St. John’s Church choir sings its soul onto CD> Songs reflect year in church

Music has been an essential part of the liturgy at St. John’s Episcopal Church since its founding in Bangor in 1835. The French Street church is known throughout the state for the quality of its choir music. The choir sang at the consecration of the Right Rev. Chilton Knudsen as the bishop of the Diocese of Maine last spring. In 1986, 1991 and 1996, it was the resident choir at Lichfield, St. David’s and Durham cathedrals in England. It recorded three cassette tapes of music between 1987 and 1992, and this week released its first CD recording.

Titled “Sing My Soul,” the songs follow the church year “from the innocence and trust of Advent and Christmas to the darker days of Lent and Passiontide, and on to Easter with its joy and final consolation,” according to the introduction to the detailed liner notes, written by Fred Jones, choirmaster and organist at St. John’s. Jones, who has led the choir of young people and adults for 18 years, conceived the album as a kind of musical tour of the liturgical year. However, Jones added that the music featured on the CD “will be very familiar to every Episcopal choirmaster.”

“We decided to do the recording when we came back from England in 1996,” said Jones. “We were flying pretty high when we got back from that trip. Plus, we had this new digital technology available to us.”

Barry Darling, who engineered the project, said he really did nothing special to accommodate the recording equipment. “The acoustics are so wonderful in that church that you don’t have to do a lot differently than at a Sunday service. We may have had a slightly different arrangement of the choir members, but that was about it. It was a labor of love.”

A long labor. It took two years to complete the recording, which includes 17 selections totaling nearly 70 minutes of music. Two selections, “Tell out, my soul” and “O praise ye the Lord,” were recorded at the 10 a.m. service on April 26, and include the congregation singing with the choir. Eight of the selections feature the boys and girls choirs of St. John’s.

“The Anglican tradition in music has always favored boys and girls choirs,” explained Jones. “Most of the music we do was originally written for boys and men’s choirs. You get a different kind of sound with a big adult choir than you do with children’s voices alone or with children and adult voices together.”

Church records indicate that as far back as the 19th century, there was a boys choir and a girls choir at St. John’s, according to Jones, who conducts a choir school each August. The money raised from the sale of the CDs will be used to send young people to the Royal School of Church Music for summer courses, he said.

The St. John’s choir prides itself on being a family affair, and the voices of all five members of one family can be heard on “Sing My Soul.” Sam and Stephanie Lanham and their three sons, Samuel, 17, Andrew, 15, and John, 9, sing together in the church choir. Sam and Stephanie Lanham met singing in the choral group “Up With People” and have performed in community musical theater productions over the years.

“Singing in the choir keeps us vocally in shape for all the other kinds of singing we do,” said Stephanie Lanham. “In choir, we must sing with no vibrato in our voices, and our pitch must be as precise as possible. The idea is to blend, blend, blend. It is hard work singing this stuff.”

Her son Andrew agreed. “It was so much work to record the CD,” he admitted. “We would have to sing one song over and over until we got it right. Some of taping sessions lasted four or five hours. You have to be aware of everyone else around you, and you have to sing just like them.”

Jones said his goal for the recording was “just to get it without the warts. Basically to get the music the best that we can. Perfection is the goal, but it has never been achieved in any way.”

Listeners most likely will not notice the imperfections Jones’ fined-tuned ear picked up. The boys and girls choir singing the five-part harmony of Thomas Tallis’ “Salvator mundi” transports even the tone deaf back to the 16th century, when it was first sung. The 20th century hymn, “Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree,” also sung a cappella by the young singers, is equally moving.

The musical and emotional high of the CD is probably “Ye Choirs of New Jerusalem.” An Easter hymn, the organ and voices of the choir bring to life the glorious joy of the Resurrection so vividly that even doubters are transformed into believers by the end. Reading Jones’ detailed liner notes outlining the history of each selection, is like taking a minicourse in the history of church music.

“Singing in the choir and making this CD is and was hard work,” said Stephanie Lanham, “but we do it as an offering. My children have learned a form of dedication and purity in the choir I don’t think they could learn anywhere else.”

That dedication and purity are evident in every note of “Sing My Soul.”

For more information on cassette and CD versions of “Sing My Soul,” call St. John’s Episcopal Church, 947-0156.