Weekly choir rehearsal wan’t very well attended last night after the Easter break, which was a pity because it took a novel turn. We filed in to in to sit in our normal places in rows some way away from the Choir Director, me in my normal outsider’s place at the end of the second row, but he breezed in and announced that we’d be rehearsing in a circle.

Initially I was a little spooked by the suggestion: there’s nowhere to hide. Everyone can see what you’re doing and I had to sit with different people from normal but I decided I’d tough it out with a smile rather than betraying my rising panic. Face is everything in China.

Adapting himself to the novel arranagement on the spot, without any notice, our Choirmaster decided to try something different for our warm-ups. He gave the person next to him a note, which we all passed around the circle. The idea was that we listened and worked together. Several of these notes went around the circle to follow the first and we ended up with a pentatonic chord. I suspect that many of us did not know at the time that that was the case but we do now. Then we were told to choose individual notes from that pentatonic scale, without hearing them again on the piano, and sing them to form a chord, which we changed every twenty seconds or so. The whole exercise encouraged us all to focus and listen to each other as well as ourselves and was a brilliant discipline,.

When it came to the main body of the rehearsal it was easier to hear each other, even though we were singing over a far greater distance than normal and we had someone to sing to over the other side of the room. It brought our sound in the turba choruses, the crowd scenes at Jesus’s crucifixion, completely to life. Luckily my different companions from normal were lovely.

But there was something more curious about this rehearsal. In the break, our choir of normally quite reticent and task-focused individuals actually talked to each other! One of the basses had brought along some open bottles of – rustic – Bulgarian wine that he’d had for a tasting the previous day and we bonded over that in a way I’d not seen at all in this session. This to me is the main difference between my choir in the UK and the choir here: in the UK we are there to sing the music, obviously, but it’s a social occasion and we make friends and chat and generally have a laugh. The Hong Kong choir is entirely music-focused, which is not in itself a bad thing, but shall we say it makes it more task-oriented than people-oriented. OK, I’ll say it. It can be quite a lonely experience.

On the 22.10 Star Ferry on the way back to Hong Kong Island we all sat together and chatted, and people who had not previously been aware of my existence introduced themselves. And the very woman who had until last night returned my friendly smiles with a blank face, preferring her own company to mine on the journey over to Kowloon, sat and chatted with me the whole way back. And all because of our circle rehearsal.

It’s just so different from my usual experience of life here that I felt I had to share this little vignette with you.