TERROR IN THE CHAPTER HOUSE 
A
modern horror story by Liz Berdinner
(in which she re-lives the nightmare of her re-audition for her
not-so-local Lark Choir – a choir most surely in the ascendant, when its
members resist the temptation to lark around in rehearsals, and a choir which
she loves so much that she would walk there in sackcloth and ashes. Well she
may have to, when this story is told.)
PROLOGUE
ALL I
DON’T WANT FOR CHRISTMAS…
So what is it that you don’t want for Christmas? A new Latin
dictionary, when your Latin has already improved so much with the help of St.
Benedict and Howard Blake? A new pair of crutches, even though they may
perfectly resemble two gleaming, tinsel-crowned organ pipes? Or, in my case, a
letter on the doormat, starting with the dreaded A-word, announcing another
round of AUDITIONS? (Bet that frightened you as it stared back at you in
stark capitals when you first glanced at this page!)
And just exactly how bad was it for you last time??
I confess I still suffer from horrendous flashbacks, discordant
nightmares and visions of angry batons flexing and flying around my head. As my
very dear, very beautiful and very insightful fairy goddaughter tells me, her
eyes filling with tears of sympathy and compassion, “Lizzie, you have ISSUES –
some very deep, very unresolved and very core (or is that choral?) ISSUES (to
rhyme with the tissues she holds out before me). You know, writing things down
can sometimes help.”
So, here I am in therapy, in the hope of silencing my endless
nightmares of being dragged from the stone floor of an ancient abbey (no, not
Northanger Abbey), screaming in arpeggios, up to the top of its Chapter House
and into a padded cell – pale, latticed, chill - (thank you, Keats, I was
beginning to run out of triple adjectives, not to mention triple choc-chips),
where a friendly grand piano mutates into a soulless electronic keyboard and
finally into a deadly electric chair and I am doomed to combustion ( for my not-so-golden
hair with the lunatic fringe will not grow long enough to let it down through
the O-so-high casement, for some handsome American dollar ( rhyming slang for
Floral Scholar) to climb up and save me! I plead you will be patient with my
insanity and prepare to read on.
Okay, hands up. Which of you, before the unforgettable re-auditions of
2004 had ever heard of J. Shirley? No, not John Shirley-Quirk of the beautiful
bass-baritone voice, just plain unhyphenated (and even unquirky) James Shirley.
The enlightened among you will know exactly where this is leading; the rest
must be kept a while in suspense.
CHAPTER ONE
A
SUMMER JOURNEY
As I poured anxiously over the entrails for my re-audition day, the
omens seemed good. The wind was sitting fair for St.Albans and the M25 was
suitably uncongested, enough for me to be swept into that most risky, but most
addictive, of dangerous sports: Letting one’s mind wander!
I thought of Percy, from my
Devonshire schooldays (at least I won’t lose marks for my Hertfordshire
vowels!) who had given me the golden key to sight-singing, the tonic sol-fa
(though it is, of course, only the key if you know which key you have wandered
into) and who knew exactly what to do if my mind wandered, pondering over some
literature essay due in the next day. Percy had worked hard on his lob, not of
a tennis ball but of the blackboard rubber, so that he could project it in a
perfect arc to land with a soft thud on the desk before me, and thus was I
brought gently back to my ground basses (how do you grind a bass?), my inverted
turns (though I was yet too young to take my driving test) and my false
relations (the ones you don’t want to invite for Christmas!).
It was Percy, who, in spite of
my penchant for wandering, first taught me to watch a conductor. He would wait
for as long as it took for all eyes to be upon him before he ran his hand
slowly backwards over his shiny balding pate, to make us smile and remember our
tuning, before raising his baton for the music to begin.
I thought, too, of Frank, from my student days in
As I entered the Abbey, my last thoughts were of those Legends of Good
Women: Joan, my English drama teacher, and Mama Breeze, my wonderful American
singing teacher, who had both given me a fresh start in life by teaching me the
art of breathing. O good St.Joan, O lovely Mama B, do not forsake me in my hour
of need!
CHAPTER TWO
THE
RE-AUDITION BEGINS
I sat in the Nave with the
sight-singing piece I had been given to prepare and I tried, I really did try,
to concentrate on the music, the rhythms, the odd intervals and the enharmonic
change, but I concentrated so hard that I made my first major error: I
succeeded in stopping my mind wandering into sight-reading, I forgot to
read all the words and I forgot to look at the small print where the poet and
his dates might just have been found! Then too soon, O much too soon, it was
time to ascend the winding stair to the soon-to-be nightmarish cell at the top
of the Chapter House, to the never-to-be-forgotten stage of my re-audition.
I think I managed the scales (or were they arpeggios?), I vaguely
remember the aural tests and then it was time for the Bach set piece. The four
words ‘Magnificat anima mea, Domine’ would not really tax my memory and,
presumably, were meant to lift my spirits and even lift mine eyes. But therein,
dear reader lies the beginning of my downfall. I looked at my copy, I counted
the beats and, with all the training of years, I looked up!
And there was no conductor!! (almost as devastating as a native of
Instead, there sat the Slim
Controller, staring fixedly down at his checklist, while the Floral Scholar, his
hands moving effortlessly (and, for me, hypnotically) over the keyboard was
seraphically absorbed in the music of the sublime Bach. And, before I knew it,
his hands had flown on without me, and, crime of all crimes (may the judgment
not be too heavy upon me), I had missed my entry! And since, as the gracious
All that was left was the dreaded moment of the sight-singing. The Slim
Controller, surely by now the Slim Executioner, was pointing to the lighted
fuse in front of me, where now I read so clearly those seven powerful (and
perhaps to be my last) words: ‘The Glories of our Blood and State’. The
fuse was sparking and hissing as I took it in my hand and I heard myself
quipping, ‘Is this in honour of Ronald Reagan?’ for the Americans among you
will remember that the late President was at that very hour lying in state
in the Capitol Rotunda.
How quickly one word could become my undoing! For my question had been
a desperate cry for help, a plea that I should be allowed to react solely to
the words, before I must absorb their musical setting at the blest pair of
hands, not to mention ears, of a highly talented Gloucestershire composer.
CHAPTER THREE
A
SIGHT-SINGING DISASTER
Either I had spoken so sotto voce that the words of my last
request had gone unheard, or the Slim Executioner was having none of it. There
was no letter of reprieve and no person from Porlock at the door. Let the
execution (or rather, in the case of my sight-singing, the lack of it!) begin.
You guessed it. I fell at the first hurdle, or, rather, at the first
interval (and missed the chocolate chip ice-cream, which I can only presume
they were saving for the second interval). Somewhere on the way down from the
tonic (O for a gin and tonic!) to the lower but yet super-tonic, I lost my
vocal nerve and landed awkwardly or did I even land? Perhaps it for ever
remains my Unfinished Interval. All I know is that the fuse had burnt out,
something had exploded in my head and the floodgates, presumably opening to
dampen the effects of the explosion, only released my pent-up questionings.
Who had penned these seven words and why and when? They weren’t the
familiar words of a church anthem and the content didn’t seem quite right for
that context either, unless they were set for a statesman’s (even a
Why did I feel that, although
perfectly set to music, these sonorous words (whose quality the composer so
instinctively must have responded to), might well have been the words of a
theatre actor? Why did they have strong echoes of Shakespeare?
Though I knew they were not
Shakespeare’s words, I could still hear Olivier beginning, ‘Now is the
winter of our discontent.’ The grammatical pattern, and the number of
syllables in those words were identical to this unknown poet’s ‘The glories
of our blood and state’ and the vowels of Shakespeare’s ‘made glorious
summer’ chimed with this poet’s ‘glories’ and ‘blood’.
Sonorous and powerful words indeed - powerful enough, if I am not more careful,
to banish me from the
Not ‘the bells, the bells’, Quasimodo, though they do have bell in this
Abbey, but ‘the questions, the questions’. Percy, thou should’st be living at
this hour - but there is no carefully lobbed blackboard rubber to end my
fruitless inner journey; only the Slim Controller, who is stopping the Floral
Scholar and myself (for, by some miracle, I think I have continued to sing) in
mid-flight, and is showing me the door, through which, dear reader, I most
desperately flee, leaving who knows what debris behind!
And why, you may ask, did I not straightway make a dash for the local
station and load the seven powerful words into a Search Engine, to find the
name of my mystery poet and put an end to my misery? For no other reason, dear
reader, than that (though my Cornish grandfather and his father before him had
worked on the Great Western Railway and though I had lived near enough to
behold many trains as they passed over Brunel’s fine railway bridge into
Cornwall) I had neither inherited nor so much as bought a ticket for a Search
Engine!
But fortune favours the curious,
and fortune was about to deal me a much kinder hand, which would lead me once
more into the company of my mystery poet but in much happier circumstances.
CHAPTER FOUR
OLD
FRIENDS AND NEW
That same summer, I was indeed fortunate in gaining a place at the
Prince of Wales Shakespeare Summer School, where I had the privilege of working
for a week with directors and actors of the RSC and even of treading the
hallowed boards of the RST and the Swan, though for workshops only!
It was during one of the
workshops on voice production that we were introduced to the classic handbook
‘Your Voice and How to Use it’ by Cicely (Cis)
So, at last, I had found my mystery poet and discovered, too, that some
of my intuitions had been right. This ode had its place in the context of a
drama, and its sonorous and solemn words would have echoed through a theatre.
James Shirley (1596-1666) was
writing at a time when our language, some would say, was close to its richest. Charles
Lamb observes that Shirley “claims a place among the worthies of this period,
not so much for any transcendent genius in himself, as that he was the last of
a great race, all of whom spoke nearly the same language and had a set of moral
feelings and notions in common.” Among other influences, he would have drawn on
the vocabulary, the rhythms, the patterns and the cadences of Shakespeare, all
of which had first prompted my comparison with the opening of ‘Richard 111’.
Shirley’s ode also has echoes of the ‘hollow crown’ theme of
Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’. In the
‘Contention of
When, later, in 1875, Palgrave came to
publish his Treasury of poems, Shirley’s ode must not have seemed golden enough
to be included, presumably overshadowed by the work of his greater
contemporary, Milton, and even (would you believe this?)being overshadowed by a
certain local abbey, for, while in the clutches of the Wicked Wikipedia of the
Web, what should I discover but that James Shirley was “a minister of God’s
word in or near St. Albans” and “was master of
Well, it’s amazing what a good school can do
for you! James Shirley was soon in London and his words ‘Death lays his icy
hand on kings/Sceptre and Crown must tumble down’ were heard at court “in that
fine song ‘The Glories of our Blood and State” sung by old Bowman (I didn’t
know James Bowman was that old!!) to King Charles and this same song was said
“to have terrified Cromwell”!
Sadly, poor James Shirley (a glance at his
dates will tell you why) was to be quite terrified himself, when he and his
second wife “died as a result of terror and exposure on the occasion of the
Great Fire of London”. God rest their souls and may they rise in ‘Glories’.
‘The Glories of our Blood and State’ was
itself destined to rise again, to come to the aid of Charles Hubert Hastings
Parry and to give him a leg up the Great Ladder (or as the dramatists will
always tell you, the Great Wheel) of Fortune. Just exactly where Parry when he
had the good fortune to stumble upon Shirley’s ode, we do not know. However,
biographers do tell us that, after his setting of Shelley’s ‘Prometheus
Unbound’ 1880 for the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral, Parry’s
next big choral composition,” a setting of Shirley’s Ode ‘The Glories of our
Blood and State’, was a work for which he himself always had a special liking
and one which brought a public conviction that a new composer had arisen,
destined to do great things.” So we do very well to pay tribute to James
Shirley!
CHAPTER FIVE
ROOM
FOR IMPROVEMENT
Speaking of Destiny, dear reader, you may be
wondering whether I was destined ever again to sing with my not-so-local Lark
Choir. I was not called into the courtroom to hear my sentence pronounced but
sent it was, by means of a noble postperson of the Royal Mail. I opened the
missive with trembling hands and, to my eternal relief, and in the words of a
far greater poet than James Shirley, ‘it was, you may say, satisfactory’.
SATISFACTORY! O sweet word, O frabjous day! Thank you, Frank and Percy. Thank
you, Joan and Mama B and thank you, O merciful Slim Executioner (or should I be
thanking that Great Judge, who alone has power to overrule you!)
I have learnt some hard lessons from my
re-audition and I know that, though these words did not appear in bold
highlights on that merciful missive, there is much ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT! And
so, dear reader, you must know my New Year’s resolution. I will be the first to
sign up for extra singing lessons and to make my way to Philip’s (or should
that be his wife’s) kitchen to see what’s cooking in the workshop. So long as
it’s before Lent, I’m hoping for some chocolate chips (for the Cockneys among
you, ’elpful tips). I’ll see you there!
“So, Lizzie, writing it all down wasn’t that
painful, was it?” My fairy goddaughter watches benignly as I slump over my
ivory keyboard – for, as you might guess, I am no more in possession of the
other kind of keyboard than I am in possession of a Search Engine. I’ll be
burning my Advent candle at a keyboard at my local IT centre, honing my skills
for my GCSE. So wish me luck!
And my wishes for you this Christmas, O most
patient of readers? I wish you the joy of the St Albans Bach Choir Carols, the peace
of the Christ Child and the blessing of not having to think about re-auditions.
For, in the great scheme of things, if logic serves me well, it surely cannot
be possible to have re-auditions without first having had ‘The Creation’!
My fairy goddaughter has disappeared again
(for, just like fairy godmothers, fairy goddaughters are prone to go wandering
off and popping up all over the place). But find her I surely will, among the
Christmas lights and the tinsel, and she will always have a special place, not
only in my wandering mind but also at the top of my tree.
POSTSCRIPT
If by any chance you have been amused or enlightened by reading this,
the writer does not request a contribution towards her Search Engine nor even a
year’s supply of chocolate chip cookies. All donations please to St.Albans Bach
Choir Carols Charities 2007.
The author wishes you to note:
· All resemblances
to any living person are purely ornamental (even appoggiatural)
· All offences are,
hopefully, pardonable
· All penances
should be received before the beginning of Lent.
This work is
dedicated to my two lovely goddaughters,
to all my friends
in the St.Albans Bach Choir,
to all who have
encouraged me on my musical journey
or who have
nurtured my love of language and literature
and, finally,
to all who have helped me, throughout my
various nightmares, to preserve my sense of humour!
AN IT NOW MARLOW PRODUCTION