The Irish Chamber Choir of Paris shows how the French and Irish take different approaches to music, writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Most of the events hosted by the Irish Cultural Centre here are ephemeral by their very nature. But out-going director Helen Carey will have bequeathed the centre with one living, lasting institution: the Irish Chamber Choir of Paris.
The choir grew out of concerts by the Irish organist and harpsichord player Emer Buckley in 2004. "We talked about the next step, an atelier or master classes," Carey recalls. "We came up with the notion of a choir." In September 2004, the College put up posters announcing "the creation of a high-level, non-professional choir".
Carey recruited Jean-Charles Léon, a musicologist and teacher at the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, with 20 years' experience as a choirmaster. Since then, she says, her role has been one of "benign surveillance". But she nonetheless counts the choir as "one of the journeys I've most enjoyed, one of the fullest experiences of my time at the centre."
Léon rejected two-thirds of the candidates, and launched the choir two years ago with eight women singers. He so likes the sound of an all-female choir that he decided not to recruit men, who were in any case far fewer to apply. The choir now comprises 13 women, three of whom are Irish.
Part of the difficulty in finding Irish singers is the requirement that they sight-sing music. "The French have superb music reading skills," says choir member Chantal Barry, from Dublin. "Irish people find it intimidating. Reading music is one skill. Sight-singing - to be able to look at a piece and sing the melody as you read it - is quite another. The French have a system of music conservatories where parents enroll their children from the age of six. They learn to sight-sing from day one. There is no such system in Ireland."
Barry has lived in France for many years and holds a staff job in research at the political science institute Sciences Po. Her passion for music is so intense that she also sings with a 90-strong choir called Jubilate and a small group called Coeur Battant. But the Irish Chamber Choir is her favourite.
"You get moments of ecstasy, of pure joy, when all the voices come together on a particular note or phrase," Barry explains. "All of the voices feed into each other, into a moment of complete harmony." None of the individual singers could achieve this on their own, Léon insists. "The music is more complicated than their individual ability. Last year, we performed music by the 18th-century composer Pierre Bouteiller. Individually, they couldn't have sung it. As a choir, they produced a very high level concert."
Those involved with the choir say the most exciting thing about it is the inter-cultural exchange, the fact that it is at the same time French and Irish. "When I come here [to the chapel of the Irish College], I am coming to Ireland," says Léon.
"It is very much a creation by the two families, the two constituencies," says Helen Carey. "It has appealed to the French interest in music, as opposed to the French interest in Ireland . . . You cannot be involved in music if you're not passionate about it. It requires so much time that you need to really love it."
The French and Irish have fundamentally different approaches to music, Barry says. "Irish people just have music in their soul and bones. We probably depend more on our ear than the French do. You put any group together, and they will sing. But if you have a dinner with French people and ask them to sing, no one will; it's not a thing that happens socially. To me the joy of this choir is the mix of French rigour and discipline and Irish fun."
It all evens out by the day of the concert, says the choir's Dutch voice coach Martina Niernhaussen, an opera singer who has sung in the Paris, Saint Étienne and Tel Aviv operas and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. "The French are more skilled at reading, but the Irish have better instincts," she says.
The chance of free group lessons with Niernhaussen before each rehearsal is an added enticement to members of the choir. Group classes can be more valuable than individual lessons, she says. "Everyone has two voices, the osseous voice that you hear inside - the bass notes that resonate into your bones - and the aerial voice that others hear. It helps to hear another voice respond to the teacher's instructions."
Niernhaussen says the Irish Chamber Choir has a "vocal colour" all its own. "Because the mother tongues are different, the sound is different," she explains. "The colour would be even richer if we had some Scandinavian and Spanish voices." Aside from the work of the 18th-century Irish harpist Carolan, choirmaster Jean-Charles Léon found nothing in the way of Irish baroque music - "his" period. "It's my job as conductor to try to find Irish music," he says.
The Contemporary Music Centre in Ireland sent Léon a CD with music for women's choirs. By chance, it included Irish-American composer Jane O'Leary's Dream Songs, which she wrote for the Dublin Secondary Schoolgirls' Choir in 1996. O'Leary holds a PhD in composition from Princeton University and is a member of Aosdána. Her works have been performed throughout Europe and the US.
Léon was so taken with O'Leary's music that he brought two of her Dream Songs into the Chamber Choir's repertoire this year. Both were inspired by poetry: Yeats's She Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven and Joanne Townsend's If There is a Dream. The Clothes of Heaven is so exquisite that Chantal Barry says she was almost too emotional to sing it the first time. "I heard French women singers with an Irish director singing music by an Irish composer and an Irish poet in central Paris," she recalls. "It brought the house down."
By chance, around the time the choir was rehearsing O'Leary's Dream Songs, Lyric FM asked if she would compose an original piece for them. "The Beckett project was starting," recalls Léon. "Helen Carey asked me if we could celebrate Beckett through music, and she suggested we do compositions inspired by his poems. Since Beckett was bi-lingual, we decided to do one by a French and one by an Irish composer."
The French composer Dominique Probst chose Beckett's Comment Dire, while O'Leary chose Something There. Their original compositions, commissioned by the Irish Cultural Centre for the Irish Chamber Choir of Paris, will make their world première in the Irish College Chapel on November 8th.
O'Leary, who was born in Connecticut and has lived in Ireland since 1972, has made four trips to Paris to work with the choir. "Mine were the first modern works they attempted," she says. "So I felt it was important to get my point of view across. We worked through it together."
For six months, O'Leary says, she couldn't get the words of Beckett's poem out of her head. It inspired her to write two different pieces of music with the same title. The instrumental Something There was performed for the first time at her 60th birthday celebration concert in the National Gallery of Ireland on October 12th. Beckett's writing conveys "the tension between reality and imagination, between the inner and outer worlds," O'Leary says. "It is a fragile space and a mysterious one. I have tried to bring the listener into that magical place beyond words."
Having performed 14 concerts in two years, The Irish Chamber Choir is well-established. With the exception of the night of the France-Portugal football semi-final, the seven concerts in the Irish College have sold out, says Helen Carey.
"Now that the structure is in place, I want to recruit more Irish women," says Jean-Charles Léon. Though the Choir originally performed only 16th and 17th century baroque music, they are branching out now. "I hope the experience with Jane will lead to more work with her and other composers," Léon says. And he is planning a Celtic music programme based on the Ballade Celtique, a Mass for three voices by the early 20th-century Breton composer Joseph-Guy Ropartz.
The Irish Chamber Choir of Paris will perform at the Irish Cultural Centre, 5 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris, on November 8th and December 13th at 7.30pm. Reservations recommended. See www.centreculturelirlandais.com
