A historic day was experienced today in the Basilica of Montserrat with the performance of the first choristers in more than 700 years of history of the Escolanía. The mixed choir Schola Cantorum, made up of 29 voices of young people between 17 and 24 years old, of which fourteen are female, sounded for the first time.
From now on, it will do so one weekend every month, replacing the traditional children’s choir, whose members, children aged 9 to 14, will rest and thus be able to spend more weekends at home with their families. This was precisely one of the demands of the parents of these children, who until now had only six free weekends each school year. Now there will be ten.
The creation of this mixed choir, which as Father Abbot Manel Gasch recalled this afternoon at the vesting ceremony of the new choirs, was a decision “thought about, worked on and voted for by the monks,” was also a social demand.
“To the extent that this social need has existed, Montserrat has known how to respond, we have not had the feeling that a wrong was committed, but rather we have followed the social sensitivity of each moment,” explained, shortly before the debut, the choir director Pau Jorquera, who is also deputy musical director of the Escolanía.
One of the young women who was looking forward to that moment is Mireia González Espelt, 18 years old and a resident of Barcelona, ??who is currently studying a piano degree at Esmuc.
With two brothers who were escholars and another currently active, he admits that he lived with “a certain envy” his formative stays in the monastic enclosure. “I saw it as luck and a privilege because of the spiritual, human and musical training they received there, it is something very beautiful that I also wanted to be a part of,” he acknowledges.
Unlike the 44 children who will make up the children’s choir this year, who live mostly on the premises of the Benedictine compound, the members of the non-professional mixed choir will only meet one weekend a month to rehearse and sing.
In total there are about thirty members of the Schola Cantorum, which will begin its regular service on the weekend of September 23 and 24. All but one of the male singers in the choir had been escolans.
The mixed formation will sing the Salve Regina and the Virolai, at the vespers service on Saturday and at the conventual mass on Sunday. Today, before a full basilica, they premiered with the interpretation of the Magnificat, written by the monk of Montserrat Manuel Guzmán in 1882, performed by two soloists and the choir.
A choice that was a declaration of intentions of the line that this new formation will follow. “We have not chosen to sing Brahms, Bach, Mendelssohn or Schubert, our task will also be to recover that musical heritage that we have in Catalonia and in the Montserrat Library, to make it known and make it available to everyone,” said Jorquera.
The director, who together with the Father Abbot of Montserrat, described today’s day as “historic”, recalled that there is a lot of music written by teachers from the Montserrat school for mixed choirs that until now the traditional choir could not perform alone.
Although the objective of the new choir is not to offer concerts, Jorquera recognizes that they have already had an opportunity to sing outside of Montserrat and that they have ruled it out for now. “At the moment we sing in the basilica, at the service of pilgrims and all those who come to Montserrat,” she explains.
The date chosen for the debut of the first female voices in Montserrat was the dress-up ceremony for the seven new choir boys who are joining the children’s choir this year, which this year will be made up of 44 students. The new additions are five children who will start fourth grade and two more who will join sixth grade.
The abbot of Montserrat has exceptionally presided over the ceremony of imposition of the cassock and roquete, the same clothing that the members of the mixed formation also wear. The event closed with the union of the voices of the two choirs performing the Virolai.
