Composition for the Cave

SingDownunder Downunder 2013

Compositions for the Cave

The SingDownunder Choral Festival and Tour is seeking new works by students of secondary school age suitable for singing in the resonant acoustic of Waitomo Caves. The intention is to encourage the composition of choral music, the performance of new choral works by young composers, and to feature works that can be performed in the acoustic of Waitomo Caves.

Works will be judged in the following categories:

Category 1. The best choral work submitted.

Category 2. The best choral work submitted suitable for singing in the Waitomo Caves acoustic, which is also performed at the SingDownunder Adjudication Day at Holy Trinity Cathedral.

Category 3: A special award for the best choral work to any composer whose choir (they must sing in it) performs his or her work in Waitomo Caves, as part of the Sing Down under Festival Tour 2013.

The awards will consist of:

Category 1: $250

Category 2: $250

Category 3: $1000

Competition regulations

1. The work submitted will be by a student attending secondary school in the year of the competition entry. Works should be by individual students.  School details should be provided as well as contact details for the Head of the Music Department at their school.
2. The work will be for choir, either accompanied or unaccompanied (Note: pianos are not possible within the cave.  Electricity is not available for instruments). It should be a work performable by a competent secondary school choir.
3. Duration should be no more than 4 minutes.
4. Choice of text is open, although works on the following themes are encouraged:
   - unity, harmony
   - singing or music
   - bringing people together
5. Composers are responsible for clearing any copyright on their selected text they wish to use which is not their own.
6. Scores should be submitted as a printed score, and where possible accompanied by either a sound file (MIDI or otherwise computer generated), or live performance recording, or as Sibelius music notation file. Recordings and/or computer files should be submitted on a CD.
7. A brief note about the work, along with the composer’s contact details should accompany the score separately from the composition. The composer’s name, and the name of the text writer, should be included on the score.
8. The deadline for the submission of scores will be 31 May 2013. Entries should be posted to:
   Owen Sharpe, SingDownunder Festival and Tour, 11a Kipling Ave, Epsom, Auckland.
9. Awards will be announced as follows:
   Category 1: as soon as possible after entries close
   Category 2: on the day of the SingDownunder Festival Adjudication Day (Wednesday June 26^th, 2013)
   Category 3: as soon as possible after the performance recordings have been completed

10.  Category 1 scores will be judged by festival music director David Hamilton and announced at the Adjudication Day. Category 2 works will be judged by the adjudicators at the Festival Adjudication Day and announced immediately.   Category 3 winners will be judged by the Festival Director and Music Director after the recording is released.

11.  SingDownunder Festival will be solely responsible for recording of all choirs in the cave.  All participating choirs will receive a copy of the recording to which the SingDownunder Festival will retain all rights.  It is the intention to make recordings of the work available online and to sell a CD which will be produced.  Apart from this recording copyright for the composition will remain the property of the composer.

Notes on the Waitomo Sound

There are few places in the world with such suitable acoustics for a choir to sing and record as the Cathedral Cave at Waitomo.  It is a beautiful experience.  Both the silence and the sounds seem so wonderful.  A side benefit is that it is attached to the world famous glow-worm grotto.

It is deep underground.  No windows, doors or roof admit any sound at all.  The hard white limestone rock reflects almost all sounds, but the complex shape of the surfaces mean that no nodes of distortion form as they might in a space with some plane walls.  The resonant acoustics add a “bloom” to the sound allowing the choral chords to linger in the air and disappear into the ethereal quiet.

The sound is louder; the reflections mean the sound stays longer in the air and volume accumulates.  This volume allows the choir members to hear each other.

The sound is longer; the reflections take time to dissipate so each note is given a longer life and dies more gradually.

The sound is deeper; the low notes have longer wavelengths and this means they reverberate for longer than the high notes.

Effort spent disciplining faster works, especially those with fricative sounds, and blended consonants “texted clipped diction” might be entirely lost in the cave.

On the other hand works sung at a slower tempo and made of more round vowel sounds are fabulous, absolutely gorgeous.

10 day Itinerary for 2012 Singdownunder Festival Visit

Day 1 Monday June 25th Afternoon arrival from South Australia

Day 2 Tuesday Touring “volcanic’ Auckland Singing with Auckland girls school Visit Auckland’s Skytower

Day 3 Wednesday After a breakfast in the hotel transfer to Aorere College for Maori Choral Workshop.   Program includes

• Maori welcome, Powhiri with speech and song from hosts and guests
• learning a Maori choreographed action song taught in sections by sections of the host choir, Sweet Sixteen
• welcome to the Maori Department of the school
• sharing a Maori “Hangi” lunch with the school’s Kapa Haka (Maori Cultural) group in the Maori dapartment.
• participation in the Aorere College unique “singing assembly” under choral director Douglas Nyce including coperformance of Maori song with host choir
• learning the long and/or short poi under instruction.  (See the ladies of the Patea Maori Club)

Read more

“In the Jungle”, “Shosholoza”, from the Front Row Choir

The Front Row Choir (TTBB) seemed to have developed this track by putting together two songs of South African origin. “In the Jungle” started its life as “Mbube” first recorded in 1939 by Solomon Linda and his group the Evening Birds.

Read more

Christchurch Earthquake commemorative ceremony

New Zealand went silent for two minutes at 12.51pm local time,  a week since the devastating earthquake.  People gathered in solemn ceremony to mourn the tragedy.

In central Christchurch, now our “ground zero”, Maori mourners sang “Whakaaria Mai”, our English and Maori version of the Christian hymn “How Great Thou Art” .

Read more

SingDownunder and the Christchurch Earthquake

At 1pm (NZT) on Tuesday February 22nd Christchurch city centre was partially destroyed by a shallow earthquake almost directly underneath it.  There is substantial loss of life and many major and historic buildings in the centre of town are partly or wholly destroyed.  The destruction includes two of the beautiful choral venues, the Anglican Cathedral in Cathedral Square  and the Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament that we sang in last year.

Read more

Pokarekareana, from “The Front Row Choir”

Pokarekareana is a Maori love song.  It is anthemic in New Zealand and widely know internationally thanks to Dame Kiri te Kanawa, and Hayley Westenra.  It is claimed by different regional Maori groups by inclusion of their local placenames.  In this unusual presentation the Front Row Choir sings both in Maori and in English.

The Front Row Choir is a boys choir, from prominent choral school Aorere College.  The “Front Row” of their name is a set of positions in a rugby team.  The boys wear their rugby uniform when performing on stage.   They are ably directed by student William Pati.

The Front Row choir was clearly the crowd favourite at the festival and awarded as such.  They moved beautifully with their songs,  they sang with obvious power, and they were boys.

Lessons from the Inaugural SingDownunder Festival, 2010.

SingDownunder gives opportunities for international choirs to tour New Zealand. It particularly gives them four opportunities in New Zealand, none of which might be available otherwise.

1. It negotiates for visiting choirs to outreach with Maori and Polynesian choirs which are uniquely available in New Zealand, particularly Auckland.

2. It provides a competition/workshops/massed choirs/concert opportunity in Auckland’s best venue and with best resources (eg sound engineer, adjudicators).

3. It draws the choirs of metropolitan Auckland together at the competition and gives the visiting choirs the chance to see some of New Zealand’s best young choirs.

4. It creates a shared and partly shared touring itinerary in which international choirs visit New Zealand’s most famous scenic areas and sing with choirs and music groups in often beautiful small venues.

SingDownunder is also a means of achieving more international exposure for New Zealand choirs, particularly those not likely to be able to tour internationally and some who might not even get to sing in New Zealand’s main centres.

These ideas were supported by the inaugural event. All of the elements of the festival seemed to make up a diverse interesting appropriate experience for the Australian group. The NZ Choirs that participated, either in Auckland or in the hinterland, seemed to love the chance that the visitors brought.

The Australians included 10 choristers who were 19-21, ie older than any NZ school chorister, but there was no problem with this. The experience suggested that American junior college choirs can participate appropriately, for instance.

The feedback from the New Zealand choirs and correspondence from overseas suggests SingDownunder will have more choirs next year.

Feedback from our Musical Director, David Hamilton

David Hamilton

SingDownunder Festival

The words of one of my own students said it all: “Yesterday was awesome and fun and I can’t wait until next year for it again.” SingDownunder launched successfully at the end of July with 11 Auckland choirs performing and competing alongside the Youth Chorale of the National Children’s Choir and Youth Chorale of Australia. Covering a wide range of music, the competitive aspect of the event allowed choirs to show off their best singing. Choirs from south Auckland such as Multichoral (Mangere College) and Front Row Choir (Aorere College) brought with them pieces from the Maori and Polynesian tradition which were received enthusiastically by the assembled audience. Other choirs stuck more closely to traditional choral repertoire, with many including pieces by New Zealand composers. Read more

National Children’s Choir of Australia 2010 itinerary

The NCCA came to New Zealand late on July 28th and was hosted in Auckland by the Choralation choir of Westlake Boys and Girls High Schools led by Rowan Johnstone.  Their busy schedule was as follows:

July 29th Full day Maori Choral Workshop with Hangi meal hosted by Aorere College’s “Sweet Sixteen” Choir led by Douglas Nyce.

July 30th and 31st Two day choral competition, workshops, massed choir rehearsals and recordings.

August 1 Flew to Queenstown

6pm Recital in St Peters Church, Queenstown with the Central Otago Regional Choir directed by John Buchanan

August 2nd Recital in the Mercure Hotel.

August 3rd Daytime skiing in the Cadrona Valley

August 4th lunchtime Concert at Geraldine Primary School with the Colla Voce Choir conducted by Shirley Lindroos from Geraldine High School

7pm concert in St John’s Church with the Mt Hutt College Choir directed by Thirza Currie and the Crescendo Light Orchestra conducted by Lyn Blackwell at St Johns Church Methven.

August 5th 7pm concert in the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament in Barbadoes St, Christchurch with the choir and orchestra of Christchurch Boys High School and the Cathedral Choir all led by Don Whelan.  This cathedral, a wonderful place for a choir to sing, was not broken in the subsequent earthquake but was cracked badly enough to be out of commission in the interim.

August 6th On the plane back to Melbourne

New Zealand Summer Holiday Time

Dear Singers,

The World Choral Tour is over and we’ve returned to settle in New Zealand. Christmas and New Year celebrations are added to summer holiday activities here so it has been a rather busy time re-establishing ourselves and beginning to play our part again in the New Zealand scene. Just at the moment schools are closed and people are away on holiday. I’ve been swimming in the surf again and it is lovely.

We saw about twenty choirs on the tour, in Australia, Europe and the US. Almost all responded very positively and many of them expressed an intention to come to our festival sooner or, probably, later. It takes a long while considering such a big venture, and longer again to organise a group of 30-40 singers to travel to New Zealand. So we don’t expect the earth to move overnight.

But it was very gratifying that people were so positive. And you can be sure that others around the world are beginning to make closer or further plans to come to New Zealand. We are planning to make it a wonderful time for you when you come.

Owen