It was noon at the Lenin Balavadi here on Sunday and founder member of the MBS Youth Choir Mathew T. Itty was exhorting the 40-odd new and old members of the choir to introduce some vim and vigour into their song.
The group kept going over the lines till Mr. Itty was satisfied. “Sing boldly; the lack of confidence is apparent,” he said. As the notes soared and fell, he told the men and the women to adjust their pitch so that what they created was melody, not a clamour of sounds.
The third day of the annual training session in choral music was pretty intensive, but the enthusiastic members made light work of it.
The choir this year has 27 new members, and the valedictory of the four-day training at 5 p.m. on Monday will see them perform along with the old members in the presence of Shashi Tharoor, MP, and Kerala State Commission for Protection of Child Rights chairperson Shobha Koshy.
Since the choir is closely associated with the Madras Youth Choir, started by veteran musician M.B. Sreenivasan, the annual training sessions are conducted here by a team from the Madras choir. This year, the MBS choir attempted to tread a different path by selecting poems in Malayalam by K. Satchidanandan and Satchidanandan Puzhankara.
On Friday, the training kicked off with an audition to select the new members. Composer Bijibal handled the next day’s session, and taught the members a song which he set to tune on the spot.
On Sunday, Mr. Itty set to tune a poem by K. Satchidanandan about trees and nature. “We have always sung poems by Vallathol, Kumaran Asan, Subramania Bharati, and Rabindranath Tagore that give the message of human values, nature conservation, and harmony,” Mr. Itty said.
The annual session, he said, helped attract new members to the choir and learn new songs too.
Maya Menon, a professor of psychology at Government College for Women and one of the new members, said she had seen the choir’s programmes on television and it was a way of getting back to music which had been an integral part of her life.
Revanth, a B.Com. student at S.N. College, Chempazhanthy, came to know about the choir from his college and found that choral singing was a “different experience” from the music he had learnt.
Anjali Ashok who works at the TISS regional centre at Vattiyurkavu had been always been singing, though she had no formal training. So, when the opportunity came to join the choir here, she jumped at it.
With five songs on the cards, Monday’s function promises to be a musical one that echoes bonhomie.
