A Feast of Choral Cartomancy is the latest offering from Horsham Chamber Choir promising a programme partially decided by tarot cards.
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00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Answer for Sussex Newspapers. Now, Horsham
00:06Chamber Choir have a concert coming up on Saturday, June 22nd, and as always under Timothy
00:12Peters, it's going to be something rather different, rather challenging. You've presumably
00:17never quite done a concert like this, and that'll be the same for the audience.
00:21Yeah.
00:22Tarot cards are the answer to this. Now, how on earth does that work? You've got the programme
00:27partially decided by tarot cards.
00:29Well, yeah. So, I always, I'm trying to think of original ways of doing concerts, and whether
00:38that's through the music or other artefacts in the room, like lighting and acoustics and
00:44things like that, those are pretty standard. But I've wanted to do something with tarot
00:50cards for a while, because we've got this rolling folk tradition series going on.
00:56Yeah.
00:57I thought that would fit in really nicely. So, we had a folk traditions last year. But
01:01then, obviously, how tarot works, and why it works as sort of a form of introspection
01:10is it's spontaneous, you don't know what cards you're going to get. And I thought that would
01:14be a really interesting way of doing a programme, sort of semi-spontaneity programme.
01:19So, you have a lot of different options, but which one you go for is decided on the draw
01:25of a card?
01:26Exactly. So, what I've done is, I haven't got every single card for a single piece of
01:32music, because the choir would kill me, because that would just be unattainable to rehearse
01:37all that music. So, I've sort of categorised the cards through, there's two main decks
01:43in tarot that I've learnt. You've got the major arcana cards, you've got the minor arcana
01:47cards. And so, we've matched up the major arcana cards, which is just over a deck of
01:54cards as we'd know it as playing cards. And sort of three, two, three or four cards at
01:59a time, I've paired with a piece of music. So, you can pull those cards and we do a piece
02:04of music. And basically, the way it works, if one of those cards comes up again, we skip
02:10that piece of music and move on to the next one.
02:12So, what's the ratio of selections to possibilities? How many pieces are you not going to do because
02:19they won't be pulled?
02:20Yeah, exactly. So, well, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine
02:27pieces prepared for the first half of the concert. And there are 18 cards that can be
02:34pulled.
02:35So, it's one and two then?
02:37Yeah, yeah. But the categories don't quite line up like that. We've sort of got some
02:42four to one, some one to one.
02:44And tell me, correct me if I'm wrong, and I've probably completely misunderstood tarot
02:48cards. I've always thought of them as being something sort of strange and sinister.
02:52Yeah.
02:53And something that you really wouldn't want to let into your life, the fear of objects
02:57whizzing around in the middle of the night. Is that completely wrong?
03:02Well, so this has been the fun of researching it because I came at tarot from, I think it
03:09was during lockdown, to be honest, because the person who's joining us, Mouse Teeth,
03:14Nancy Dawkins, she's doing the tarot card readings. And she's a friend of a friend.
03:19And she was hosting these online readings. I mean, everyone's just sort of trying new
03:26things in lockdown, weren't they, online? So, I signed up to one of those. And basically,
03:31it completely changed my mind. It was almost just a form of guided meditation.
03:38So it is wrong to think of there being something inherently sinister.
03:41Yeah, so that sort of turned the corner for me. I was like, okay, so maybe this isn't
03:46what I think it is. I did some research. And it was only one tiny point in history, and
03:51a group of people who adopted it as part of like, sort of divination and occult. But the
03:57history is, it was just a playing card game. And then throughout Europe, it was used for
04:02different things. But mostly, it's just been a parlor game. And then pop culture...
04:06And you're returning it to that, in fact.
04:08Yeah, so we're going for the more introspective, meditative sort of side of things. And so
04:15Nancy will be up the front, guiding the entire audience through a reading, as she pulls a
04:21card. So it'll be, this is the strength card. This is what's going on in politics today.
04:28This is how people are feeling about the economy. Here's how strength can relate to you. And
04:32then we perform The Road Home by Stephen Pauls.
04:35And if people feel instinctively sceptical about this kind of thing, presumably it doesn't
04:39matter. You just go with the flow and enjoy the performance.
04:42Exactly. We do have, I've done a really big sort of spiel about it at the start of the
04:48programme. Sort of breaking it all down and addressing people's sort of concerns with
04:56it. And there are like, well, I won't lie, when we tried to book one of the churches,
05:01they said, nope, we don't do that. So we've been trying to find sort of avenues for discussion
05:08for this sort of thing. But I mean, what's been nice with the choir is, I've said these
05:15in these interviews before, they let me sort of guide them through these sort of more challenging
05:19sort of art forms. And I think that's what art is for and what music is for.
05:27Is it no longer enough to do a straight concert? Or is this you being you?
05:35It's mostly me being me, but...
05:36But that's fair enough.
05:40No, I mean, there's not enough funding going around for artists and musicians. And if we
05:47were a fully professional group, it would have to be breaking so many boundaries and
05:53all be completely original. We couldn't just do stuff that people know and love.
05:57So in the great run of things, you have to try to get noticed, don't you?
06:01Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
06:03Brilliant. Well, this sounds a fantastic way of doing it. So good luck.
06:08Let me talk a little bit more about the second half, if that's okay.
06:12We've got this. This is the first half, really, is mostly the tarot stuff. But Nancy Dawkins,
06:18who's doing our tarot, is also a poet and musician. And she's just released an album
06:24about tarot card stuff. And so the second half, we did this last year with some musicians.
06:31The second half is basically her doing her album. And I've written some backing vocals for a load
06:36of her songs. So we've got this first half of the tarot card. And the second half is going to be a
06:40very entertaining singer songwriter sort of style set. So we've got this choral vibe in the first
06:47half. And then I'm going to argue, it gets a kind of cinematic rock vibe for the second half.
06:53So the choir have got that sort of turn of the corner for them in the second half as well.
06:58So we've got quite a lot on show for that evening. Yeah.
07:03It sounds fantastic. So it's on Saturday, June the 22nd at the barn in the causeway,
07:09Horsham, and tickets are available through the Horsham Chamber
07:13Choir website.
07:14That's right. Yeah.
07:17Thanks so much. Cheers.