Ed Long on Songs of Ourselves

Released back in September, 'Songs of Ourselves' is the début recording from The Fourth Choir, founded in 2013 with a vision to act as London's LGBTQ+ chamber choir for advanced singers. Ranging right across the range of choral repertoire from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary works (sacred and secular), it has a particular focus on performing the works of composers from underrepresented communities.

The album was recently praised by BBC Music Magazine for going beyond mere 'tokenistic' attempts at diversity, as well as by Gramophone for threading the needle between addressing the lived experiences of queer people and remaining accessible and relatable to everyone.

The choir's chair, Ed Long, was kind enough to share some of his thoughts on this programme and the themes it draws together.

For those that don’t know your back-story - why are you the fourth choir, and what were the first three?

Hildegard of Bingen and other medieval mystics believed that the nine orders of angels were arranged into three choirs around the throne of God. But Hildegard had a fourth choir on earth – the nuns who sang her difficult compositions.

The Fourth Choir is named in honour of the anonymous singers of “fourth choirs” of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance who first sang the masterpieces of choral music and who used their voices to recreate the sounds of heaven here on earth.

Séamus Rea’s notes about the Song of Songs setting suggest a pretty unfavourable view of religious texts and practices - and sadly it’s virtually a certainty that some of your members will have encountered exclusion from an established religion. Does this ever cause disagreements within the choir when you include sacred music in your programming?

We're excited to perform works of music across the spectrum of period, style, language and texts with both religious and secular origins. Obviously a huge proportion of the western choral canon draws from religious texts and nearly all of our concerts include sacred music in some way. Our members all have their own experience of religious practice – one of our founder members is now a Canon at Salisbury Cathedral – but we're mindful that when we perform sacred works it's in a secular concert setting so everyone can take from it what they want, whether it's an expression of their faith or an enjoyment of the music and the symbolism of the text.

We have addressed the challenging topic of queer people's exclusion from and persecution by the church in previous performances. We were invited to sing in a cross-denominational memorial service organised by One Body One Faith in 2023 and, earlier this year, programmed a Requiem concert commemorating queer people sentenced to death for their sexuality or gender expression across Europe in the 14th to 19th centuries. The latter concert was held at Farm St Church and supported by LGBTQ+ Catholics Westminster and was an enormously moving experience for our singers and members of the audience. 

How do you decide how widely to cast your net, in terms of whose voices to focus on? Queer experiences of marginalisation obviously can and should give rise to solidarity with those who face racism, ableism and similar - but when does that become mission creep? How do you balance staying ‘in your lane’ against the need for the marginalised to stand together?

We develop themes for our concerts collaboratively and ideas may be proposed from our membership or developed in collaboration with other performers or producers. We make an effort to programme under-represented composers in all our concerts, though this had a particular focus for our recent album recording. We think this naturally makes for more interesting concert programmes as we're more likely to be performing works that an audience hasn't heard before, and the exciting and varied repertoire is typically the first impression that new members share with us when they join the choir. We're proud to be an ambassador group for Donne, Women in Music and have also collaborated on multiple occasions in the past with Deaf performers, including a concert in 2021 that included, to our knowledge, the first instance of "polyphonic signing" and the first commissioned choral work based on a sign language source text.

There’s also a balancing act between hailing composers from marginalised communities as flying the flag for their identities, versus unintentionally reducing them to doing only that and thus still putting them into a box. How do you handle this dilemma? Sometimes, obviously, centring a particular facet of a composer’s identity will be crucial and pertinent, but at other times surely a composer might yearn to just be seen and known for their music?

Our main motivation is making a compelling concert that showcases the best choral music, tells a story with emotional impact and gives our audience something to think about. The music is always centre stage regardless of the framing and, while we have programmed concerts with all-women or all-queer composers for example, we're also singing works by those same composers regularly in concerts with other creative themes. Our most recent concert programme, Storm Cycle, was a collection of dramatic choral works about storms and sea journeys and, although fewer than half of the works in the programme were by white men, there was no specific spotlight shone on the composers' identities.

Focusing for a moment on the ‘T’ in ‘queer’ - hormone therapy is a big deal for one’s whole body. What sort of effect does it have on a singer’s voice, tone, technique and so on? Do your trans members sometimes have to do a bit of a back-to-square-one manoeuvre as their vocal instrument changes?

We've not had a "back to square one" situation with any of our trans members as far as I can recall. Now that the choir has been running for over 10 years, lots of singers find that their relationship to their voice changes over time for one reason or another: getting older, having children, taking a break from singing, or as a result of working on technique in a certain register. Coming out of lockdown was probably the most dramatic moment where pretty much everyone's voice had shifted in some way and we kind of had to find our sound as a choir again. When voices do change we are very flexible on having singers try out with a different voice part if it feels more comfortable. I'd also highlight our friends at the London Trans Choir who do great work in supporting trans singers in developing their vocal technique.