Founded in 2013, The Fourth Choir decided to celebrate our tenth anniversary season by launching a campaign to raise funds to record our first album: “Songs of Ourselves” is the result.

Our first challenge was to find songs that were “of ourselves”, songs with which we felt a connection. Our Musical Director, Jamie Powe, searched long and hard for works that would represent The Fourth Choir, both musically as an a cappella choir and politically as a choir that supports equality and diversity, with particular reference to the queer community.

We were also interested in exploring pieces that had never been recorded before and most of the works on this album are being recorded under studio conditions for the first time.

The Fourth Choir has always felt drawn to performing music by underrepresented composers, voices that struggle to be heard due to marginalisation and prejudices – homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny. It is an exciting time therefore that so much music by underrepresented composers is now being heard.

Two of the tracks on this album were written by nuns from the Italian Renaissance. The all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, for whom Vivaldi wrote many of his compositions, may be the best-known example of musical excellence in religious institutions for women but, more than a century earlier, various Italian convents were famed for their music-making and some of the nuns who created that music became celebrated far beyond their convent walls.

One of those women was Raffaella Aleotti (c.1570 – c.1646), the maestra di cappella of the Convent of San Vito in Ferrara which boasted an ensemble of 23 singers and instrumentalists, conducted by Aleotti. A renowned singer and organist as well as a composer, her collection of choral motets, published in 1593, was the first sacred music by a woman to appear in print. Surge Propera Amica Mea is a setting of a text from the Song of Songs, an erotic love poem which has somehow found its way into the Bible and which blushing clerics tell us represents divine love.

Caterina Assandra (c.1590 – after 1618) was a composer and organist at the Benedictine monastery of Sant’Agata in Lomello, near Milan, who published a collection of motets in 1609. Her setting of Salve Regina for two choirs is from her second published collection, now sadly lost. The edition used for this recording is based on a later reprinting of the original which was itself incomplete, missing one of the soprano lines which the editor Francis Bevan has reconstructed.

The third piece of Renaissance music on the album is Allor che ignuda, a madrigal published in 1562, not by a nun this time, but by Vicente Lusitano, born in 1520 in Portugal and believed to be the first Black composer to have his music published.

The Fourth Choir has from its outset commissioned new works which speak to the queer experience and we are delighted to include two of our commissioned pieces on this album.

Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself powerfully embodies the values of The Fourth Choir and we asked the Canadian composer Stuart Beatch to set an extract from Whitman’s poem to celebrate the Choir’s fifth birthday in 2019. Beatch says of the commission: “Song of Myself is one of those special works, directly inspired by the ensemble for whom it was written. This piece highlights the strength inherent in the text, beginning and ending with repetition of the words ‘I am’, eventually transformed into a statement of empowerment: ‘I am enough’.”

Coincidentally, Wild Nights – Wild Nights!, the second commission on the album was also a birthday commission, written by Kerry Andrew to celebrate the Choir’s tenth birthday and first performed at a Fourth Choir concert at Milton Court in London’s Barbican as part of a programme of works written by women and non-binary composers. Kerry was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson, another great American poet and contemporary of Whitman’s who, like him, blurred the boundary between sensuality and sexuality to the point where it need no longer exist for the reader.

Women poets also provided the inspiration for two more works on the album. All three of the Brontë sisters are quoted in I Am My Own by the Indian-American composer, Shruthi Rajasekar, and the Canadian composer, Marie-Claire Saindon, was inspired, not only by the words of Mahvash Sabet and her poem The Imaginary Garden, but also by her life. Sabet, who is a prisoner of conscience in Iran, is a member of the Baha’i faith, a persecuted minority religion in Iran. She was a schoolteacher before she was arrested in 2008 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment on false accusations of spying. While in prison, she smuggled out her poetry, one line at a time, on napkins and paper towels. She was released in 2017 but rearrested in 2022 and sentenced to a further 10 years in prison. And although at the time of writing Sabat remains in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, her poem speaks of how the spirit can soar and spread a message of love, even from behind bars.

The remaining two compositions on the album see two young LGBTQ+ composers reacting in different ways to nature and the climate crisis. The setting of Psalm 46 by the Welsh composer, Derri Joseph Lewis, celebrates nature by portraying the long journey of rivers flowing together into the sea and has an optimistic message – “we will not fear, though the mountains tremble, though the waters roar”. In contrast, the American composer Cooper Baldwin’s composition, Libera me (as embers singe the tide) creates a terrifying vision of a world in flames. Baldwin intermingles text from the Latin Requiem Mass with statements from the 2022 United Nations IPCC Report on Climate Change, then adds his own words describing a world “shrouded in smoke”. It is the voice of the younger generation who want “to laugh, to hold, to love” and Baldwin instructs the Choir to stamp its feet with fury as the piece culminates in a shout of outrage at a “future ripped away”.

The works in this collection cover a multitude of themes and musical styles and we offer this album as just one glimpse of the riches to be gained from mining the hidden seams of underrepresented voices.