Conducting for Harmony

“The lyrics are untranslatable but the song is so beautiful,” says Nuria passionately. She is talking about Com un arbre nu, a Catalan song by composer Lluís Llach. Accompanied by Matt, she sung it to a rapt audience in Bharat Nivas during a concert in March. “Singing, especially in my native tongue, is one of my ways to recharge my battery,” she explains, “But I also vibrate with these lyrics.”

Recharging is a must as she has a very heavy workload. That started early, shortly after she joined Auroville in 1991, when she became conductor of Auroville’s choir. Not that she had much experience to speak of. “My father was a choir conductor, so naturally all his children were part of his choir. But as a child I found the conducting business boring. Moreover, you stand with your back to the public, so where is the fun in all that?”

That all changed when Pushkar, who had started the Auroville choir, had to leave Auroville for a few months. He asked her to help out in his absence, and she agreed. But soon after he came back Pushkar announced that he would leave Auroville for a few years. “He asked me to take over the choir. I said no. And I said no again to one of the singers, who then went on a personal crusade to convince me to take it up. She kept begging me. I finally agreed to try it, on the condition that if it didn’t work, I would stop. ‘Yeah, yeah, no problem,’ she replied. That was the beginning ...”

Two years later she also took up the children’s choir. It was June 1995, right after the performance of Beyond Asleep and Awake, the children’s opera that Holger had composed and conducted. “I had been in charge of training the children and the soloists. Some days after the performance I was having lunch at Bharat Nivas and Holger was there. I walked up to him and told him, ‘Look, if you want, I can take over the choir’. His eyes lit up. ‘It’s all yours!’ he replied, very relieved.”

But the conducting gene was slow to manifest. “It was hard going,” she remembers. “When you don’t have any experience and little knowledge and you have a group of 30 amateurs in front of you who you must make sing, it isn’t easy. I was quite young, my English wasn’t all that good, and although things were going quite well, for about two years I was not sure of myself. Was I really being accepted by the adults or were they just being nice to me? Did they like the way I was doing things? For I was doing something I never had done before. Moreover, I am a perfectionist, so there were many tough moments. Often, I went home after a rehearsal feeling quite uncertain.”

Working with the children was easier. “There are fewer voices, mostly two, maximum three, instead of four in the adult choirs [sopranos, altos, tenors and basses, eds.]; and the music is lighter. Kids are also more flexible and learn very quickly. I was already teaching recorder, guitar, music appreciation and singing at Transition primary school, so that job was less demanding as I had the skills to handle children.”

The lack of knowledge and experience was compensated by her passion. “That pulled me through,” she reflects. “I started to gain self-confidence, liking it more and more, and decided to continue.” Help came. Over the years, four professional choir conductors passed through Auroville. The first was the father of Aurovilian Gilles Boulicot, who taught her some conducting essentials and gave her books and scores. “I started to study the books and used the choir as the testing-ground. My qualms about this were silenced when, on a holiday in Europe, I chanced upon a book written by a female choir conductor. ‘The best way of learning’, she wrote, ‘is having the choir in front of you every week’. This was exactly what I was doing, so I felt very encouraged.”

While Gilles’ father kept sending scores, other conductors turned up. One was Orpheus, a Dutch composer. Another Dutch choir conductor passed through, for a few days only, “but just talking to him opened up a world.” Then came Eugeen Liven d’Abelardo, a Belgian choir conductor and composer who became a Friend of Auroville and who stayed in Auroville a few months at a time. “I asked him to teach me. He agreed. After seeing my first rehearsal, he commented that I was a natural but had no technique. That was a bit shattering. ‘But it doesn’t matter’, he assured me. ‘For if you have the first, you can get the second’.”

Eugeen taught techniques and provided many scores. Soon he agreed to work with the choir himself. “I became his assistant, doing the vocal warm up and making sure everybody knew their parts. That worked well for two years, but then stopped being satisfactory. I took a sabbatical, Eugeen continued alone with the choir, but after a year handed the baton back to me.”

What finally confirmed her conducting skills was a conducting course she attended in Spain five years ago. “I learned many techniques and people corrected my mistakes. More than ever before I became aware of the basic requirements for being a conductor: to be very well prepared, to know the music down to your fingertips, and to know what you want from the choir. Now when I conduct, I am not even aware anymore of the public; I am all there for the music. I’m totally into music. More than ever, conducting is my sadhana.”

She elaborates. “In fact, everything I do in Auroville I take as part of my yoga. But working with the choir is a beautiful tool to create human unity. There are now 50 singers in the choir. They may not relate much to one another or even may hold opposite views and opinions, but when we are singing all that disappears and something of a higher level shines through. Perhaps this is because of the way I take this work. For me, the main reason to conduct a choir is to provide a space for self-expression through refined choral music, to create something beautiful and of quality together, in harmony, and through it, work on human unity, in fact on another level.

Has her choice of songs anything to do with this? “Not really,” she muses. “When it comes to choir music I have a preference for Western classical music from all time periods. But I also like to do gospel songs, folk songs, songs from musicals, and popular music, as it provides a good range of music for the choir.”

Is she bothered by the often religious texts of Western choir music? “Sometimes,” she admits. “I had a Roman Catholic upbringing and had to struggle to liberate myself from that influence. I do not like to reconnect to that past through this type of music, or even manifest it here in Auroville. But, on the other hand, most of that music is so marvelous and uplifting and extremely well composed. How can I say ‘no’ to the music of Händel, Bach or Vivaldi? And even if I feel uncomfortable with the texts, many others in the choir are willing to take the texts for granted as the music is so grandiose. There have been proposals to change the texts, but that doesn’t really work. This music has been composed for those texts, so we had better leave them untouched.”

Over the years, conducting two choirs and teaching at Transition became more than a full-time job. “I stopped singing for myself and started missing it. For, as a musician, you have to keep working on yourself. You cannot just give out; you also need to recharge the battery.” Three years ago, she decided to stop teaching music in the school as it had become too demanding for her voice. “It took me two years to do so, as I liked it so much. Instead, I have started teaching Awareness Through the Body which is less tiring for the voice and also interests me a lot. Now I have time to work with a group exploring modern songs, like those of Lluís Llach.”

Like a bare tree, as a drawing made in the wind, like a bare tree, I, the bird. As a sea port, silent world, love nest, as a sea port, I, the ship. The infinite all at once and the absolute silence.