Gold Screen
The inaugural Newark Early Music Course was held between 27-29 May 2005 in Newark Upon Trent in Nottinghamshire, United Kingdom.
It was organised by two members of the Gonzaga Band: Jamie Savan (cornett) and Adam Woolf (sackbut).
This page holds my (Wayne Plummer) recollections of the course.
The course started at 6pm on the Friday evening in the parish church, St. Mary Magdalene. This venue was absolutely breath-taking. It was a huge privilege to be allowed to play our instruments in such beautiful surroundings - not to mention the splendid acoustic!
Note: all of the images on this page were taken with a Sony Cybershot DSC-P200; the full 7.2 MegaPixel versions can be accessed by clicking on the in-line image (well, OK, it's not actually the full 7.2 MegaPixel image because that turned out to be too big for my ISP free web-space, so I used standard JPEG compression to reduce the size).
Saturday saw us start in the church hall of the Methodist church near to St Mary Magdalene. This was in two separate groups with personnel swapping from one room to another to allow different combinations to be tried out. The organisation was excellent and I really enjoyed the material covered.
The first session saw the three cornett students with Jamie in a room with someone who wanted to try the cornett for the very first time. This session worked very well in my opinion with information on warm-ups and general technique for the more experienced students interleaved with Jamie showing the aspiring player how best to start out in her cornett playing :-)
In the second session I got to play the second "S" in an SSATTTB Schütz piece called "Selig sind die Toten" - the sound was magical and literally had the hairs standing up on my arms.
In the afternoon we moved back to St Mary Magdalene to prepare more for Sunday's activities (read on).
The first highlight of the course was performing for the morning service in the parish church. I've forgotten the details of the repertoire, but some of it sounded very nice indeed (excluding my top G played from cold at the start of the first piece after the service - doh!)
The second highlight of the course was playing from the tower of St. Mary Magdalene at 11am on Sunday. The spire is 223 feet high and the parapet at least half-way up, so it's blooming high. Sensibly the organisers took all of us who wanted to check it out up the tower on Saturday evening. This gave a fair proportion of us - myself included - the chance to opt out of this particular activity (in my case because of a fear of heights, for which this certainly qualifies!).
Jamie seemed very cool about being up on the parapet... even though it was incredibly windy on the Saturday evening.
On the Sunday itsef, the wind had gone and conditions were perfect. None of us had any idea how well the musicians who went up would be heard - the two organisers and four additional sackbuts.
It turned out to be really splendid. I used my little Sony Cybershot DSC-P200 to film a video of one of the numbers - I was using just the built-in microphone which must be really tiny and it picked up every note. I de-multiplexed the audio using TMPGEnc and you can hear the audio by downloading tower_music.mp2. Here's a still photo of the performance to look at while you listen:
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The third highlight... yes, they kept on coming, there was never a dull moment!... playing in the castle grounds at Newark - this was the ground-level version of tower music for the members of the course who were too scared to go up the real thing; ground level in the castle actually overlooked the River Trent from quite a height, so we played some of the numbers through the windows to bemused bystanders at the Newark Beer Festival on the other side of the river!
Here are a few random photos of the rehearsals and performance of this:
We went back to St Mary Magdalene for tea and a final session for our own pleasure. This concentrated mostly on a three choir piece by Gabrieli transposed down a fourth which was good for our tiring embouchures. This sounded very well indeed in the massive acoustic of the parish church.
Finally, by special request from me, we played Schütz's "Selig sind die Toten" one more time. This time Jamie played the first "S" line and Adam the "A" line, so I was sitting between the two pros. From my point of view, this was the absolute highlight of the whole weekend - I felt truly uplifted by the experience. There was a marvellous stillness when we finished as the last chord slowly ebbed away from the church's massive vaulting.
I felt a great sense of let-down when Jamie said it was the end of the course and we all had to start thinking about making our way home - I wanted the experience to go on all week!
I thought this was a great course - the three day format worked well (OK I know I said I wanted a whole week, but sadly I just don't have enough days' annual leave). The organisation was excellent, the venue was superb. Newark is a beautiful place.
My family had refused to come with me because they thought they would have nothing to do or see. Now I have been to Newark, I think that was a mistake. If the course ever runs again, and I sincerely hope it does, I shall make sure that they all come along with me!
Thanks Jamie and Adam!
Wayne Plummer