AN IRISHMAN'S DIARY

WHY do some church choirs still recruit boys only? No doubt an all male children's choir made sense when females were seen as…

WHY do some church choirs still recruit boys only? No doubt an all male children's choir made sense when females were seen as unclean vessels of the devil, who had to be regularly immersed in ponds and purified by the occasional immersion in fire. But we are more enlightened about these things these days; it is even possible, or so I hear, that women might have souls. And until the idea is totally disproved, are there are not grounds for admitting females into what have hitherto been all male choirs?

It is not such a great concession, after all, and involves the installation of showers in only the most outre establishments. It barely affects the question of whether women are fully human - though it is rather odd how often bishops seem to run away with them, the hussies.

Though when you see a troupe of girls appearing in the sanctuary, guitars in hand, the heart sinks like a stone in gruel and one is inclined to long for a ducking stool; for ahead of you lies half an hour's plaintive warbling of the songs of Johann Sebastian Dylan, sung with a winsome religiosity and in a key which quivers with excruciating uncertainty between A sharp and A nightmare. In all truth, this is probably guerrilla war being waged by musically disfranchised young women who are exacting revenge for their exclusion from boys' choirs.

There is a way to end this murder. Firstly, a prayer: no more guitars, please, oh patron saint of religious music, whoever you are; and make it easy to abolish guitars from the sanctuary by giving us back the great music of Christianity, in all its forms and from all its creeds, without reference to that simpering, fluting Trinity, Peter Paul and Mary, or to those who have followed their central tenet that music is a form of diabetes.

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Great musical figure

If there is not yet a patron saint of religious music, I intend to have a firm word with The Gentleman Who Arranges These Things when I see Her next. Or maybe the reason there is not, is simply because Ite O'Donovan, happily, is still with us. For Ite is one of the great figures in Irish music of recent decades.

She took the Pro Cathedral's Palestrina choir when a very young woman (she rather than it) and turned it into one of the great vocal instruments in Ireland, if not the greatest. The High Masses in the Pro Cathedral came to be great celebrations of liturgy and music, which could have caused Beelzebub to repent and Lucifer to light a penny candle in tearful contrition.

He - and not he alone - got the impression that the Pro Cathedral authorities were not as impressed as they should have been by the great gift she and her young choristers had given to the church. She left last year, still remaining active in numerous choirs and orchestras in the Dublin Institute of Technology. And now she is forming two new choirs, the Lassus Scholars for adults and Piccolo Lasso for boy children and also, bless my soul, girl children too.

She is currently holding auditions for them both - the next sessions to which aspirant choristers may send their tonsils on a lap of the test track are in Newman House on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, September 24th and 26th. For inquiries, and all audition appointments, contact lie at Dublin 4539663.

She has named her choirs after Orlande de Lassus, the little known virtuoso of Renaissance polyphony, who was so skilled as a child singer that he was kidnapped on three occasions by rival choirs. Don't we know all about it; the kind of thing which happens in Dublin the entire time. Free at last, he was taken to Italy and became miestro di cappella at St John Lateran before even Palestrina did.

Hunting Masses

Merely because he was writing great church music does not mean there was no cynicism to what he or his masters had in mind. He used to write, for example, especially brief Jager Masses, that is hunting Masses, which combined commendable brevity with musical piety, so that the immortal soul was saved in as little time as possible during the hunting season. But his output of motets, Masses and Lieder in sheer productivity rivalled the assembly lines of a Japanese car plant on the Emperor's birthday, though with more harmony and infinitely greater longevity; and this vast body of music remains as a lode for any conductor to tap. Try tapping a 400 year old Toyota, and see what you get.

Rehearsals for Lassus Scholars and Piccolo Lasso will take place in Newman House, and clearly there is the potential for a lateral movement into the glorious spaces of the University Church. That might well occur; in the meantime, Ite intends the first concert of Lassus Lasso, singing Mozart's Coronation Mass, to be round the corner in the National Concert Hall on December 14th. Choirs for men and women, boys and girls, and not a guitar in sight.

St Audoen's Church

The University Church is one of Dublin's best known and most fashionable churches. St Audoen's on High Street is neither; but it is at least the equal if not superior to the church in Stephen's Green. Redevelopment shifted population away from the church, and for a long time it barely opened at all. This was a shame, because it really was and is a quite wonderful building; and though we might not like the way the pennies of the poor went into its building, the truth is, they did, and it is there, a monument to their piety and to the single minded determination of their priests.

One of these was "Flash" Kavanagh, who clearly was the kind of priest Lassus wrote his Jager Masses for he prided himself on the speed with which he could canter through a Mass in order to release his congregation, temporarily spared hell and now impatient for the pub. But Flash's will be a disappointed shade indeed on October 6th, when Our Lady's Choral Society will sing a varied and most of all protracted programme of secular and religious music - Mozart, Puccini, Handel, Mendelssohn, Vivaldi and Faure, proceeds to Inner City Charities. Go for the music; but then admire the church, designed by Patrick Byrne, and ask: how did we lose such great church building skills?