by Penny Stone with Stonehouse Male Voice Choir
Excerpt performed by: Alan McCullough, Andrew Wilson, Bill Grainger, Colin McKinley, David Lochead, David Onions, Jim Peters, Kyle Grubb, Peter Ramsay, Ray Ashe, Richard Mitchell-Lay, Sean Mitchell-Lay, Simon Harkness, Walter Stewart & Wilf Lilley
Access resources for Where There Is Music
Where There Is Music was created by songwriter and choir leader Penny Stone in collaboration with Stonehouse Male Voice Choir. The lyrics were developed out of conversations Penny shared with a core group of singers. She drew upon the sense of camaraderie and community that was evident between them and how clearly they expressed what the choir and its friendships meant to them.
The song is a hymn-like chorale and can be sung as an acappella song or accompanied by brass instruments. We have made a flexible brass score that can be adapted and arranged for available forces and brings a lot of colour to the song. The audio resources are accompanied by trombone quartet.
This song offers some rehearsal challenges, tricky time signature changes, the alternation between swapping the energetic 6/8 passages with its nippy clipped feel and exact dotted rhythms, and the more lyrical 2/2 passages. The trickiest moment is an acappella canonic idea at Letter D. “Where there is music there is my heart” is a beautiful summary of the song’s intention, and as you’d expect with a song for male voice choir, the joy sits in the lush and direct close harmony.