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