Text 1: The rehearsal that became a concert, by Miriam Cole

An original contemporary magazine article.

The first sign that our Saturday rehearsal had gone wrong was the silence. The community choir had been promised a warm-up room behind the library, but the room was locked, the caretaker was at a football match and forty-eight singers were standing in the rain with their folders under their coats. Our conductor, Len, peered through the window and said, with the calm of a man who had not yet noticed the problem, “We will improvise.”

His improvisation was the town square. A market had packed up early, leaving an empty wooden platform and perhaps thirty shoppers who had stayed to watch the rain. We arranged ourselves in a semicircle. The altos tried to look as if singing in public without preparation was something they did every day; the tenors looked at the sky as if an important message might be written there.

I was holding the music upside down. This would have been a minor difficulty indoors, where only the person beside me could have enjoyed it. On the platform, it became a public announcement. A little boy pointed. His mother pointed too, but at him, which did not make me feel less observed. When Len raised his hands, I took a breath and decided that dignity was no longer available to me.

The opening was dreadful. We began in three different keys and arrived at the first verse at three different times. A dog joined in from beside the fountain, confidently and without any knowledge of the tune. Then something shifted. The shoppers stopped sheltering beneath the awnings. A woman who had been carrying a bag of onions began to sing the chorus. By the final verse, the people watching were singing louder than we were.

Afterwards, Len called it “an excellent exercise in flexibility”. I called it an ambush. Yet as we packed away our damp folders, I found myself hoping the room would be locked again next week. There was a peculiar freedom in discovering that an audience could see every mistake and still sing along.

Text 2: An unexpected audience, by Harriet Marchmont

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1872, a young woman tells her cousin about being asked to perform at a village gathering.

My dear Ellen,

You will scarcely credit the position in which I found myself on Tuesday evening. I had gone to the village hall merely to return Mrs Bell’s book, and was standing near the door when the gentleman who arranged the entertainment informed me that the young lady engaged to play the pianoforte had been prevented from attending. Before I had recovered from my surprise, he had seated me before the instrument and announced my name to the company.

I confess that I wished the floor might open beneath the chair. Every face seemed turned towards me: the curate’s solemn beard, three children sharing a plate of cakes, and an elderly gentleman who examined me through a pair of spectacles large enough for a telescope. My fingers trembled so that the first notes resembled the tapping of a woodpecker upon a roof.

A few persons smiled, though I cannot say whether at my performance or at my terror. This uncertainty made matters worse. I played on, fixing my eyes upon the music and pretending that the room contained no one at all. When I reached the second piece, however, I heard a small girl whisper, “She is better now,” with such plainness that several people laughed, including myself.

From that moment I looked up. The company was no longer a wall of faces but a collection of people listening, and an old farmer in the front row nodded in time as seriously as if I were conducting a military band. At the conclusion they applauded with a warmth that quite overcame my earlier alarm. The gentleman declared that I had rescued the evening. I replied that the evening had first attempted to rescue itself by sacrificing me.

I shall not volunteer for such an adventure again, Ellen. Nevertheless, if the pianist should be absent next Tuesday, I hope someone will remember to send for me.

Compare:

• how the writers present their changing attitudes towards performing while being watched
• how each writer turns the experience into an entertaining account for the reader

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