Rodney Wetherell at the SCUNA 50th Anniversary Dinner
My thanks to photographer Peter Hislop for permission to use this photo
See also SCUNA 50
'Every university should have a choral society' - somehow I got this idea in 1962 during my first year at the ANU, which I thought was a fantastic place - but where were the clubs and societies then considered essential to university life? I knew about QUMS in my native Brisbane, and also SUMS, MUCS and TUMS. In Canberra I found there was a very good choir called the Canberra Choral Society, under the baton of Wilfred Holland, an imperious Englishman, and managed to get in. He was as sarcastic as many another choral conductor I have encountered. I recall him saying 'The altos sound like cows plodding through glue'. I felt the ANU was ripe for its own choral society, and took a walk from Bruce Hall to University House where I put an ad on the noticeboard asking plaintively if anyone there would be willing and/or capable of conducting an undergraduate choir with, as yet, no members. To my utter astonishment, a shortish intense man, not much older than I was, appeared at my door in East Block next night. This was Ian Allan, a junior classics lecturer, a Roman Catholic from Melbourne who was heavily into Renaissance church music and Mozart, among other composers. It was Ian who christened our fledgling choir SCUNA - Sodalitas Choralis etc., to this day the only university choir without the standard boring name. We were a small group, and I'm not quite sure how we all came together.
Rodney Wetherell at the SCUNA 50th Anniversary Dinner
My thanks to photographer Peter Hislop for permission to use this photo
We were very lucky to have two star singers. One of them is here tonight, Janet Hough, now Healey, who had one of those voices that could charm birds out of trees. The other was baritone Geoff Brennan, whom many of you will have heard around Canberra I'm sure. Our star tenor was Colin Matheson. Others were Sue Falk, Elizabeth Reid, Judy Clingan, Christine Alexander, Ian Blackert and me - and that was about it. Somehow we put on a concert in Bruce Hall Dining Room consisting of Missa Brevis by Palestrina, Laudate Dominum by Mozart, Cantate Dominum by Buxtehude, and the short opera Bastien and Bastienne by the 12-year-old Mozart. The ranks were distinctly thin, but the sound was all right - or possibly superb if you took a biased view. The Bruce Hall Warden and residents fell over themselves to help shift tables and set up a primitive stage - nothing like this had happened before.
I'm now going to drag Janet out of retirement to say the words of her opening aria in Bastien and Bastienne. Picture the scene: the lovely young shepherdess, complete with crook, wanders tearfully among her sheep singing these words:
By my true love I am forsaken,
sleep will not come to still my sighs
sleep will not come to still my sighs.
From all my dreams I now awaken
with tears that burn my grieving eyes
with tears that burn my grieving eyes.
Lonely forlorn, my heart will mourn,
condemned to sigh until I die
condemned to sigh until I die.
The other highlight of the year was going to the Inter-Varsity Choral Festival in Adelaide, by train. The camp was held in the Adelaide Bible Institute, Victor Harbour, and we did Beethoven's Mass in C in the Adelaide Town Hall at the final concert, conducted by Lewis Dawe.
I had lunch with Geoff Brennan today - he and Margaret are in Sydney tonight unfortunately - and he gave me a page of recollections. Here are a few of them:
'I vividly recall dancing down the streets of Victor Harbour singing the three ladies trio from The Magic Flute - Janet, Judy, Rodney and me, accompanied by Ian on the fiddle. 'O peerless youth!' I will never forget Janet's performance of 'Laudate Dominum' in the final concert, to rapturous applause. Over breakfast one female enthusiast cried 'I just love Beethoven - he's so madly pornographic'. I sang Colas the magician in Bastien and Bastienne, of which Ian I think did a new translation of the whole thing, also commissioning Wilf Holland to compose recitatives for the spoken dialogue. I know almost nothing of what happened to Ian after that year, but he was a total enthusiast for music with a charismatic intensity, if a little eccentric. Without him, SCUNA may never have been formed, and for that small band, our own university experience would have been deeply impoverished. For all of us, I think, SCUNA was the centre of our lives - as our academic results at year's end testified.'
A candle had been lit, but it could very easily have gone out the following year. I went off to Melbourne, Ian left not long after, and so did Janet - but SCUNA struggled on, thanks largely to Judy Clingan and Geoff Brennan, until the appointment of Graham Kerrison in the second half of '64.
I have read articles claiming that choral singing improves the mental health and sociability of its devotees, enhances the immune system and can practically cure cancer. I don't know - I have had some dreary evenings at choir practice, and that applies to the most venerable choir I have belonged to, the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic Society, founded in 1853. I have also had some scintillating and musically most satisfying evenings, and would perhaps single out a performance of a seldom-heard Victorian warhorse, Mendelssohn's Elijah - 'Hear our cry O Baal' and all that. I'm sure you all know the feeling: you've thrashed the piece to death, but the bookings aren't promising, and the orchestra is average. On the night, the hall is full and it all zings along beautifully. You even forgive the conductor his or her sarcasm and black looks.
I feel my age when I hear that something I kicked off as an adult is having its 50th anniversary. But it's a thrill to be here tonight, to help celebrate with a choir which has chalked up so many wonderful concerts, and continues to do so. Like Belshazzar the king, we have had a great feast - Gaudeamus, Hear our Cry, and Hallelujah!
- Rodney Wetherell
Talk reproduced by kind permission of the author