eve at 7 and 9pm.
