Author Archives: Emma Ahmed

Singing Near Each Other, at last

Christmas during Covid

I was so grateful that we managed to sing near each other on this Saturday afternoon before Christmas. Following the rules for outdoor performance, each household stayed 2m apart. We looked over the wonderful vista of Sheffield to the north as the sun disappeared, and sang ten Christmas songs together.

The sound was not as rich as when we stand shoulder to shoulder, but it was unified and musical. We ended up with quite an audience – I could hardly believe how many people were there when I turned round. I think it was a mixture of people who had come knowing we were performing, and people who had stumbled across the event and just stayed. They certainly seemed very appreciative and it felt like we had shared something worthwhile.

We started off in unison, just to see how it felt, and gradually people started adding a little harmony here and there. By the end there was a real appetite to recapture the joy of singing in four parts, so we plunged into a rendition of our favourite Christmas song, Hail Smiling Morn. Miraculously, it came back to life in a way that astonished me. People moved to stand near others who sing the same part and, with no rehearsal for approximately 360 days, the song appeared. It is amazing, and moving, that songs we have learnt well, live in us in a physical way – your brain may not be sure it remembers, but when you start to sing, the words and music fall into your mouth. We’ve all heard and seen examples of people suffering from dementia, sometimes having lost the power of speech, recapturing songs they learnt long ago.

Here’s another picture featuring two of my grandchildren.

Singing at the Cinema

Saturday 7th March 2020 at 2pm

We’ve not worked with a cinema before but we hope it will get people’s attention and bring live a cappella singing to a new audience.

Sing Away the Blues

Videos from Sing for Samaritans

On Sunday 20th May we joined five other local choirs for “Sing for Samaritans” – a celebration of vocal music supporting The Samaritans. It was in the Memorial Hall of Sheffield City Hall, which had a lovely acoustic. It was a fantastic event and we loved taking part. The choirs varied in their style and choice of songs – some had backing tracks and some had matching T-shirts, some even did CHOREOGRAPHY! They were all great – i love watching and listening to other choirs, and we like singing to other singers. The other choirs were the U3A A Cappella Singers, Love to Sing Ladies, Sheffield Singers, Rock Choir and the brand new Samaritans Branch Choir.

Here are four mobile-phone videos of the songs we sang:

Iqude

This is How it Feels

Nanila/Golden Slumbers

Don’t Worry, Be Bobby!

A Grand Day Out

: School trip photo

: Spring by Tony Cragg

: Sound of Music photo

: Tony Cragg – Hedge

: Tony Cragg – Minster

: Hailing a taxi photo

: Demonstrating our superb choreography once again

: Are Carfield Choir hiding somewhere in the Copper Sulphate Room?

Here are some photos from our fabulous day out at Yorkshire Sculpture Park on Sunday 25th June. It was lovely to enjoy the combination of gentle landscape, uplifting architecture and brilliant, intriguing art with our choir friends.

We had decent weather and a tasty lunch too. With minimal rehearsal we sang on the promenade above the formal garden – for our own pleasure really, but it was very pleasing that people stopped, listened, and even applauded.

Marvellous Millennium Gallery

On Saturday we sang at Sheffield’s iconic Millennium Gallery, to support and raise awareness of the Refuge/e installation. AMP-Art have transported a real shelter, one of those issued to Syrian refugees arriving in Lebanon, and erected it in the gallery space. They give us a chance to walk through a real space, listen to people’s voices, look at their stuff.

Everyday things – shirts, plates, baby’s bottles, boots – have been frozen in time by being cast in plaster and brass. I liked this touch, and I liked knowing that it had taken quite a time. It seemed to add a layer of distance and respect, this transformation of the ordinary into artefact, so that when as a visitor you walk through the space it is not just walking through someone’s home and staring.

The outside of the shelter is insulated with discarded advertisements – giant photographs incongruous and colourful. The two images on the Refuge/e shelter are a model wearing an elaborate wedding dress, and the president of Lebanon (upside-down). The value of the advertisements is purely practical, in that they add vital insulation.

What should we sing to complement the exhibition? We had already embarked on learning a couple of songs before we were asked to perform and I decided to leave them in the set.

I ended up with a list of nine songs. Two were specifically written in response to the plight of refugees: Alison Burns’ haunting When Death was Behind Me and Kirsty Martin’s resolute Different Ships. We sang the lovely round By the Waters of Babylon (Philip Hayes via Don McLean), about missing one’s homeland, and we revived Ain’t Gonna Study War (Roxane Smith), an upbeat six-part anthem for peace.

We opened with Bambelela (Zulu for “Never Give Up”), and also brought in E Malama (A Hawaiian song calling for love and respect for the earth and sea.

And then we threw our other songs in – Aida Idem Jano, where we sing in the voice of a Bulgarian youth persuading his girl to come to the fair, and The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More, which went down well with the audience and had a poignant edge in the context. (“Emptiness is the place you’re in, Nothing to lose, and no more to win…”) I have name-checked the other songwriters so here’s to Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe, who wrote this beauty along with many other classics – most of the Four Seasons’ songs and the wonderful “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You”.

We finished the set with a new addition – I’m Gonna Lift My Sister Up, by Faya Rose Toure, who as well as writing a great song, was the first female African-American judge in Alabama. It’s simple to learn, easy to improvise harmonies to, and can be rousing or gentle. I love the simple twist in the lyric – not just saying that your loved one is not heavy, but “If I don’t lift her up, I will fall down.” Sometimes being strong for other people is what keeps you going.

You don’t have to sing like a lark

Robin in an apple tree

“The woods would be very silent if no birds sang but those that sang the best.”

I love this little quotation so much I’ve got it on my business cards. It sums up what I’d like to convey to people about singing in particular, and music in general. Just because someone else does it better is no reason for you to give up – or never start. Birds sing because they want to tell other birds they’re alive.

Sometimes I go on courses and I’m in a room with a whole bunch of other people who earn a living through music. One of the most noticeable things – every time – is that during the introductions a lot of people will say of at least one area of music “I’m not very good,” and admit during the tea-break that they feel very aware that other group members know more, play better, or have nicer voices. Music is such a vast ocean of experience – all the genres, the instruments, the technology, the different cultures and histories – that even if you do nothing else for years you can only paddle in a small corner. Sometimes it seems that the more you learn, the more you become aware of the size of the ocean you know nothing about – so the most skilled musicians are often the most humble.

tyne-kittiwake-chick-ian-cook-webcrop-1360x680

Kittiwakes in Durham

Kittiwake is the name of my business. Kittiwakes are one of the gentlest of the gulls – not aggressive like herring-gulls and the vicious great black-backed. They have a call which is incredibly distinctive but not praised like the lark or the nightingale. They live on the wild edges of Britain, laying their eggs on the narrowest of cliff-ledges. There are kittiwakes colonising the Tyne now (thank you to Eileen for telling me about them), finding little ledges on buildings like these in Durham, and they call from underneath the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.

In Pembrokeshire they thrive alongside pilgrimage birds like puffins and Manx shearwaters, birds that people travel hundreds of miles to see, and nobody notices the kittiwakes very much. But they sing their individual song and without them the whole seascape would sound completely different.

Some birds are lucky enough to be born a nightingale, or a lark, whose songs we humans like the sound of. Some are like the great tit, which sometimes produces really tuneful little scraps of song but spends most of its time sounding like a squeaky wheelbarrow. That’s not going to stop it singing.

Some of us humans have the genes that give us a melodious voice, or a wide vocal range, or the sort of brain that learns tunes quickly. We all have a voice which is individual, unique to us, and precious. And we are lucky enough, like the mocking-bird and the parrot, to be able to learn other people’s songs too.

The hopes and fears of all the …

Not the years, but the choir members, have been shared with each other over the last fortnight.

I asked people to share one thing they’d like to do with the choir one day, and one thing they hoped the choir would never do – with very interesting results.

choir-vision-and-values Click on this link if you want to see the whole list. I was interested to note that some of the things on the hopes and fears lists were things we have actually done. We have sung songs from a show, and done some actions, which were both on the fears list – so is this a plea never to do such things again? Or did these comments come from people who have joined the choir since we did them?

There were some lovely ideas about future events – some which would be quite easy to organise, like a walk and a picnic, and some which would take more effort, like an exchange visit. Several people wanted to do more concerts where people actually listen, rather than us being (ignorable) background music, which is a marker of our increased confidence. Importantly, there was nothing that I felt was completely out of the question, nothing “over my dead body!”

When it came to the “I hope we never…” I was very pleased by a couple of people just finishing the sentence with the word “close”. Some of the most popular statements underlined our key values of accessibility, inclusiveness and welcome. I too hope we never have auditions, wear a uniform or take part in a competition.

So one thing to consider with the more ambitious Hopes is that they will not be accessible to all our members. A trip abroad would need money, and time away from home, and a passport, and the ability to undertake a long journey. Some of these are already limiting factors when we just go to somewhere in this country for a weekend with Street Choirs. And doing a significant new experience together, away from home, is very unifying – so the people who don’t come might feel left out or that there is an “us and them”.

Our core activity is singing together. What the choir does is sing together on a Monday night in a school hall in Sheffield. Anybody who comes along and shares this activity is one of us, part of the choir. The other things – the performances, and trips, and parties and committee meetings – are optional extras.

Not averse to Verse

Merely Poets are a duo, one of whom sings in our choir. The Mere is from Meersbrook and the -ly from Heeley, (for foreigners, the former is our little patch of Sheffield and Heeley is the patch next door) so perhaps it’s really Meerley … hey, that rhymes!

Anyway, Linda and Cherry have been writing Poems to Go, on any subject requested, and Linda has produced this lovely tribute to the choir..

Merely Voices

for Liz Nicholas and Carfield Community Choir

A voice can be a whisper in the night

A murmur of intriguing titbits on the bus

An angry joust of hot opinions

Or a demanding question -rise and fall,

But in our neighbourhood, in our school hall

We warm our voices in their fullest ranges

We stretch our voices and our knees,

We form a circle of our highs, our lows

We sing in tongues from many lands, some understood,

We sing in rounds, for we’re not squares.

And then our MD brings our glory out-

With wit of her arrangements

The beauty of our four or even six parts

And we tell stories with our harmonies,

And sing the world, and each of us to rights.

I’m not going to analyse it to death, but I particularly love “We form a circle of our highs, our lows” and “sing the world, and each of us to rights” which capture the healing quality of singing with others.

Mock-Tudor

Every so often somebody asks us to perform somewhere and it requires a certain repertoire. We generally have a repertoire that rolls around, a mixture of songs old and new – I mean this in both senses, things we’ve sung for ages and things we are learning for the first time, and songs that were written last year or hundreds of years ago. Learning from a couple of experiences, I am now reluctant to learn a particular song for a particular event or even one particular person if I don’t feel we’ll use it again – because that means 30+ people putting in a great deal of time and effort over weeks or months.

However, when we were singing at the Walled Garden in May, someone came along from the volunteers at Bishops’ House, a brilliantly preserved half-timbered house at the top of our park. (See the photo above.) She asked us if we could sing some Tudor songs for their Autumn Fayre in October, and I thought, why not?

It falls on the same day as Apple Day, which is celebrated across the park in the Walled Garden. This year we had a BIG concert on 3rd September, and then this little window of 5 rehearsals before the twin feasts of Apple Day, at the bottom north-east corner of the park, and the Tudor fair at the top south-west corner. What could we do in five weeks?

First of all, what have we got in the back catalogue? We learnt Greensleeves four years ago when other people were getting giddy about the Diamond Jubilee, so that’s on the list.

Many people believe Greensleeves was written by Henry VIIi, but apparently it is definitely after his time – though it is still Tudor. And then there is Non Nobis Domine, a lovely chant we learnt in the very early days of choir and it sounds ancient. I re-scored it for three parts when we had no reliable men in the choir but we had not sung it for years and it would be nice to go back to the four-part version now that we have a strong bass section. With a minimal amount of Googling I found that this was as Tudor as 1988, written for the Kenneth Branagh film of Henry V. Still, on the list it goes. (The battlefield scene where it is played is utterly heartbreaking- have a look on Youtube).

What is quintessentially Tudor? Why, Shakespeare! Let’s find a traditional setting of a Shakespeare song. “When that I was an a little tiny boy” from Twelfth Night, for instance. There is an old tune to this which is used in all the “authentic” performances – but I now discover the tune is by Joseph Vernon, 1738-1782. Not Tudor. Not even Stuart. Definitely Georgian. But it’s very Shakespearean, so we will add that to the set.

We are adding in a couple of rounds which were definitely a-round in Shakespeare’s day (Hey Ho, Come Follow, and Gaudeamus Hodie) and also Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, without which no Apple Day would be complete.

And finally, Henry VIII was a real musician, and did write songs, probably the most famous being Pastime with Good Company, which we are singing in three parts. It is not hard to believe the words were written by a famously wilful and high-living king; a brief paraphrase would be, “Having a good time is good for me, and anyway, who’s going to stop me?”

So our Tudor set is a mixture of real and fake, but overall I think it conveys a historical atmosphere and is, crucially, both fun to listen to and to sing.