Since its founding, Sydney Chamber Choir have been fierce advocates not only for the great choral music of centuries past, but also of the modern choral tradition and composers writing today. Artistic Director Sam Allchurch walks us through the repertoire for their next concert, Innocence & Experience, which draws on these two rich veins of material, and argues that in music, as in life, it is contrast and comparison that is so much more rewarding than binaries and forced dichotomies.

Sydney Chamber Choir Artistic Director Sam Allchurch

Sydney Chamber Choir Artistic Director Sam Allchurch

The concept for this concert is borrowed from the masterwork of William Blake, the Songs of Innocence and Experience. I became intrigued by these poems at high school where a profoundly gifted English teacher opened these works to my imagination. While their structure might initially suggest that life is dichotomous – either innocence or experience, either love or hate, either good or evil – the poems really suggest that more often than not, it’s a case of ‘both, and’ rather than ‘either, or’.

Here then was a useful way to explore two pillars of Sydney Chamber Choir’s musical...