Mark Harris MA ACIS ACMI – a biography for Musica Anglicana

I was born in Kent and educated here (www.sirjosephwilliamson.medway.sch.uk), here (www.ccc.ox.ac.uk) and here (www.bbk.ac.uk). My ‘proper job’ is as Deputy Secretary of London South Bank University (www.lsbu.ac.uk), but my chief outside interest is choral and organ music. Read on, if you will, nor falter by the way.

I don’t think I come from a particularly musical family. My paternal grandfather sang in his parish choir in the 1890s and early 1900s and my grandmother could play the piano, but their musical influence on my father was not, I think, very great. What we did have in our house, though, was plenty of recorded music.

What got me into choral singing was joining the Oxford University Gilbert and Sullivan Society for a concert performance of HMS Pinafore. Then a friend suggested joining the Kodaly Choir, a large, non-auditioning choir run by students from Merton College, just as they were starting to rehearse the Verdi Requiem. I joined. And I was hooked, little realising that this was the beginning of the slippery slide into church music!

After Oxford I worked for a while in Nottingham, where I managed to do some more G&S as well as singing with the Nottingham Male Voice Choir and the Nottingham Choral Trust (another large, non-auditioning choir).

I came to work in London in 1987, which is when I first joined a church choir. Oddly enough, it was a Lutheran church choir (lots of JS Bach to sing!) at St Anne & St Agnes, Gresham Street (practically in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral). Not long afterwards I settled in the north London suburb of Palmers Green, where there was a local choir called the Bourne Singers They were looking for new members for The Messiah at Christmas, which seemed reason enough to join. I met my wife through the Bourne Singers and, although the choir no longer exists, they survived long enough to sing at our wedding.

Here’s a link to the website of Crouch End Festival Chorus (www.cefc.org.uk), another London choir I sang with for about twelve years. They’re a very good choir, but too much into contemporary music that I find doesn’t speak to me.

Nowadays my main singing activity is as a choir member at All Saints Church, Edmonton, in the London Borough of Enfield. The church dates back to 1136 and the organ was built in 1772 (see console on right). I’ve been a choir member at All Saints for some 15 years now. I started learning to play the organ in National Learn the Organ Year (1990) and I occasionally play at All Saints. Our choir is not numerous at All Saints, but we’re a dedicated bunch. We can cope with pieces that are in two or three parts (it was a search for such music that led me to Musica Anglicana in the first place). Hence also my interest in writing/ arranging for the ‘SA + Men’ combination. Some of these arrangements appear here on Musica Anglicana.

I also sing with the Harsnett Choir (www.harsnettchoir.org.uk), whose raison d’être is to sing cathedral services. This year, for instance, we sang the services at Norwich Cathedral for a week in August and on single days at Chichester, Guildford and Ely. The fixture list for 2007 includes Canterbury, Rochester and Winchester.