Every Wednesday evening I head up to Swarland for an hour and a half of complete merriment with this wonderful group of people – no matter what sort of mood I’m in when I set off, it never fails to put me in, or maintain and improve, a good mood.

We spent the first half of the year learning new repertoire and trying to find a date when everyone was available for a concert of our own. We were successful on the former, but not the latter, so maybe next year!

Some of our new repertoire included some much trickier songs – always very rewarding to master something that at first seems unattainable, eh?! We gave most of these new songs an outing at a joint concert in July with our friends in Fiddlezonly and the Alnwick Pipers’ Society in Swarland Village Hall.

One of these new songs was my pal Chris Marshall’s Minoi Minoi, a Samoan folksong. What we found tricky were the lyrics in Samoan – a language that is so completely unfamiliar to all but one of us. Anyway, we’ve got it now, and you can see from this video that by July when we performed it, we were fairly confident – confident enough to look up and dance along!

Another of our new trickier songs has been Unsquare Dance by Dave Brubeck – no difficulties with the lyrics here as this was originally an instrumental work, so lots of ba ba baas and do do doos. No. The trouble here was the timing – it’s in 7/4, you see, which is why it’s unsquare! Anyway, the only song of ours that was recorded at the concert was the above segment of Minoi Minoi, so we recorded a few other things at our next rehearsal, including this one!

By the way, if you like this arrangement of Unsquare Dance and would like to sing it with your choir, the scores are available here!

Another of our new songs was Tourdion – easyish music but…in French. Anyway, we can master anything these days!

Our full set list for this concert was: Salsa Salsa; Rosebud In June; The Wellerman; Unsquare Dance; Lovely Day; Keep You In Peace; If Ye Love Me; Did You Not Hear My Lady?; Minoi Minoi; Tourdion; Hoolets In The Woods; Crossing The Bar; The Miner’s Dream Of Home; Goodnight Sweetheart. We sang this lot in two sections, and it represents nicely our wide range of styles and also a goodly mixture of old and new (to us!) You can read the programme notes if you click on this!

After a break during August, we were back with lots of new songs again in September. I also resolved to take more photos of the choir as there were hardly any in the first half of the year. Writing now in December, I’m not sure I’ve kept up very well with that resolution, but I started reasonably. Here they are singing Moonfinches with some moon pics and a couple of from that first rehearsal back!

We had another performance outing in November, again with Fiddlezonly, and again only one song was recorded, so here’s a bit of that one with a few photos of the occasion!

Our full set list for that one was: Salsa Salsa; Blow, Blow Thou Winter Wind or Did You Not Hear My Lady?; Ride The Chariot; Rap Her Te Bank; Crossing The Bar; Jacobstowe Wassail; John Kanaka; Queen Of Waters; The Wellerman. We had to go back to some much older repertoire in three parts for this one as we were greatly reduced in numbers, but Queen of Waters, a very lively shanty by Nancy Kerr, was a new one for us, and we’ve also been learning Gathering Up The Roses, which is in a barbershop style, a couple of Renaissance pieces (O Vos Omnes by Croce and Weep O Mine Eyes by John Bennet) and a New Zealand folk song, Totara Tree.

We’ve abandoned all that towards the end of the year as we prepare Christmas music for a mini-concert of our own, which was last night (11th December) and also for an appearance next week at the Northumberland Woodland Burials and Crematorium Christmas Memorial Service. Here’s a snippet from last night’s concert with some photos by Jamie

2015 promises some new experiences for us with hopefully our own concert at some point, rumours of two more performances – one with a “WW2 songs” theme and one with a “Latin America” theme. I’m also in the middle of writing them some new songs using lyrics Annie has written about owls. Also, Carmen has lent me a CD of Romanian songs to select something from, so maybe by this time next year we will be able to tick another language off our list! Whatever we end up doing I know it will be joyous and full of laughter – a complete treat.

More stuff about Swarland Voices:
Swarland Voices – The Story So Far
Swarland Voices in 2023

Stop Press!
As I type this, the following has come in following last night’s concert: “We had some lovely comments afterwards. One elderly and somewhat disabled lady said that she couldn’t tell me how much she had enjoyed the evening and how much it meant to her. Another said it was so nice to sit, relax and not think about anything and enjoy your beautiful voices. Comments like these make it all worthwhile.”

Indeed!