Horsham’s Chamber Choir offers  Threshold – Spirituality in Choral Music to be performed at The Barn in Horsham’s Causeway at 4.30pm on November 11. - video Dailymotion

SussexWorld

Horsham’s Chamber Choir has been treating its audiences to a very different menu of musical experiences for the past year.

Transcript

00:00 Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor for Sussex Newspapers. Always

00:05 lovely to speak to Timothy Peters, the Musical Director of Horsham Chamber Choir. Now, Timothy,

00:10 since you started, you have pushed and challenged, haven't you? And it's a particularly exciting

00:16 programme that you have coming up on. It's November 11th, isn't it?

00:19 That's right, yeah.

00:20 Tell me the thinking behind this concert.

00:23 Well, you're right, I have pushed and challenged, but I'm excited with where the choir's at.

00:29 We've got some newer stuff in this concert. We've got a concert, two concert world premieres

00:37 in this programme. So there has been some stuff that the choir is familiar with already.

00:43 But as I say, there's brand new things for the choir. I've pushed them in a slightly

00:47 new direction, mostly to sort of challenge all of us, but also for the audience's sake.

00:55 I've come up with this concept to do with spirituality in music that I wanted to share

01:03 with people for a long time. I'm not much of like a scientist or an academic mind, so

01:10 I've been writing it up, but it's not been making too much sense, literarily. So I wanted

01:15 to share it in sort of a more experiential way. And so the idea is that we've programmed

01:20 this concert that's very meditative. But the idea is not to just say, look, you know why

01:28 this music is meditative, just listen to it. I want to explain exactly why it is sort of

01:34 spiritual. And so I've been looking at what makes music spiritual. And I've come up with

01:40 a few different theories. And based on these theories, I've programmed the music. So we've

01:44 got the more traditional stuff, but I've been applying this theory to sort of more modern

01:50 things, which includes electronic music. And so what I've done is in the second half of

01:56 our concert, I've commissioned a friend of mine, David Buckley, who writes lots of electronic

02:02 music. He's been featured on Radio 1 and things like that. And it's also the anniversary of

02:09 William Byrd's 400th, 400 years since he died. And what I've asked him to do is expand on

02:16 this 400 piece, 400 year old piece of music with electronic music responses.

02:21 So that's presumably it's not often that they're mentioned in the same sentence, Byrd and electronic.

02:27 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I've applied this theory that I will obviously sort of buffer

02:34 the audience and sort of give them, I'll explain exactly how this all works, because I think

02:40 to some more traditional minds, how dare you touch William Byrd's music and all this. But

02:45 I'm not going at it from a musical sort of musical rules perspective. It's more of an

02:51 experiential perspective. So that's the sort of take on this.

02:55 Yeah, it sounds very exciting. So how long have you been there now?

02:59 I've been there since January. So yeah, it's been...

03:02 And you are clearly, clearly, obviously enjoying your time with Horsham Chamber Choir.

03:07 Yeah, big time. I'm really, really enjoying it. But it's mostly just because they're letting

03:11 me do these things. I don't know, they're just letting me do it. I've not been met with

03:18 any resistance. I was expecting a lot more resistance with these sort of new left field

03:22 ideas. But yeah, they're just going with it. So I'm loving it. I'm having a great time.

03:27 Fantastic. We're wishing you a really happy, successful concert on November the 11th. Lovely

03:31 to speak to you.

03:32 Thank you. Thanks so much.

03:33 Thank you.

03:34 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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Horsham’s Chamber Choir offers Threshold – Spirituality in Choral Music to be performed at The Barn in Horsham’s Causeway at 4.30pm on November 11.

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