Afterwards, I had fish and chips

I popped down to Sheffield this weekend to see my parents. Ostensibly, this was so that they could see me for my birthday since they wouldn't be seeing me next weekend. Except that now they are also planning to visit me on Friday too so I feel like I've been slightly conned somehow.

Mother just happened though (what a coincidence!) to be singing in a choral concert last night at Sheffield Cathedral. She also had got hold of a ticket for me (how convenient!) so I was able to go along to watch. I'm not really a fan of choirs and old fashioned music so I apologise if what follows seems a little negative.

Sheffield Cathedral itself is a bit nicer than I was expecting though in common with churches everywhere, the seats were damn uncomfy. It looks relatively new from the outside since it got bombed in World War 2 but inside there is a lot of much older stonework which makes the building feel much more cathedral-like than it might otherwise. It's being done up a bit too at the moment, the main impact of which is that the toilets are currently in portakabins outside the main entrance.

We (we being myself, father and a couple of mum and dad's friends) sat at the back of the room - an ideal place to watch something if there's a danger of falling asleep. The programme was split into two halves. The first was described as "a sequence of sacred motets and organ music". I had no idea what a motet is. And I still don't. But what this bit consisted of was some choral singing, then a bit of organ, then half the choir would wander off into one of the transepts of the cathedral and sing where nobody could see them, leaving the rest of the choir at the front doing nothing at all. This seemed odd to me. I think it probably seemed odd to the non-singing part of the choir too (which included my mother). They'd then come back repeat this whole sequence of events. It sounded nice enough, I suppose, though I was pretty bored by it.

The second half (after a quick interval spent in a local boozer) was a rendition of Schutz's St. Matthew Passion. As far as I have determined, a "passion" in the musical sense is a retelling of one of the gospels set to music. What this then seems to equate to is the composer rewriting the gospel in his own words, but still completely in prose, and then people singing the resulting text. Unlike an actual play where there might be some acting and stuff, here there is also a narrator (called "The Evangelist") who sings out narrative bits and also things like "Jesus said unto him" and "And they answered and said" - things that would be normally unnecessary.

The singing itself is also strange. There are no discernible tunes, motifs or even rhythms. Instead they just sing notes and sometimes go up and sometimes go down, seemingly at random.

Now, it's likely that it all just seems odd to me because I'm unfamiliar with the form and I'm a Philistine and because there were no guitars. But I would be willing to put a small wager that this is genuinely a form of music that is odd, somewhat boring and lacking in anything we now take for granted in music (like a tune). On the plus side, the guy being Jesus had a really good beard, though not in the style that it is generally accepted was worn by Jesus. This one was a bit more Rasputin.

As a second plus point, the passion only lasted for about 50 minutes. I'm told that someone (possibly Bach) did a St Matthew Passion that goes on for over three hours! That might have taken me over the edge.