St Martin’s Voices: touring during the pandemic

‘There’s this idea: how can St Martin’s Voices represent the ethos of St Martin-in-the-Fields, throughout the country but in a way that’s working with people? And also: how can the Voices be resourcing other people to enable them to do things that they might not have been able to do before? A really key part of that is this idea of touring.’

It is a November afternoon at St Martin-in-the-Fields, whose director of music, Andrew Earis, is discussing the recent post-lockdown tour by the church’s professional choir, St Martin’s Voices. The ensemble, a regular pool of about 20 young singers, is one of several choral and vocal initiatives which run alongside a year-round concert programme at the Trafalgar Square landmark.

The Voices are regular broadcasters, and it was that line of work that eventually led to the idea of an autumn tour around England. They had just finished recording the music for the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mothering Sunday broadcast in 2020 when the country was put into its first lockdown. ‘A few weeks later we had this idea, working with the Church of England, to start recording music for churches around the country to use for their online services.’

Earis reckons about 4000 churches started using these resources every week – hymns and other music recorded by the singers individually – and decided to continue with them once the group were able to meet in person. These were available, alongside other liturgical and spiritual resources, on an in-house platform, St Martin’s Digital.

‘Suddenly we found we were this heartbeat, resourcing a lot more than just the four walls of this building. We then had the idea a few months ago that we had had so much online correspondence with churches around the country that could we, now that we were allowed to, get out and start meeting people?’

The result is a tour combining concerts with work in communities. ‘There are very much two parts to the tour. One was the pure concert idea, but then we also did a lot of work with a lot of local musicians to see how we can help people to start rebuilding their own music traditions, post-pandemic.’

It was also split into two legs: the first covering the South and East of England in Autumn 2021, with the rest of the country to follow in early 2022. Earis says they ended up putting ‘quite a strong emphasis on saying: can we work in places where you wouldn’t obviously think of going on a music tour, avoiding big tourist hotspots? […] Which is why we decided not to go to the south of Devon with all its well-known places and decided to go north of Dartmoor; why we decided not to go to Norwich but north Norfolk; not go to Cambridge but Burwell’.

For Daisy Walford, a soprano in St Martin’s Voices, the tour meant seeing up close the effect their musical efforts have had since lockdowns began. ‘It was amazing to visit parishes that had been using our music throughout the pandemic. Everyone was so welcoming and grateful for the work we had done at St Martin’s. It was so lovely to hear of the uses it had and what a difference it made to congregations at a very difficult time. For some parishes, the concert we gave was the first live performance in the church since pre-pandemic; this made for an exciting atmosphere and definitely made us give our very best performance.’

Inevitably, Covid-19 had an impact in how the tour took shape. Indeed, uncertainty as to how the pandemic would develop over the winter months was one reason for splitting the tour into two instalments. But it also affected planning on the music side. For one thing, it meant touring in small groups of around six singers, smaller than usual for the group.

‘But that gave really interesting results,’ says Earis. ‘One is that with a tight group of singers, it’s interesting how they interact […] But the other part of it is that when you’ve got a small group working with other singers locally, you actually get much more interaction than with two massive choirs.’

Since the tour overlapped with the COP26 summit, Earis decided to use it as inspiration. ‘We’ve really focused on the environment, focused on creation and on the news of the day, but trying to do it in a way that wasn’t twee – in a harvest time, we-plough-the-fields-and-scatter way – but was in a more earthy, in-depth way. We’ve been working with local choirs in some of their churches and then coming together for workshops, culminating in a beautiful sequence of words and music. Part of it is to make people think in a slightly different way about some of the really important issues that are going on in the world at the moment.’

There have been discoveries for the Voices, too, not only through the experience of singing in smaller groups but also in repertoire. He mentions, for example, Blessed Be by Melanie DeMore, whose tree theme meant it featured in workshops addressing the environment topic, and the anthem Set Me As A Seal in the setting by Eleanor Daley rather than the much older version by William Walton. Earis describes it as ‘just the most magical piece ever. If it hadn’t been for this tour, we’d never have discovered that.’

The workshop element of the tour has had another benefit for the Voices; giving them hands-on experience in leading engaging activities. ‘How we can develop people as whole musicians, when we’re in the world we’re in – that broad skillset is important.’

It was certainly an enjoyable part of the tour for Walford. ‘I met a lady after one of our concerts who was really unsure about coming to the workshop the next day. She wasn’t part of a choir and hadn’t really done any singing since school. I reassured her that this really didn’t matter! I was so happy to see her at the workshop the next day, really enjoying herself. Singing with amateur musicians always reminds me how lucky I am to do what I do for a living, even if it comes with its challenges and instability, especially during the pandemic.’

With details of the northern leg of the tour to be announced, Earis is sure that future tours will follow. ‘We very deliberately don’t want these to be one-offs; they are ongoing relationships.’ And while there has been some concern expressed among freelance singers about St Martin’s online music resources and the Church of England’s backing of them at a difficult time for performers, Earis argues that they have a role to play in creating a local appetite for live music on which local live musicians can capitalise.

‘The message that we’ve constantly tried to get out is that this is all about working with local musicians, it’s all about mutual learning.’ Of the St Martin’s Digital resources, he says: ‘Our initial assumption was that it was churches who did have music and couldn’t do music in lockdown who would use them. That was quite a lot of the use of it; what’s interesting is we’re keeping going with this and it’s still being used a huge amount. It’s now evolving into churches that never had music in the first place, and is enabling that to happen. What we’d really like to see is that people’s understanding of what church music can do increases, and that helps create an appetite for locally generated music.’

You can find out more about St Martin's Voices at the St Martin-in-the-Fields website.