TOTAL CHOIR RESOURCES SUPPORT FORUM

In 2024 Inner Wheel will celebrate 100 years. I am hoping to put together a choir from  members throughout Great Britain and Ireland for a Convention at Manchester which will be attended by members from all round the world. (Inner Wheel began in Manchester when 27 Rotarian wives started a Club for women. It is now present in 109 countries.)  There will be approx 2000 attending. For the closing ceremony we thought it would be nice to feature music, song and dance from all four cultures of Great Britain and Ireland. Hence a  choir. Can anyone suggest songs for SA to represent each corner of GB and I? I think there will be 30 to 40 in the choir. However, logistically the practices will be difficult to hold. I think we will only manage two live practices as potential choir members have signed up from Kent and places in between up to Aberdeen. Hence, deciding to just have two part harmony. I’d be interested in suggestions.

So I've been running my choir for over five years now and it's going well. However I have a little friendship group ( two or three people), in one section, who are very vocal about their dislike of the warm up. Mostly I've dealt with it by being  upbeat, explaining the purpose, making sure I keep it bright and varied, using the analogy strategy like not expecting to do a marathon without warming up. But hey it still continues.  I'm feeling it's actually disrespectful and that probably by allowing it to be handled and accepted as light hearted banter, I have 'made a rod for my own back'. Having just revisited your difficult situation training I'm feeling having deliberated that I need to take action. Any suggestions of how others have dealt with similar or other ideas would be gratefully received.  Thanks .

I wonder if anyone has any advice to offer regarding helping people who are singing wildly out of tune in an open door community choir...? I have been seven years leading 2 open door groups and this is the first time that somebody's voice has been noticably way out of tune. It's an elderly gentleman who is thrilled to have found the choir and is very enthusiastic. He has only attended one session as yet but i feel the need to intervene fairly rapidly as he is already impacting the sound and the enjoyment of the other singers. I'm not sure if this is something that has been discussed already at TCR but would value any advise on how to tackle this situation sensitively and professionally.

Hello :-)  !

I am  very new in conducting and in community choir work, but still I decided while traveliing to Nepal later this year, to do a month long community singing project with children in Nepal.

Are there any recommendations in this platform which I  may have not seen? :-)

Do you have any good recommendations (website, songs, activities etc..) for this kind of project?? (where language is a major issue ) 

I am already doing my research and collecting african songs, call response songs, ice breakers, music games, but as I am not experienced in this, I would really appreciate any suggestions,  resources, books, songs and practices that you have seen  that work well, while working through music with groups of kids that don t speak the same language.

Thank you very  very much! :-)

Any help is deeply appreciated ! 

Kinga 

Hello. I had some helpful feedback about children and safeguarding from my last query - thank you. Please can anyone advise me about the need (or not) for children who are performing with a choir to have a licence to do so? My community choir (which out of around 30 members currently has just one child) is hoping to include performances from a very small local children's choir and a beginners' brass band (mostly comprised of children) in our Christmas concert. 

The band leader has shown me a form from a band website which indicates that children who perform at an event for which the audience pay for tickets or make donations and/or which is held at licensed premises must all have a licence to perform. The band leader and the leader of the children's choir should make arrangements for their own groups if necessary, but where do I stand on this with the one child who attends the Community choir, always in the company of her mother? 

Any help would be really welcome, please!

Thank you very much.

Alison