mcheckley
New User
Aug 12, 2009, 7:28 PM
Views: 4042
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Thriving Village Church Choir seeks further personnel
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I am inspired to try this as part of our "marketing mix" by the success experienced five years ago in the rehoming of a wonderful organ which, due to church redundancy, was facing the builders skip. A vast volume of internet-based communication eventually resulted in the movement of the instrument to CHINA, where it has enjoyed a new lease of life.
So, here goes.
The Choir of Holy Trinity, Belbroughton with St. Mark, Fairfield has grown over the last ten years.
We now comprise:-
Six small boys (all trebles)
Seven teenage girls (6 Sopranos, 1 Alto)
Nine Adult Sopranos
Two Adult Contraltos
Three Tenors
Three Basses
Then we have three teenage "organ scholars" (at various levels of development, one being pretty well "the finished article") and little old me.
It's UNBALANCED - we need more Altos, Tenors and Basses. The top line has grown whilst the rest of the Choir has remained static. We always welcome all comers, of course, but ATB is where we are struggling. We shall probably have more children in the new term (we have two Church Schools in the parish and one secular School, and all are very co-operative) so we will get even more unbalanced if we don't get more ATB.
We're a typical, old-fashioned English Village Church Choir such as you might have found a-plenty even ten or twenty years ago, but much harder to find, sadly, these days. Our average age is neither young nor old, but we include in our number the very young and the very old and all stages in between. With one or two notable exceptions we're not musically literate. Our repertoire is the simple end of the Cathedral repertoire. Sung Eucharist most weeks, Choral Evensong once a month or thereabouts, traditional hymnody, anthems range from Byrd and Palestrina to Wesley and Stanford, with the occasional negro spiritual thrown in for good measure. A LOT of acapella singing. Very few of our singers have any musical training - we "learn the notes" round the piano on a Friday night. We're totally comfortable with teaching complete beginners.
We've got a little group on Facebook that we don't do enough with - http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=17619191618 - we'll be doing more with it shortly. We've got a little concert coming up in September - http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=100850819182&ref=nf . There is stuff about the village and the Church(es) to be found at http://www.belbroughton.com/
We're competent as what we are, we can be good on our day, even very good on occasion, but we're never going to reach the very highest standards week-on-week, nor would we wish to because that could not be done without excluding many good people from our number - including the Director! Our Congregation love us and are hugely appreciative. We take ourselves seriously (but not too seriously) and we do our best. Some of us like Beer. There is good Beer in the village. We would not be a suitable place for serious / quasi-professional singers who want to sing to cathedral standards every week. We are VERY MUCH the place for people who enjoy singing or would like to find out if they enjoy singing.
My thought was this. There must be LOADS of people who would like to sing with us if they knew we existed. Sure, you need to live in Birmingham / the Black Country / North Worcestershire to be able to get to us, but if we put the word out in the right way, essentially asking people to mail their contacts to mail their contacts to mail their contacts etc etc and got a "chain" going, we'd be BOUND TO reach the right audience by the monkey and typewriter principle. It's not that we need to recruit 100 people - half a dozen would make the world of difference.
The choir, of course, is currently in recess, and reconvenes Friday 4th September, 7.00 pm (6.30 for the children).
So, would you good people on this fine list be kind enough to begin the process ? Just TELL EVERYONE. I'm hoping that chains of communication along the lines of someone tells someone in California who tells someone in London who tells someone in Australia who tells someone in Birmingham whose auntie might be interested.
I can be contacted by email at Mark.Checkley@Quintadena.com, and the UK phone number is 0121 451 1186.
See what you can do, folks, and I'll post details of any response to this list for general encouragement.
Kind regards
Mark Checkley
Director of Music
Holy Trinity, Belbroughton with St. Mark, Fairfield.
Diocese of Worcester.
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