Blog post #46 - ChoirKate - Part 6

VoxSynergy! Yes well, talk about a crazy ride! Some will dredge the name up from Battle Of The Choirs, but that was actually the tail end of years of exploration, growth, KateSongs and all sorts.

Melbourne Youth Music asked me to come on board when the conductor of their Swing Choir left. Back on the block after my Canadian sabbatical still waving the flag of an Australian Voice unique to who we are, I said that I would caretake to tide them over but really I wasn’t interested in conducting a Swing Choir.
Not my bag!
MYM were fantastic from the word go saying that I should do whatever I felt was the right thing for their small group of talented young singers.
So it was that I began building them musically and vocally, not really knowing what I meant by an Australian Voice, but following the hunch that our sound needed to be vibrant, passionate and malleable as we explored the idea.

One Saturday after rehearsal very early in the piece, I was visiting Phil (yes, hurray for Phil!), but I was uncharacteristically early and he wasn’t home. So I took myself off to a cafe and sat down and wrote Synergy!
Yes, my second KateSong turned up just like that!

“Through the years songs were made, songs were sung to brighten up each hour,
Melodies found harmonies and filled fainting hearts with power,
Soon the song began to grow and other voices sang,
And together they wafted skywards, ‘til the bells of heaven rang.
Synergy, working together,
Synergy, the sound of our song,
Synergy, our energy united will be strong.”

So it was that in the reworking of the name of this group VoxSynergy was borne. Our accompanist, Rebecca Hicks’ idea. Bingo!
And grow it did.
It wasn’t long before before we realised we needed a younger group to feed into the original ensemble who were upper high school and uni age.
So we had VoxMajor and Voxminor for a while and then as more and more kids came into the program and the original group were by now scary in skill and taking the world by storm, we made that top group VoxSynergy, retaining VoxMajor for the middle teens and Voxminor straddling upper primary and preliminary high school years.
It was HUGE!
Shout out here to, Rebecca Lang, Prue Jury, Vicky Jacobs and Phillipa Safey whose expertise and brilliance gave so much to all levels of the VoxSynergy program.

MYM hosted some fabulous festivals at The Edge, Fed Sq where we had multiple choirs join us in performances of themed music. Festival Luna, AquaFest etc etc and I started weaving songs together with segues and theatrical devices so our audience never had to endure the tedium of trudging entrances and exits.
And all this time I was writing and arranging music for them, tailoring things so we had quality, singable songs which were not only KateSong originals, but also reworkings of music from multiple eras and from around the globe.
So it was for instance, that for AquaFest we had a processional of Holst’s “Water Clear, Water Pure” to enter. The kids were wearing T-shirts of varying hues of green and blue and I have it on good authority that it looked like a growing stream and river as they processed down the steps at The Edge.
Aficionados may realise that the 140 or so kids were walking in 5/4 time!
Ha! Here’s an idea and off we go!
“River of Love” was the finale item for AquaFest…..

Running alongside this, I was the choral director of the Melbourne Girls Grammar chamber choir. So, I was writing for them too. They were a regular guest choir for the MYM festivals, as were Curtis Bayliss’
top ensemble from Melbourne High School.
You had to be there!
It was insane and yes, whilst I was brimming over with ideas, tripping over myself to make it all work, timetabling those Saturday morning rehearsals down to the last second, it did take its toll on all aspects of my health.
I had cancer, pneumonia (nearly died from that)and off the scale anxiety!

Andrea Gaze and I were running the Stacey Trust through all this too. VoxSynergy appeared in our Stacey Morning Melodies at the Concert Hall and sang the Trust’s theme song, “Make Our Garden Grow” in the final 2006 Stacey Night which wound up a decade of fundraising.

VoxSynergy (by now you realise that that stellar bunch were the top group of three) were put forward for the ABC’s 2007 Choir of the Year competition.
One of our number was over 21 and so it was that we had to be in the adult section of the competition. Yet we were clearly a Youth Choir! So we lost out to Concordis.
But on the strength of that performance we were invited to present on Sunday Live at the end of 2007. Here it was that “Stealing” had its debut performance.
The ABC also wanted us to make an album, featuring KateSongs and discussion was well under way about that.

By now we had the 2008 Battle Of The Choirs nipping at our heels. Channel 7 were really keen for us to do it. We umm’d and ah-ah’d for weeks about it until it was Alli Kitching who said, ‘come on guys, it’ll be fun!”
And the other thing was that despite the huge success of the VoxSynergy program we were under threat of being cut by the Department of Education, so it was also a bit do or die in that respect.

So off we went to Sydney on the bus (12 hours there and 12 hours back) for the preliminaries and then again (12 hours there and 12 hours back!!!) a couple of weeks later for the finals.
In between we had our annual Festival! Well, I had the rest of the kids to consider and had we not got through the preliminaries, we’d come home deflated and all the other kids wouldn’t have their annual jamboree, so we went ahead with it.
My stress levels were through the roof.
Even so, when VoxSynergy’s arms raised in that exquisite plea singing “in the arms of the angel, fly away from here…..” well……
https://youtu.be/_SuaOY19-oY?si=nsSn6OTcpY2xZ2Ip

(Yes, that would be Raph Wong who blew the world away with his rendition of Advance Australia Fair at the Boxing Day Test last year!)

I don’t know how those kids did it. All those charts were given to us to sing, so we were learning them on the hop and the choralography idea was new to us too and none of it was useful for our Festival, so they were completely immersed in multiple song and of course part learning, for weeks on end. Heaven only knows what their schools and unis thought about all this!

It was after we had signed up that the choralography was jumped on us, as was the “enticement” of the winners making an album. I remember thinking, “well I’m pretty sure the CD Universal Records (woohoo!) will want us to make won’t be the CD I want to make!”
(I was so right about that!)
I was so proud of my kids! They just acquitted themselves with such dignity, joy and love throughout the whole show, both on and off camera. Bless their dear wonderful hearts.

Remember the backdrop to everything for me was to embody what it meant to be Australian, musically and vocally. VoxSynergy had sung Britten’s “Rejoice In the Lamb,” and my arrangement of Allegri’s Miserere, adapting the words of Desiderata into the soaring loftiness of the music; and all manner of KateSongs, the sing-song KateSongs and Kate’sOtherSongs; Stealing, Ngapartji Ngapartji, and Song of the Upanishads.
For me then the crowning moment was when they sang “You’re The Voice” in the semi-final of Battle Of The Choirs.
https://youtu.be/augn7m8dtuU?si=JNOzHypwJn8rFaSU

We didn’t win, but I didn’t really want to because I did not want to make that apparently tantalising CD that we would have to make.
As it was we made the CD I wanted to make with the ABC and a sponsor stepped forward to keep us going for another year so we could sell that recording.

There’s a lot more to this bit of the story which was really difficult and stressful - it broke me really.

However, it happened and apart from the pivotal song of “Angel,” every song on that album was Australian AND it included Stealing and Ngapartji Ngapartji.

Now really - woohoo!

Now I need a drink! Kxx

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