Some historic recordings of choirs from Northern Ireland
A Perfect Day – Carrie Jacobs-Bond
Carrie Jacobs-Bond wrote A Perfect Day in 1909, when the drawing-room ballad was still an important part of domestic music-making. It became one of the best-known songs of its day. The words look back over a happy day and ask what remains when friends must part.
I first knew the piece through Ballyclare Male Voice Choir. Under William “Billy” Thompson MBE, it was often an encore. The choir sang both verses, then hummed the harmony while Billy sang the melody as a tenor solo. He began in his usual place, facing the choir. As he sang, he slowly turned towards the audience.Audiences were always deeply moved. Billy’s was a natural tenor voice, not a carefully mannered one in the English style. It had more colour, but nothing coarse or vulgar.
He knew how to make the text tell and never needed to overwork it. Billy had been a member of Harlandic. He was also a quartet singer and soloist. Adam Donaghy had done much to form him as a musician, and in 1965 Billy became conductor of Ballyclare. By the 1990s we were fellow conductors. I visited him at home not long before he died on 8 February 1998. He had received his cancer diagnosis and knew the end was near. I was twenty-five and not at all sure what to say to him. In the end, I asked how he was getting on. “Prayerfully,” he said. I have never forgotten the answer. Nor have I forgotten Billy singing A Perfect Day. In his voice, the old ballad’s thoughts of friendship and parting ceased to sound conventional. They became true.
In the Gloaming – arranged by Doris Arnold
Recorded about a million years ago in the now closed St Martin Church on the Newtownards Road in Belfast. I was lucky (again) to have one of the most gifted accompanists and he is heard on this track. David Drinkell was Organist and Master of the Choristers at Belfast Cathedral and I had the pleasure of working with him for many years.
In the Gloaming was written in 1877, with music by Annie Fortescue Harrison and words by Meta Orred. It became enormously popular and remained in the repertoire long after most Victorian drawing-room songs had disappeared. The reason is not difficult to understand. It has a fine tune and a very simple idea: two people looking back on a love which has gone, each wondering what the other now remembers.
Doris Arnold’s arrangement belongs to the great British male-voice tradition in which songs of this kind sat quite naturally beside glees, folk-song arrangements, part-songs and more substantial concert works. Arnold knew that world well. A pianist, broadcaster and BBC producer,
There is a particular challenge in singing music like this now. Sentiment needs to be taken seriously, but not exaggerated. Slow it down too much, lean on every expressive word or indulge the harmony and the whole thing can become cloying. Sing it simply, with a good line and properly tuned chords, and it works.
That is one reason I wanted to share it. In the Gloaming represents a strand of male-voice singing which has almost disappeared from modern programmes. At its best, this repertoire asks for good singing, musical judgement and restraint. Doris Arnold’s arrangement has all three written into it.
