Gloria

The choir's seats were empty. The musicians' seats were empty. The audience was waiting. Suddenly from the gallery behind them, four trumpets started playing Purcell's Funeral March for Queen Mary. 

Led by the conductor, the choir, dressed in black, slowly processed from the back of the church up the aisle to their places and stood silently. The march ended on a C minor chord. On a C minor arpeggio the choir started to sing:

Man that is born of a woman
hath but a short time to live,
and is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow,
and ne'er continueth in one stay.

Sombre, serious, dramatic. None of us knew until this afternoon that we would be staging it like this.

We in the choir had felt ourselves to be badly under-prepared but somehow we produced an exhilarating concert. Every piece, from the Funeral Sentences, through Bruckner's Te Deum, through an unlikely combination of Liszt and plainchant versions of Vexilla Regis to John Rutter's Gloria, was accompanied by brass. In the rehearsal last night it sounded brash. In the rehearsal this afternoon it sounded under-rehearsed. In the concert this evening it was magnificent.

Our audience was small but it didn't matter. We made music for ourselves.