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SING HER TUNE 6-7pm, Sunday 18th May 2025, St Mary’s Church, Guildford GU1 3UA

Corra Sound, conducted by Amy Bebbington

Corra Sound, an all-female choir and dedicated advocate for upper voice music, announces its May concert, Sing Her Tune – a unique opportunity to experience a stunning medley of dynamic compositions from some of today’s most talented choral composers.

Taking place on Sunday 18th May 2025 at St Mary’s Church, Guildford, this performance will proudly unveil the top three winning works from Corra Sound’s 2023 ‘Call for Scores’ competition. From a total of 90 submissions, these outstanding compositions were selected not only for their musical artistry but also for the powerful themes they portray. Composers were invited to write music based on themes of female power, strength, flowing energy, survival, and/or parental advocacy, and the winning pieces offer deeply creative responses to this remit.

The concert will feature the premiere of A Mother’s Farewell by British composer and jazz pianist Kate Hill. With text by Scarlett Palys, this work reflects upon the enduring power and vulnerability of maternal love, exploring a mother’s final question about the sufficiency and recognition of her love. The piece showcases jazz-inspired voicings and an emotive, rich yet accessible sound-world, led by an elegiac soprano line.

The audience will also hear The Land of no more Night, an evocative piece by Seattle-based composer and pianist Kari Kruver Medina. Setting text by Christina Rossetti, the work briefly opens with a ponderous tone filled with darkness and despair, before quickly shifting to joyous proclamations of creation singing its hymn anew with the promise of a new day.

Completing the trio of winning compositions are two humorous musical settings by American composer and organist Erik Meyer: Unfortunate Coincidence and Social Note. These works bring the dark, sarcastic wit of Dorothy Parker to life, demonstrating her penchant for social protest against patriarchal convention through acerbic derision.

In addition to these exciting premieres, the programme will include equally illuminating and uplifting repertoire by both new and established composers. Audiences can look forward to hearing Eriks Esenvalds’ beautifully evocative Only in Sleep, Elaine Hagenberg’s rousing Measure me sky! and magnificent Shadow River, Don MacDonald’s ethereal Moonset and optimistically powerful She is the river, and Alexandra Olsavsky’s What happens when a woman?.

The concert will also feature two pieces that were winners in Corra Sound’s workshops last year: Hope is the thing by local composer Barbara Cobham, a heartfelt tribute to her niece who sadly passed away, and Air, Heart by Amanda Dean, scored for voices and boomwhackers, celebrating the tenacity and adventurous spirit of Amelia Earhart.

Corra Sound invites you to join them for this dynamically diverse programme celebrating new and established composers, thought-provoking and remarkable repertoire, and challenging yet accessible music for upper voices.

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Corra Sound is an outstanding ensemble, brilliantly led, and their programming is inspiring and imaginative. They sing with commitment and artistry, with clarity and colour, and are a joy to listen to.

Neil Ferris (Director, BBC Symphony Chorus, Sonoro)

Corra Sound is a remarkable group of singers with a love for performing, discovering new repertoire and celebrating the works of talented and often little known female composers.

Comprising a blend of professionally trained and high level amateur voices, the members of Corra Sound each have their own story to tell, but share a passion for music written by and for women, exploring the reach and versatility of the female voice.

Corra Sound has a unique identity which encompasses a broad range of vocal styles, bringing a deeply-rooted sense of heart, connectivity and passion to their performances. Corra’s mission is to bring works by (predominantly) female composers out of the shadows and into the spotlight, and the choir is gaining a reputation for high quality performance across a wide range of repertoire.

It is incredibly refreshing to be part of a group where musical excellence and well-being are held in equally high regard. This is a group of women who bring everything to the table and Corra Sound’s resulting performances are imbued with life-affirming and infectious emotion, passion and joy.

Katherine Bond-Smith (Corra Sound member)

Corra Sound was founded and is directed by Dr. Amy Bebbington, a passionate advocate for choral singing and conductor training, known for championing marginalised musicians through choral programming, Discovery Days and mentoring, and sought after for her engaging teaching style and wealth of pedagogical experience.

The choir is based in the south-east of England.

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Guest post by Dakota Gale, the latest article in his series aimed at amateur adult pianists

I clearly remember the first time I rode Tyler’s, a popular bike trail near me. I walked some rocky uphill ramps, awkwardly landed jumps, and generally hacked my way down it like a noob.

I still had a hell of a fine time.

These days, I’ve ridden Tyler’s dozens of times and know every major feature. I fly down that sucker.

But is Tyler’s more fun, exciting or fulfilling now versus my first time? 

In general, is there a way to develop appreciation and deeper comprehension rather than boredom for a repeated experience?

Travel to the same places. Hobbies we’ve done for years. Meals we’ve made for a decade.

Or piano pieces!

Navigating the creative gamut

Like a new bike trail, the first time I play a piano piece my brain scrabbles to survive, jamming the notes into my brain. I’m walking super rocky sections and scoping out switchbacks, one measure and phrase at a time.

Take Schubert’s Serenade, a song I’ve always loved that I started playing. In my initial efforts, I pushed through the technical challenges of the piece and could “play” it. Then I tabled it for a month, letting the music sink into my synapses. Cue round two, with more nuance and expression…and yet I was barely getting started.

Bridging that gap between what I CAN do and what I WANT to do is the hardest part. With any new piece, I listen to recordings and think, “yup, do that, fingers!” Then I sit down and create some monotone pabulum akin to playing bongo drums with wet laundry. *sigh*

The gap between my expectations and my abilities is frustrating sometimes. Like some truculent kid, I want to play it like a pro, now now now!

After I turn my pre-frontal cortex back on, I can (usually) reframe things. Because truly, I find this so motivating: I’m going to grow not just with new pieces, but enjoy a deep satisfaction revisiting piano works for the rest of my life. Something fresh to discover, to experience.

And dang it, I AM making progress. Even if I’m no master, there’s magic in the journey and daily satisfaction in the learning. I don’t need to be pro to have fun. (Maybe it’s more fun not worrying about earning a living with it?)

Plus, pushing myself on challenging songs pushes me to greater heights on those I already play. It’s the same thing that happens when I ride technical trails on my bike. I may not slip effortlessly through the toughest moves, but that difficulty makes other trails feel even more cruisier in comparison.

Unlike during piano pieces, sometimes I pause mid-climb on a bike to eat…

As piano, as life

I love how this mindset so easily translates to other endeavors or pastimes. We’re different people when we revisit a city or national park, reread a book, or play an old song. Depth, additional context, a slower pace…it all modifies the experience and likely results in a deeper appreciation.

With all this in mind, I’m continuing to actively push myself to share not-perfect work like my beginner drawings and music recordings. (Sharing my writing on my blog starting a decade ago was an early effort in that arena.) 

It’s tough because I want the work to be better, to make insane progress overnight. Sometimes I shake my head at how hard it is to take what’s in my brain and put it on paper or piano.

Whatever. There’s a reason every book on creativity decries perfectionism and Ira Glass from This American Life talks about “The Gap,” that space between what we envision and what appears in reality. I’ll probably always find blemishes and wish-it-were-different aspects of ANYthing I create.

The good news? It creates constant motivation to keep improving, growing, seeking.

That’s a beautiful thing.

As for Schubert’s Serenade? Maybe it’s not perfect, but I’m looking forward to a lifetime of it evolving beneath my fingers.

And if I get frustrated, I can always go rip down Tyler’s on my mountain bike.

When he isn’t playing piano, Dakota Gale enjoys exploring the great outdoors, learning languages and drawing. He also writes about reclaiming creativity as an adult and ditching tired personal paradigms in his newsletter, Traipsing About. He can often be spotted camping and exploring mountain bike trails around the Pacific Northwest.

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Watching Masterchef The Professionals, a series to which I am rather addicted (mainly because my son is a professional chef), I have noticed a certain expression from chef Marcus Wareing during the preliminary Skills Test section of the competition.

In this round, contestants’ culinary skills and nous are tested with a set of technical challenges, most of which should be second-nature to any well-trained chef – filleting fish, shucking oysters, boning out a joint of meat, making meringue or hollandaise sauce, for example. For some, this is a daunting round where weaknesses are exposed or nerves get the better of the contestant. For others, it proves their mettle and demonstrates that not only have they been properly trained (and keep their skills well-honed), but also that they are able to adapt their skillset and intuitive culinary common sense to an unfamiliar recipe or set of ingredients. When a chef succeeds in this, Marcus Wareing will often say, with an approving nod, “Chef’s head“.

So I’m coining the expression ‘Pianist’s Head’ to apply to those situations when we might encounter music which is unfamiliar or outside our comfort zone, which might at first appear daunting, challenging or even almost impossible, but which, with some consideration, drawing on our musical knowledge, experience and intuition – our Pianist’s Head – is achievable. Having a good Pianist’s Head upon your shoulders will stand you in good stead for successful sight-reading and the ability to learn music more quickly.

No repertoire is ever learnt in isolation – or at least it shouldn’t be – and everything is connected. Musical skills, just like culinary skills, once learnt and practiced, can and should be applied to different situations. No learning should ever be done in a vacuum: a single piece of music is not just that one piece, it is a path to other pieces via accrued technical proficiency, musical knowledge and artistry. Early students and less advanced pianists often see the pieces they are learning in terms of stand alone works which have little or no relevance to other music they are working on, or are going to learn. This is also particularly true of scales, arpeggios and other technical exercises which may be studied in isolation instead of appreciating their relevance not just in understanding keys and key relationships, but also in actual pieces of music. This was something I was not taught when having piano lessons as a child, and it’s the fault of the teacher, not the student, if the usefulness and relevance of such technical work is not highlighted.

Chopin knew this: it is said that he studied Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier every day, appreciating the music’s relevance to his own musical development, his composing and his teaching. If you can successfully manage Bach’s ornamentation, for example, your Pianist’s Head should allow you to cope with Chopin’s trills and fioriture.

Your Pianist’s Head skills will develop the more time you spend with varied repertoire and your willingness to take an open-minded, lateral thinking approach to learning and playing music to an point where these skills become intuitive and you won’t even know you’re applying them!

To develop and maintain your Pianist’s Head, approach each new/unfamiliar piece of music with the thought, “what do I know already and how can I apply experience from other repertoire to this piece?“. For example, if you’ve encountered a similar passage or technical challenge elsewhere you’ll know how to approach it this time.

Understand and appreciate the composer’s particular stylistic characteristics, idioms, soundworld, and quirks. This can be developed not only through playing other music by the same composer but also by listening and studying scores away from the instrument. And as your Pianist’s Head develops, you’ll find yourself making intuitive decisions about how to approach repertoire based on sound technical knowledge and musical insight.

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Guest post by Frances Jones

I’ve never found it easy to keep New Year’s resolutions. Often, they are admirable but just not sufficiently motivating and are inevitably dropped before ever really achieving anything. Last year, though, I decided I would practice the piano more often and also give a concert, however low-key, for my students, most of whom were under the age of 10. One of the pieces I re-learnt and performed was Germaine Tailleferre’s Impromptu, a wonderfully spirited piece with an oft-repeated motif that ducks and dives through many keys before finally coming to rest with a ritardando and arpeggiated passage alighting on the tonic.

Rediscovering this piece led me to think of Tailleferre’s First Piano Concerto. I say rediscovering because Germaine Tailleferre’s music was the subject of my undergraduate thesis, back in 2005. It wasn’t long before I was listening to the concerto, now much more easily available on Youtube, and recalling an afternoon spent poring over the score in the dimly lit depths (or so it seemed to me) of the British Library.

Tailleferre wrote her first piano concerto in 1924 and, in a departure from the Romantic style of her earlier pieces for piano, embraced the neo-Classicism that had been emerging in France in the early years of the 20th century and that she had deployed in her string quartet of 1919. As far as I’m aware, there has been just one recording to date, by the University of California Santa Cruz Orchestra:

The first movement is in sonata form, but foreshadows the neo-Classical style of Stravinsky in his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto with its similarity to concerto grosso. The instrumentation, too, is reminiscent of earlier times, with strings, trumpet, horn, oboe, bassoon, flutes and timpani. The piano and orchestra start together in the first bar, and the musical themes are shared in a joyful back and forth full of counterpoint and syncopation. The opening theme, a descending melody with a repeated rhythm, is heard over a staccato bass which really bounces along and immediately conjures up a sense of exuberance. Later on, the harmonies are more Romantic and the piano is more obviously accompanied by the orchestra, but the melody is still propelled by a driving rhythm. The joyous, energetic character returns as the opening material is repeated, exchanging fragments of melody, overlapping and answering, until the final bars.

The second movement has a different feel. Indeed, when I was researching this work for my thesis, I was so struck by the similarity of the slow movement to the slow movement in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, that it led me to consider the influences that this concerto may have had upon Ravel. (Ravel wrote his concerto in 1934, and the two composers were good friends). This is a subject for another time, but it makes for an interesting discussion. The movement starts with solo piano, and a continuously evolving melody which defies a clear sense of beat and only becomes clearer when the flute enters in bar 4. This emphasis on melody harks back to the earlier style of her piano works, in which melodies evolved over a more static bass line. It’s a beautiful movement, wistful and yearning; it builds to heavy chords, anguish almost palpable in each, and subsides, the strings accompanying the piano to resolve onto a major chord, the sun shining again on the rain-soaked pavement (if you’ll excuse the weather analogy).

We return in the third movement to the uplifting character of the first and indeed, to a more obviously neo-Classical style. But it’s not without its individualism. The themes are characterized by off beat rhythms that cut through the texture but there is lyricism, too, always urgent, pushing forward, both orchestra and soloist involved in an intense communication. There’s a joyful, ascending

piano melody, followed by a conversation with the flute and oboe and, finally, a cadenza where the pianist emerges into the limelight. However it’s the interweaving of the melody through the orchestral parts, specifically flute, oboe and trumpet, that I really enjoy in this movement. Towards the end, the syncopated motif is shared around the orchestra, the soloist running up and down the piano in scalic passages until the trumpet breaks through the texture to end with a triumphant flourish.

Tailleferre’s Piano Concerto was premièred in London by Alfred Cortot in 1924. Although performed many times in the decade following its publication in 1925, the work has not since achieved a fraction of the commercial success enjoyed by other 20th century concertos. It perhaps just doesn’t quite have that level of virtuosity attained by other composers, such as Ravel in his Piano Concerto in G, or Shostakovich in his First Cello Concerto. Its neo-Classical style and lack of a really prominent part for the soloist may also have contributed to its gradual disappearance from the concert platform. However, the more I (re)listen, the more I’m drawn to this work which appears like a burst of musical sunshine from the Paris of the 1920s. I’d love to hear it performed live. Perhaps now, 100 years on, might be the time for its renaissance.

Frances Jones read music at York University, followed by a PGCE at Cambridge. She is Music Lead at a school in West London and also teaches piano.