I’d been dreading the moment we were presented with this term’s new score. The Hong Kong Bach Choir has to perform a commission of a piece, usually a premiere every year (I think) and we have just been presented with James Boznos’s cantata, Gabriel, for our Christmas concert.

My sightsinging is not good, and we’d only been emailed a soft copy of the score quite late on Wednesday night, so I’d spent yesterday frantically trying to learn the thing. Not much was going in.

With a new piece there’s no recording to fall back on, and contemporary music like this often has no hummable tune. If you can’t read music you’re a bit stuffed, and I suppose this is why the sightsinging part of the HKBC audition is so frightening and, for me, horrendous.

In our first taste of this last night, Jerry our Director was encouraging us note by note, using musical intervals. Now, over the years I’ve learned a few reference points: a Major 6th is My Bonny Lies over the Ocean and I know a Perfect 4th as the opening notes of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto. The Augmented 4th, the Tritone or “Devil’s interval” is Maria from West Side Story. It takes me a while to process this information and convert it into sounds however, but all I can do is practise. Somehow I have to learn the thing in the next six weeks.

I made a voice memo recording of us learning one of the movements, which is only a few bars long. Posterity or something