The Fourth Choir - Songs of Ourselves (2025) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

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.

TRACKLIST

1. The Fourth Choir - Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
2. The Fourth Choir - Surge, propera amica mea
3. The Fourth Choir - Psalm 46
4. The Fourth Choir - Allor che ignuda
5. The Fourth Choir - Libera me (As Embers Singe the Tide)
6. The Fourth Choir - The Imaginary Garden
7. The Fourth Choir - Salve Regina
8. The Fourth Choir - Song of Myself
9. The Fourth Choir - I Loved You First: But Afterwards Your Love
10. The Fourth Choir - I Am My Own



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