Katy Wheeler was complaining the other day of an earworm ('earworm' being a term to describe that snatch of music that you just can't get out of your head: you wake at 3am, and there it is; you fall into a fitful sleep and wake to your alarm and... there it is again.  It accompanies you wherever you go; the space between your ears is crammed inconveniently full with a 90-piece orchestra all day). So I nobbled her and asked her to tell us about it as the Clip of the Week.  And she obliged:

Having sung the Chichester Psalms by Leonard Bernstein several times during my 17 years with the choir (and once before that too), I know this piece quite well. I was delighted to see it featured in this year’s Last Night of the Proms and even though that is now several weeks ago, this catchy “Lamah rag'shu” excerpt (from the second movement) still stays with me. As an alto, I don’t, of course, sing the tenor and bass line, but even so I can’t get it out of my head. I go to sleep with the music playing and when I wake in the morning, the music just starts up again. Perhaps this snippet should come with a health warning, it’s so infectious!

We in the choir have a special connection with this piece, in fact. Chichester Psalms was commissioned for the 1965 Southern Cathedrals Festival at Chichester Cathedral and our esteemed Musical Director, David Gibson, sang the treble solo in the first UK performance of the work (sung at this year's Proms by a counter tenor, Iestyn Davies). I was interested to read the following on Wikipedia: "Bernstein stated explicitly in his writing that the part for countertenor may be sung by either a countertenor or a boy soprano, but never by a woman. This was to reinforce the liturgical meaning of the passage sung, perhaps to suggest that the 23rd Psalm, a "Psalm of David" from the Hebrew Bible, was to be heard as if sung by the boy David himself."  How appropriate!