The Heathens

Spring is in the air here in Blackheath and it certainly has arrived in Chris and Mick’s garden. The magnolia tree we gave Chris last year to say thank you for all her hard work, has blossomed. Here is a picture. We are also looking forward to singing in the beautiful gardens at Chapel House in Rydal again!

Thank you to the organisers of the 2016 Blackheath Choir festival. It was bigger and better and created a fabulous vibe around town.

And a personal thanks to our fabulous choir director – Chris Wheeler – whose amazing energy, talent and confidence inspires us to sing our best and have fun doing it. Thank you xx.

Practising…practising…and getting very excited about this fabulous festival coming to our town.

Hey Heathens – check out the link below to see the restorative powers of group singing!

http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-wellbeing/sing-it-loud-20160415-go7lve.html

Sing with others. Group singing has been proven to release “happy hormones”. It is also a natural antidote to feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Sing shamelessly. When you sing out loud, musical vibrations move through you. Singing produces satisfying and therapeutic sensations even when the sound produced by the voice is of average quality.

Stay focused. Group singing requires complete attention on breathing and vocal activation. A good choral workout can be as effective as a group-led meditation.

It was a terrific night of fun and singing with all 3 choirs and Canon Fodder. A big THANKS must go to Tim Kaye for organising yet another great night and to everyone who volunteered to help put this annual fund raising night together. It was great to see everyone dress up and get into to theme of OFFBEAT. Well done everybody!

Get ready for another fun night of singing and quizzing on Friday 10th June. Featuring The Heathens, Phoenix & Vocal Edge with a special appearance by Canon Fodder.

Tickets go on sale at 9.00am on 24 May 2016. Get a table of 8 people together and book early! Tickets are $18 per person and will be available on-line at www.trybooking.com/LLGX or you can buy them at your next choir rehearsal.

This years theme is OFF BEAT! Which can mean many things – so use your imagination, and dress up your table to win a prize! BYO food & drink. Lots of great prizes to be won!

More details will be supplied soon at your next choir rehearsal.

We know Chris reminds us to practise between rehearsals…and perhaps some do! Here are some tips for those of us who don’t…or find it hard to do…

Congratulations! You’ve now been told for the millionth time to practice your music for your next choir rehearsal. But if you are someone who hears that and thinks, “I don’t play piano. I can’t do this without someone helping me,” here are some ways you can practice on your own and improve your singing.

Grab your music and a pencil. Many of these steps can be done in a public place. No need to head to the practice room (stop using that as an excuse).

1. Start with the text. Make sure you know what you are singing. Think about the text. Find a translation if it is in another language. Write the poetic translation above/below the lyrics. If you want to go deeper, use a translation site to translate word for word (especially if there’s a word that you sing over and over again. You should know what that specific word means). Do you know who wrote the lyrics and why? Can you put the piece into historical context?
2. Listen to a recording. We live in a time of unbelievable access to recordings. Find them. Listen to more than one recording and compare them until you find one or two you really like. Follow along with your score. Listen while paying attention to all of the parts. Listen while paying attention to just your part.
3. Analyze your music. How is the piece organized? Does it have sections? Are there repeated parts? Does your part occur in another voice part? Are there key changes or meter changes? Is there a repeat sign/first and second ending/coda? How would you describe the organization of this piece to someone who has never heard it?
4. Find your starting pitches. For every entrance you have, figure out how you are going to find the starting pitch. Maybe another voice part just sang the note. Maybe it was just in the accompaniment. Do you know what note of the chord it is (e.g. I’m singing the root of this chord)? There is nothing worse than “sheep singing” (blindly following what the person next to you is singing). Take responsibility for being able to enter on your own.
5. Don’t just sing through the parts you already know. You’ll be wasting your practice time. Identify problem areas, analyze why you’re having a problem with that spot, figure out ways to solve the problem area.
6. Solve the problem area. Break it down to something you CAN do. Then add something to it. Practice with repetition, but only if you’re sure you’re doing it right! Start with just the pitches slowly (dare I say on solfege syllables?). Then add the rhythm to the pitches. Next, add in the lyrics. Make sure you slow down the tempo the each time you add another layer. No need to practice with dynamics, articulations, and breaths until you have mastered pitches, rhythms, and lyrics.
7. Work backwards to forwards. How many times have you felt great about the beginning of a piece, but completely unsure of the ending? During your own practice time, work on the ending section and progressively add sections, each time going through to the end. If you think of your piece as “ABCDE,” practice E, then DE, then CDE, then BCDE, and ABCDE.
8. Audiate your part. Sing your part through in your head. Do this while you are walking somewhere. Do this in your car while you’re waiting for someone. Do this before you go to sleep. Do this ALL OF THE TIME. (Friendly reminder: Audiating is virtually impossible if there is other music playing. Carve out some quiet time in your life.)
9. Use your pencil. Mark your score while you’re in rehearsal so you remember what was giving you problems. This will save you time when you plan out your next practice session.
10. Just practice. 99% of the time I don’t want to practice. No one does. But 99% of the time, once I start practicing, I get stuff done. I stop when I lose focus or I run out of time. I NEVER regret spending a little time practicing something. Do yourself a favor and make it part of your daily routine.

You have the ability to do these ten things. Do them. You will reap the benefits of being more confident with your part, which will allow you to contribute to the ensemble in a more meaningful way. And your own vocal technique will improve, because you’ll be able to concentrate on how you sound instead of always worrying about how your part goes. You’ve got this.

-Doreen Fryling (lifelong practice avoider)

We are growing somewhat! Here is a photo of us all with some of our new members.  Thank you Tara for taking the photo…and Happy 21st Birthday to Bella – and for giving us the photo opportunity.

Happy New Year! The Heathens are back and Chris has worked hard over the break bringing us wonderful new songs to sing. We welcome our new choir members and really look forward to singing and performing with you all as the year unfolds.

For any new members…we still have copies of our little book which features some members of the choir and gives a little background. Cost is only $5.00 – see Victoria at rehearsals.

Or should I say A BAND! Our final concert of the year with The Blue Mountains City Band was a blast! Thank you to everyone who came and listened and we are proud to announce that we raised over $800 for The Blue Mountains Refugee Group – so thank you! Here are some photos of the afternoon (taken by Paul Burrows).

We are gearing up and rehearsing like mad for our upcoming performances this month! We hope to see you at The Folk Club at the Ivanhoe Hotel in Blackheath on Thursday 3rd Dec at 7.30pm...and we are very excited to be joining The Blue Mountains City Band on Sunday 13th Dec at St Hilda’s Church, Katoomba for a great Christmas Concert (one without carols!). We will be singing songs from around the world in the spirit of Christmas and all proceeds will be donated to The Blue Mountains Refugee Support Group.

We hope to see you there!

The sun was shining down on Blackheath on Saturday 7 November and the town came alive with music, poetry, stalls and of course the parade. Not only did Chris lead The Heathens in two performances, but also sang herself in two of her own performances – what a busy day she had! It was a great day for Blackheath. Here are some pics of our performances in the Gardens and later in the Uniting Church. Don’t we look glorious!

A lovely letter from the organisers of the Rydal Daffodil Show (click on the letter to enlarge) and what a great result for them! We look forward to singing there again next year.

Check out this great article on the wonderful benefits of group singing…

http://ideas.time.com/2013/08/16/singing-changes-your-brain/

Flowers and Heathens must be a match made in heaven. We were invited once again to Blackheath’s annual flower and craft day this year and sang to more flowers…and lovely it was too. Thank you to all who came to listen.

More great photos of our concert at the Rydal Daffodil Fair. Thanks to Tricia’s husband Mike O’Day who took these…

The sun was shining, the geese were honking…and the daffodils were smiling. Thank you Chapel House for having us sing in your beautiful gardens!

Photos courtesy of Paul Burrows.

Come and join us as we celebrate the coming of spring and the colour of happiness at Rydal Village on Sunday the 20th of September!
Daffodils at Rydal, 1pm, Sunday 20th of September, entry fee $10.

We have been busy rehearsing new songs with Henrick to sing at the Rydal Festival on the 20th September. Stay tuned (haha) and we hope to see lots of people there. The Heathens are looking forward to it!

The Heathens have a banner! We ended term 2 with a great party down in Megalong Valley and had our photo taken with the new banner. Thanks Graham McCarter for taking another great photo of us all!

There are a few Heathens missing from this photo as they couldn’t make it on the day unfortunately…but there will be another photo opportunity later in the year I am sure.

Chris will be having term 3 off as she heads up to Brisbane for the birth of her first grandchild. We wish her, Mick and Isabel all the very best at this exciting time.

In Chris’s absence we are looking forward to having Henrik Eneberg as our music director. Henrick is a trained voice teacher, piano player and choir director and currently sings bass with  Canon Fodder. Term 3 starts on 15 July!

The night was a huge success and a lot of fun! The Blackheath Community Hall was overflowing with over 200 people dressed as pirates, pussy cats, mad hatters and even a zebra! Canon Fodder started the music off, followed by Vocal Edge, Phoenix choir and finishing with The Heathens. There were great prizes handed out – thanks to our generous community.

A huge thanks must go to Tim Kaye for having the vision and organising the night…which was such a success that it is surely to become an annual event!

Our newest and youngest member to join the sopranos is Safira. Would she classify as a sopranino?

Are you a trivia buff? Then join the fun – have your trivia tested and be entertained by Blackheath’s three choirs and special guest performers Canon Fodder. Grab your friends and put together a team of 8 people. BYO food and drink – picnic style –  and decorate your table. You never know – you might win a prize for the best looking table. It is going to be a fun night – there are loads of prizes to be won! Tables are selling fast!Tickets are available at Richardson & Wrench, Blackheath.

Chris has checked out the newly renovated Bates Hall – that’s the small hall in the Blackheath community centre, nearest to the Great Western Highway.  Its looking very smart after its new makeover (thanks Linda and the Hall committee) and the curtains tone down the acoustic so it should work very well. There is a kitchen and break out space for our tea break.

So from Wednesday 29th April, Bates Hall is our new rehearsal venue.  Rehearsal times stay the same.

Wow! What a fabulous afternoon.

The wonderful MC, Phil Koperberg, launched the afternoon with great humour and a glowing introduction of The Heathens.

Check out the photos here.

Our first set included Ataturk Tribute which we were a little nervous about, but like true troopers, we pulled off a pretty good rendition much enhanced by the fact that Ian Hamilton, who composed the music, was with us in the audience. How good was that! We sang our six songs and it was said by someone in the audience that …“The Heathens sang with fullness and had matured as a group”.

Then, on came the SSC with Amazing Grace – always a stirring number – but I felt it even more strongly with their performance. Their set included some very well-known numbers and their performance of all was, to say the least, gutsy.

This was followed by a set from The Village Orchestra, Llew and Mara Kiek & Gary Daley. Great musicians, great delivery, stirring music.

After the audience and performers had partaken of a delicious afternoon tea prepared by members of The Heathens, it was back on stage for all performers. There followed a number of songs that were also well-known to the audience who joined in with much gusto.

This concert was definitely one of the highlights of the performances The Heathens have done over the past five years. A good time seemed to be had by just about everybody. A win win!

Contributed by Sandra Stevens

And from our Event Coordinator – Julie Brackenreg…

“Can we do it?” YES WE CAN!! – with bells on!

After all is counted up we will be able to donate to the Street Choir something over $1,000 AND facilitated the sale of $250 worth of their CD’s. What a great outcome – and I think we all had fun doing it – even better!

Thank you to every person in our Choir – we are MORE than a bunch of people who sing together – we are a true community and family who can work together and support each other.

Sydney Street Choir meets Blackheath’s community choir, The Heathens for a shared performance in Springwood on Saturday 11 April.
Sydney Street Choir was formed in 2001 to connect with, inspire and empower homeless or disadvantaged people. For many of its members, creating music together has been a life-changing experience, and taken them to extraordinary places including the Opera House, St Mary’s Cathedral and Uluru. This concert will raise funds to help the choir continue its important work.
Be inspired by Sydney Street Choir songs that mirror their triumph over adversity, together with the Heathens’ selection of folk, world and popular music, with both choirs combining for an uplifting conclusion. Special guests The Village Orchestra, three internationally renowned local musicians.

Tickets $15 from http://www.trybooking.com/HBFI, or from bookshops Gleebooks (Blackheath) and The Turning Page (Springwood), or at the door.

As you can see…we have out-grown our rehearsal space at Banc so from now on rehearsals will be held at the Uniting Church hall in Govetts Leap Road (walk down the drive past the church and through a gate to the hall entrance at back). Usual time 2-4pm but do try to get there 10-15 mins early so we can start on time.

Some folks are saying they’d find it much easier to pay by the term, and of course we can accommodate that. We’ll just keep a note of who’s paid up front. If you’d like to pay for the rest of this term, just put $35 into an envelope with your name and Term 1 on the front.
In future, if you prefer to pay by the term, use the same system – $50 in an envelope, name and term on the front. We’ll have a few envelopes in the tin for your use.

For those who prefer to pay week by week, there’s no change to the usual $5 each visit and no pressure to change.

If you haven’t got your copy … The Heathens Book is available to buy for only $10 at Banc.
It is a beautiful collection of stories of the lives of the choir members. Each story is magical, unique and generously told and collectively, provide an insight into our time and place.

Jan writes …

We certainly spread the happiness at Morven Gardens yesterday. The residents loved our visit.

The book launch and party  at Chris and Mick’s was, despite the noise of the torrential downpours drowning out our singing, a  fun and happy finale to  another Heathens year. For those who couldn’t be with us, we missed you.

Thanks go to Chis for all the work she put in  with us  during the year for us to sound “good”  for our performances.

Thanks too for all involved in producing our beautiful Heathens book.

May we all enjoy a safe and happy Christmas with family and friends and  get our voices ready for Heathens 2015!

“May your voices take springs
there where fire burns.
May your songs put roses
there where battlefields lay.
Open furrow and sow love
to harvest fruits of hope.
Sing to liberty where despot rule,
Sing to equality where poverty nests,
Sing to love where hate prevails.
May your singing direct the world
so that peace takes over wars,
so that all will cherishes earth,
so that all race or color discrimination is banished
so that we will be together as sisters and brothers
so that this planet rejoices with your voices.”

Victoria came across this and thought you would all enjoy.

The Blackheath and District Horticulture Society have invited us back to perform at the Flower and Craft show next year.  Julie O’Keeffe wrote to Chris that “The Heathen’s performance at our show this year in early September was so enjoyed by all our visitors I would like to invite you to come and sing again next year.”

We will be performing at 1:30pm on Saturday 26th September 2015, just after the opening.

Jan writes …

So enjoyed the revue last night and particularly all those “Heathens” who performed!  We are very lucky  Heathens to be surrounded by such talent.

What did touch me though was our Bella singing “Follow the Heron Home” I hope she and Chris will let us  hear it again – it was absolutely beautiful and of course Bella looked gorgeous, quite “The Lady in Red”!

Congratulations to you too Tim for all your hard work as musical director of the revue.

Jan Cutler

Monday 27th October

Meet at the Presbyterian Church at 5:45pm for warm up and short rehearsal.  We perform at or soon after 6pm.  Please wear the usual colours purple, red and black.

See you all then 🙂

The flags flying above you were made during the school holiday art workshops
by children from Blackheath and Mount Victoria.

Thanks from Jo at BANC

Last week we looked at three different types of progression which you can follow in the music, even if you don’t actually read music.

The simplest progression is a musical scale where the notes move from space-to-line and line-to-space and you simply follow the line of notes and go up or down a whole note with each move.  They are not all actually whole notes but your brain is attuned to the major and minor scales in western music so you will do the half tones naturally when they come (though those are the ones which are most often a little out of tune).

Sometimes the notes are spread out in what is called an arpeggio.  In the music we sing this is often the major or minor triad (1st, 3rd, 5th).  Wollemi Pine is a great example of that – full of arpeggios.

The trickiest progression to sing is a chromatic scale where is movement is only a half tone.  In these scales you see a lot of sharps (#) or flats (b) which mean move the note up half a tone (#) or move the note down half a tone (b).

Tony pointed out to me that a great example of a chromatic scale is the Aria Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen – a downward chromatic scale thats fiendishly difficult to sing in tune

I hope you all found the first little tutorial yesterday useful.

Unless I am democratically overruled 😉 I will try to give a little musicology snippet at the start of each rehearsal.

Once you understand your own musical range it helps you to pitch notes within your comfortable range and to prepare your voice when you can see that a note will be very high or very low.

We all have different voices but I have attached the pictures I used yesterday, giving what I think would be typical for each of the voice parts.  Click on the image to make it bigger.

The picture also shows you a useful mnemonic to know the letters for each space on the stave – “FACE” for the treble clef and “All Cows Eat Grass” for the Bass clef.

Next week different types of musical progression.

Mick writes that we have just learnt of the passing of one of our early Heathens, Bob Rowe, after a long battle with brain tumour that caused him to go blind.

Bob was a pianist and singer who became more and more frustrated as he lost his sight. He tried coming back to the Heathens once he was given a seeing-eye dog, but it was all too much.

Bob was an accomplished academic (Newcastle University) and family man, and he will be remembered fondly by those of us who knew him.

All good things come to an end.  Frank has shared with us how singing makes you healthy, helps you to stay well and helps you to heal; how it makes you happy; and how its good for your baby (or someone else’s).  So now lets all take a deep breath …

6. Singing Helps You To Breath

qi – the breath of life

Studies indicate that the breath control required for singing has a positive impact on asthma sufferers, enhancing lung function & helping children stay calm when they experience shortness of breath.

Hospital patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have also been shown to benefit, with improved quality of life. Singing is associated with bigger lung volume.

Breathing can also be an emotional outlet for those with chronic disease.

So whether you are breathing a sigh of relief, breathing to relax or just breathing to stay alive, lets all thank Frank, for a very illuminating series of posts.