I may have gone to University to study music, but in so many more ways the Vancouver Peace Choir is my true alma mater. And it’s for this reason that I’m extremely sad to hear that it’s disbanding.
It was while attending University that I was bitten by the choral bug. I became extremely excited about writing for massed voices. But there wasn’t a good cooperative established between the composition department and the choral department. I tried, in vain, to get the choirs to look at my music but they were always to busy with their current performance schedule. Most of what I wrote ended up languishing in a desk drawer.
It wasn’t until after I graduated, and I began singing with The Vancouver Peace Choir, that I was FINALLY given the opportunity to write for massed human voices. Our director at the time, Tim Corlis, knew I was a composer and asked me to write for them.
The first piece was, bye bye blackbird
This opportunity was exactly what I craved! For a composer, nothing compares to being around for the first rehearsals. You get to see what comes easily to the performers and what they struggle with. This is a powerful learning experience for a composer. It’s okay to ask a performer to do something that pushes what they’re capable of but you have to know when you’re doing it and by how much.
I have so many other wonderful memories of the group…
I remember rehearsing Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei – a choral setting of the second movement of his string quartet. It was an ambitious piece for us to sing for where we were at and the choir was likely relying heavily on some of the stronger singers to keep the tuning up and find the more problematic pitches.
On this particular rehearsal, many of these stronger singers were absent and our director was being gentle with us. When it came time to rehearse the Barber, he made a noise like a a tuba swallowing a used car salesman and suggested we skip ahead to different repertoire. Likely, he was trying to spare us the disappointment of failure.
The choir hummed a delicate revolt the way that choir’s often do and we sung the piece all the way through. We sung it very well. In fact, we never sang it better.
I remember performing Tim Corlis’s Missa Pax at a church in Richmond, BC and almost nobody showed up. The audience may have numbered approximately half of the choir membership. But I remember the intensity Tim brought out of us at the end of the Gloria. It was chilling – and you could see it in his face.
Speaking of Tim, I remember that he would show up to a performance in whatever shoes he was wearing, sometimes knee-high rubber boots and change out of them into Birkenstocks for the performance. The reason for this will forever remain a mystery.
I remember Alec asking what kind of Latin we were singing in and having no idea what he was talking about.
I remember a particular figure I had written in one of my pieces that didn’t follow the pattern established in the rest of the work and the director yelling, “That should be illegal!”
I remember having the opportunity to conduct one of my own works in rehearsal and realizing in that moment that I did not want to be a conductor.
I remember performing a piece by Eric North that opens with a guttural yell (unpitched) from the tenors and basses. Once, during a dress rehearsal I misread a cue and the whole choir to hear me perform it all by myself. Stephen Belanger said to me, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong as loud as possible!”
I’ll miss you, Vancouver Peace Choir.
Chris Sivak | Composer 