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Anyone reading the comments below might get the impression that IVCFs are frivolous affairs! No, never, not at all...
Fifty years ago choristers from the main Melbourne and Sydney University choirs decided to get together for a huge party and sing some music together, and the only difference nowadays is that there’s more singers, parties, drinking, fun, sex, mayhem, and more music! I attended my first IV in 1991 as a representative of TUMS, the festival being held in Melbourne that year, and for the subsequent IV in 1992 I was the Librarian for the Festival, which was held in Launceston and Hobart. I feel it is only fair to warn you that I may or may not be represented in any of the following photos.
It is normal to have one or more publicity events to garner attention for the upcoming festival concerts, known colloquially as a “pub sing”. The repertoire for this usually includes well-known favourites (and overlaps with the songs that are sung in the other type of pub), sung mostly by memory from a specially prepared booklet known as the Songbook, a copy of which is given to all participants in their Goody Bags.
Since a different city (and organising committee) hosts the IV each year, each festival produces its own eclectic grab-bag of songbook music; thus the repertoire is sometimes thrown together from a collection of past songbooks, miscellaneous stuff that happens to be lying around, scores downloaded from CPDL and not proof-read, and then grungily rushed into print by a tired and harried librarian or assistant slaving over a hot photocopier a matter of weeks before the festival begins.
I prepared the most recent songbook for the 2005 Melbourne IVC festival, and it is probably the most scrupulously prepared and pedantically edited publication of its kind in many years. The hand-me-down aspect of year-by-year songbooks often results in mistakes in one songbook going uncorrected for many subsequent years, so I enlarged my editorial brief to explicitly correct some errors that have crept in. Despite this, there was one minor mistake and several infelicities committed to paper. Repertoire was short-listed a year in advance; typesetting completed (with several exceptions) four months in advance, and two drafts circulated for comment/proofing; performance notes written two months in advance; the booklets laser printed, collated, and stapled a month in advance; and the pages of the “sealed section”, another innovation, were sticky-taped together on the day of the general IV working-bee (happy birthday to me) a week or so before the festival.
The covers were printed with three different colours, representing the host choirs MUCS (blue), MonUCS (purple), and ROCS (red). There was some interest from people wanting to acquire their choir’s, or their own preferred colour!
The songbook, in line with a number of other silly acronyms associated with this particular festival, was entitled the Tunes Redolent Of Lyrical Lusciousness, Or Publicity Songs. Here are the contents (mostly alphabetical by title):
* Christopher Tye, Laudate nomen Domini (traditional arrangment, by ?E.S. Roper)
“Amicus” (Peter Dodds McCormick), Advance Australia Fair (a stand-by, should the Governor should turn up to a concert!)
George Frideric Handel (arr. PML), A solis ortu usque ad occasum
* John Dowland, Come again! Sweet love doth now invite
Traditional Negro spiritual, Ev’ry time I feel de spirit
* Anonymous, Gaudeamus igitur
Anonymous, Gaudete! Christus est natus
* Henry Carey/Thomas Arne (attr.), God save the Queen!
Henry Purcell, If music be the food of love
The Sealed Section:
Chunder (in the old Pacific sea); Sir Roger of Kildare; As I was walking by St Paul’s; The sexual life of the camel; Mobile; Old King Cole
plus two contrafacta, courtesy of the Melbourne University Falsetto Singers, to be sung to other pieces in the collection:
Clifton Hill (You know...), Ayrton Senna (N’kosi...)
Enoch Mankayi Sontonga, N’kosi sikelel’ iAfrika
Anonymous (not William Byrd), Non nobis Domine
Anton Bruckner, Os justi meditabitur
Anonymous, Pase el agoa
* King Henry VIII of England, Pastyme with good companye
Jeffrey Moss, Rubber Duckie
* Thomas Ford (attr.), Since first I saw your face
* Joshua Rifkin (arranger), You know if you break my heart
Charles Wood, Oculi omnium
Editorial notes
Christopher Tye, Laudate nomen Domini (revised arrangment, by PML)
* Songs marked with an asterisk are traditionally sung in response to various toasts at the academic dinner.
It is normal for the chorus master(s) to utilise the songbook as a respite from rehearsing the official music programmed for the main concerts. Regrettably neither conductor at Melbourne made any recourse to the songbooks, and therefore the publicity sings could only rely on the “known” repertoire, rather than branching out into the unknown: the pieces by Handel, Purcell and Wood were specifically chosen to expand the collection of “known” music.
As the major works to be performed at the IV were by the composers Howells, Kodály, and Bruckner, we wanted to include a representative small piece by each composer in the songbook; but copyright restrictions on works by Howells and Kodály (no matter how trifling) made this impossible. The concert manager and I repeatedly spoke to the conductor of the Bruckner, desiring him to include a bracket of smaller works to complement the Mass in E minor, one of which (originally Ave Maria, then replaced in the final songbook by Os justi) would have used the version printed in the songbook for concert performance. Unfortunately these plans were shelved after the first few Bruckner rehearsals.