Health, hope and happiness

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This is my wish for us all in 2021.

In March last year, I would not have believed that we would still be unable to have our normal choir rehearsals after ten months. I remember hearing at the beginning of lockdown about an organisation putting their sessions on hold for 12 weeks and thought it was excessive. A way of living that seemed unimaginable has become the norm. We are fearful of touching people, which is sad. I watch TV and almost wince at the casual handshakes and hugs we used to take for granted.

I am grateful for many things, not least that I live with someone I really like, and our house is big enough for us to work in separate rooms. Our youngest child was here from March to July, struggling with trying to do drama school online and missing her friends but we didn’t have to cope with young children at home. (From July to September her boyfriend joined our bubble and we were a happy foursome.)

We have a fantastic park on our doorstep and woods nearby, so we can walk or run from the door and see greenery and hear birds. The elderly relations we cannot visit are healthy and well cared for.

When I heard people saying, a few weeks ago, “I can’t wait for 2020 to be over”, I felt uneasy. It was as though the troubles of the past months were the calendar’s fault. Once the number of the year changed, everything would get better. We were hanging our hopes on “next year” being the time when we could return to a more familiar way of life. But of course it doesn’t work like that. January 2021 is just the week after December 2020, and the hoped-for changes, like the vaccine, will take time to happen.

The only way to live through 2021 is one day at a time. We need to look after our own health, eating right and sleeping plenty, spending some time outside every day. It’s important to try and connect with other people, however we can, and not get stuck in our own heads. Try to be optimistic. It’s very difficult not having the usual milestones of holidays and celebrations to look forward to, but Spring will come and babies will be born and puppies will be adorably naughty.

Music can help us weather the storms. Whether you listen to Debussy or Daft Punk, music fills your head. Let your body feel the music and move about. Don’t be shy about singing along. Much of the music we love brings memories of other times in our lives, and the people we knew then, which is another dimension of enjoyment.

Why not try learning to sing a song you love? It’s easy to find lyrics for almost anything on the internet. (I have to warn you that you almost NEVER know the song as well as you thought you did!) Or you could revisit songs you’ve enjoyed singing in choir.

What about writing your own song? If you’re not confident about making up a new tune, use a tune you already know.

Whatever 2021 has in store, I wish you peace and harmony.

Singing Near Each Other, at last

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Christmas carols in Meersbrook Park, 12th December 2020

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

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There’s a film coming out about choirs being a GOOD THING.  Hooray! We heartily agree.  It’s “Military Wives”, loosely based on the real Military Wives’ choir set up by Gareth Malone in 2011.  I haven’t seen it yet – I don’t know if there’s a Gareth character in there – but it’s got the lovely Kristin Scott Thomas in it, which is usually a sign of quality.

To publicise the film, we’ve been asked to sing at The Light cinema on Moorfoot in Sheffield city centre:

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

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I have finally edited the recording of the wonderful “Sing Away the Blues”  concert at the Cathedral in February 2019 and here are our five songs and Thina Simunye, which we sang with everyone else at the end.

I hope you enjoy them. It’s live so there is a bit of audience atmosphere and joining in too.

Thanks to Andy for recording.

  1. Caravan of Love

2. Fear Not the Pain

3. Bambelela

4. Give Me Birds at the Dawning

5. Don’t Worry, Be Bobby

6. Thina Simunye

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

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

 

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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.

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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.