Singing with Cantabile d'Eymet: my story

I cannot remember when I first had the urge to join a choir. I think I was drawn to listening to choirs when I used to watch them as a young boy on TV. Then whenever I went to church and there was a choir in the stalls I always felt more moved by the liturgy and the experience.

As a young parent in my 30s I joined a local family choir run by a local music teacher. The children sang the soprano part, the mums the alto and the dads the bass. I loved it. We gave two performances a year. One for the village in the summer and the second was taken around the old peoples’ homes at Christmas. I can still remember my favourite arrangements. There was a beautiful arrangement of Sing a Rainbow, a dramatic version of House of the Rising Sun and a moving arrangement of Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof.

It wasn’t till I moved to France, indeed until after Covid, that I became involved in singing the traditional choral works for choirs, many of them sacred works. Whatever one’s religous beliefs might be the music that composers were commissioned to write for choirs - in those few hundred years before ‘popular music’ allowed them to earn a living away from religion - is truly spectacular. There is nothing more hauntingly beautiful than Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, more dramatic than Vivaldi’s Gloria or more stirring than Handel’s Messiah.

Cantabile d’Eymet has been going for 30 years this year bringing together people like me who have their own love story to tell about choral music. We each bring a different history of association with singing, with music and with choirs, but what unites us all is the pure enjoyment we feel coming together every Wednesday night to try and master for a public performance another challenging but hugely stimulating choral work.

Some of us are experienced musicians. Some like me are relative musical novices who cannot play an instrument or sight-read music but who nonetheless delight in joining with others the challenge of singing a great work.

I hope that Cantabile ‘d’Eymet continues for at least another 30 years bringing joy into the lives of French and non-French singers and to our audiences in Eymet and the surrounding area.

David Cottam is President of Cantabile d'Eymet