Mark thought that he was going to be able to have a quiet coffee in the student cafeteria, but this ambition was not going to be fulfilled today. The coffee was managed perfectly adequately, but his peaceful solitude disappeared when three other students slipped into the other spaces at his table.
“Hello” said the student sitting opposite him. “You’re just the guy we need to talk to”.
“I am?” asked a somewhat surprised Mark.
“Let me introduce myself”, said the student. “My name’s Luke, and I’m a second-year Music student. This here is my friend and fellow Music student John, and sitting next to you is Matthew, who is a post-grad in the Music Department.
“Nice to meet you,”, said Mark. “But why do you need to talk to me? I’m a final-year student in the Philosophy Department – I know precious little about Music.”
“We saw you last night in the student bar”, said John. “You must have had a few before we arrived, because otherwise you would never have attempted that karaoke number you did. You remember, surely?”
Mark felt himself going red with embarrassment. How could he have forgotten? Nobody expects much quality from a pub karaoke session, but his effort had been what the word dire was invented for.
“Your problem”, said Luke, “was that you started in the wrong key, and an octave too high, and found yourself in the stratosphere when you reached the point of no return.”
“So you’ve come here today to rub my nose in it, have you?” said Mark, who was getting annoyed and starting to stand up.
“No, no – far from it”, said Luke, waving him back down again. “We liked what we heard – in a strange kind of way – and that’s why we want to talk to you.”
“The first thing we did after we heard your performance was find out who you were”, said John. “And we couldn’t believe our luck when someone told us that your name was Mark.”
“You see,” said Luke, “the three of us have wanted for some time to form a singing quartet that we could call The Gospellers. We had Matthew, Luke and John – but were only lacking a Mark. And now we’ve found you – if you’ll join us, that is.”
“But I’m a lousy singer – as you’ve just reminded me”, said Mark.
“But your falsetto range has definite promise,” said John. “And that’s what we’re missing.”
“Let me explain,” said Luke. “Apart from the appropriate names, the three of us all have different singing voices. I’m a bass, John is a baritone and Matthew is a tenor. We only need one more male voice to complete the set”.
“Which is?”
“Countertenor, otherwise known as the male alto, singing an octave higher that the normal tenor range. Back in the day they used to castrate boys so that their voices wouldn’t break, but that custom is no longer practiced.
“I’m glad to hear it”, said Mark.
“However,” Luke continued, “Some men have a natural countertenor voice, and others can be trained in the falsetto range to produce something that it is nearly as good.”
“And we reckon that you could be just such a person”, said John. “With the proper training, you could be the fourth Gospeller and we could give concerts round the University and anywhere else if we wanted to.”
“Singing what?” Mark asked.
“Our own arrangements”, said Luke. “Madrigals, folk songs, religious stuff, that kind of thing.”
“But what about the training?”
“That’s where Matthew comes in”, said Luke. “He’s a
professional voice trainer who worked with dozens of singers before joining the
University and now he does the same here. What do you reckon, Matthew?”
"It’ll be a challenge”, said Matthew, “But I reckon it might work.”
So that is precisely what happened. Mark had twice-weekly sessions with Matthew for the next six weeks, after which the new Gospeller – thought not quite the finished article - was reckoned to be good enough to be let loose on an audience
When the four of them next got together, Matthew had news for them.
“We’re going to give an end-of-term concert”, he said. “Just to the Music Department. We’ll do a set of madrigals for the main part, but the conclusion is all yours, Mark.”
“What do you mean”?” Mark asked.
“I want to perform the Professor’s own arrangement of The Lark Ascending, by Vaughan Williams. He’s set it for countertenor voice and small orchestra, and it’ll be a real showstopper if you get it right. Are you up for it?”
Given that Mark had no real idea of what was involved, he agreed on the spot.
Rehearsals for the concert went really well, although as the concert date approached, Mark became increasingly worried that he wouldn’t be up to the job. For one thing, he had no real musical knowledge and he would be performing in front of an audience of musical experts.
And then there was the little problem of being able to conclude the concert by singing a piece arranged by the Head of the Department, in his presence, and producing a final sustained top note that was as high as any male singer – trained or not – could be expected to reach. During rehearsals he was sometimes able to get it right, but by no means always.
On the night of the concert, Matthew took Mark to one side
to give him some final advice.
"I’ll be conducting this piece”, be said, “So you’ll need to keep the final note going for as long as my baton stays raised. Take a good deep breath before the final rising sequence and then keep the last note as steady as you possibly can. The volume is not so important, but the purity of the note most certainly is.”
Mark had this in mind all through the concert, which went very well with the audience clearly enjoying what they heard. The final piece was then announced. Matthew took to the podium and the other Gospellers, whose work was now done, sat in seats in the front row of the audience.
Fortunately, the Music Professor’s vocal arrangement of The Lark Ascending was not quite as intricate as the original violin version, being considerably shorter and with far fewer twiddly bits. However, that did not mean that it was not a very tricky piece to perform. As it proceeded, Mark was fully aware that without Matthew’s excellent training none of this would have been possible.
The climax of the work was approaching. Mark became acutely aware that every eye in the audience was on him and his old self-consciousness returned. He blushed as each moment passed and the notes got progressively higher.
And now here it was – the final sequence. He took the deep breath that Matthew had advised before allowing the “lark” to reach its final height. He watch the tip of Matthew’s baton more like a hawk than a lark, but he also became aware of something happening in the audience just behind Matthew. His fellow Gospellers appeared to be mouthing something, and it looked for all the world that what they were mouthing were numbers.
And it was not just the Gospellers. All the audience members
were counting in rhythm. Despite continuing to sustain his final top C, Mark
could definitely hear “six, seven, eight, nine”.
And then they all shouted “ten”, at which the baton dropped, and Mark felt like doing so as well. There was wild applause and cheering and everyone rushed up to Mark to congratulate him. The happiest person in the room appeared to be Matthew, who was also being mobbed by his fellow students.
“What was all that ‘eight, nine, ten’ stuff about?” a puzzled Mark asked John and Luke.
“I supposed we’d better come clean”, Luke said. “My name is not Luke, it’s Dave. John is Peter and Matthew is Alec. The whole Department were in on this, including the staff. We all knew that Alec was good, but the Professor, having written his Lark Ascending arrangement, bet Alec that he couldn’t produce – from scratch – a proper “count to tenner” for the final note.
“We all reckon that Alec – thanks to you – has won his bet and he owes you drinks for a month!”
No comments:
Post a Comment