When I attended my first NYCGB course at Harrogate in 2000, the idea that I might eventually become a professional musician was an implausible one. I was a chorister at my parish church and a member of my school choir, though since my voice didn’t so much break as go through an extremely protracted and messy divorce, my usefulness was circumscribed. Fortunately, the NYCGB Tenor 2 section is a bespoke borstal for anyone in my position and I was well cared for. I fell in love with the choir, the courses, and, generously, every single member of the Soprano 2 section.
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| Singing with NYCGB in Shothole Canyon 2003 |
11 years later, with a university degree and a music college postgraduate qualification under my belt, and having rejoined the NYCGB as a staff member, I found myself in Tudor Hall School gymnasium. Mike Brewer, the man who’d auditioned me at Chetham’s School of Music back in the last millennium, was introducing me to the choir as a rehearsal conductor for the forthcoming session. I was brushed by one of those sensations of time lost. It hit me that the NYCGB had been my companion throughout my mature vocal development – and my eye sought out the youngest Tenor 2 in the ranks in front of me. An unlikely-looking chap, I thought. Raw stuff. A two-handed nose-picker. But, given the alchemical powers of this organisation, one to keep an eye on.
I won’t pretend that my pre-NYCGB existence was a sob-story. But there’s no doubt that the NYCGB brought something new and colourful into my life that wasn’t conspicuous before. The open, enthusiastic, uninhibited – and thoroughly un-cliquey – culture prised me out of my teenage bark, and gradually turned me into a confident singer, speaker and omniprat. Never mind being a professional musician, there’s no chance that I’d have made president of my university comic debating society or wound up running stand-up shows with random Australians in London if it hadn’t been for the NYCGB.
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| Jules in performance with Lisa Swayne at Opera South 2011 |
And, in time-honoured last place on the list, beneath cabaret and the Soprano 1s, the music. I will never forget the realisation in the Royal Albert Hall at the Youth Prom in 2000, half-way through our epic performance of William Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, that the backs of my hands were sweating. Nor will I forget the microsecond of time and space, huge with potential energy, between the final chord of that same piece and the explosive roar that burst from the audience. I won’t forget recording the Benedictus from Giles Swayne’s Missa Tiburtina at around 2 in the morning; won’t forget singing a solo in approximated Mongol to a bemused crowd of sun-seekers on Broome Beach; won’t forget treating Shothole Canyon in Western Australia to its first and possibly last rendition of Scandalise My Name. Through Mike’s evangelism, I’ve also discovered a lifelong source of musical inspiration in the works of the German composer Heinrich Schütz, whose music I’m programming in a concert this year (August 2011) with a group of my own.
That’s possibly the best thing of all. My NYCGB experiences aren’t confined to the past. They continue to enrich my present and will be part of what sustains my future.
