Blog post #47 - ChoirKate - Part 7 (nearly done…)

I was really quite at sea after the storm of VoxSynergy. 
Exhausted from it. 
I didn’t really want to go near a choir again, but you know, I was born to do that choir thing particularly, so when my friend Ophelia asked me to fill in for her contemporary choir in 2010, I obliged. 
I had a bit of fun there, but wasn’t ready for any greater involvement. 

In 2011 I didn’t have a choir. 
However, at the end of that year I was one of four Australian composers to present selections of my music at a PrintMusic Works choral reading day. The others were the late Harley Mead, Paul Jarman and Mark Puddy.
It was such a scary day for me! 
Like the Choral Conducting thing, it took a while for me to realise that actually I had the Choral Composing thing going on too! (Duh!)

PrintMusic Works had taken me on for digital publication and I need to mention here the tireless work of David Wilson who fixed up my scores so they were fit for purpose. 
I had been learning the ins and out of Sibelius on the job and so many of my scores were frankly laughable!
More recently, I am self published and now there’s even a catalogue of Learning Packs, so the singers can singalong with Auntie Kate to learn their parts!

Still I did write, “Sing Like There’s No Tomorrow” in 2011. I remember it well, although that was a slow burn compared with others. But I have sharp recollection of walking down Liddiard St. in Ballarat for my next round of adjudication at South St, when the middle 8 came to me….
“When Ludwig had his trials,
He’d his quill and skill employ,
Defying all the odds he faced,
He gave us his Ode To Joy.”

Those lines still make me chuckle all these years later!

And mid-year I took the Women’s Choir for the festival of choirs headed by my friend Jonathon Welch so Sing Like There’s No Tomorrow had a premier and I also composed my Hymn To St Cecilia especially for that group. 
That whetted my appetite a little, so when the job at Canterbury Girls’ Secondary College came up, I thought, “well, I know how to do a girls choir.” I had done workshops and adjudicated comps where these girls had been mega stars having been trained by the inimitable Beryl Nagorca for many years.

The girls were every bit as fabulous as I believed them to be and I entered into another period of prolific writing and arranging. Significantly, I arranged Eddie Perfect’s “A Place By The River” for Cantabella. 
Such a special experience hearing him sing it in Hamer Hall, hearing the beautiful harmonies interweaving even as he sang; and then the follow up, his generosity of providing me with resources so that it was effortless. 
The girls did a stunning job and I’m thrilled that the chart has now had a ten year life and been sung countless times at festivals and jamborees across both the high school and community sector. (I snuck in an optional baritone part so it’s super user friendly)

https://youtu.be/sEWKXuLFEoc
(I put this together when we went into lockdown. Lucky for me this was within my exercise parameter)
Gorgeous solo by Eilish McGregor

“Where Everything Is Music” was written in my Cantabella period. My friend Heather was much on my mind for by this time she had been diagnosed with the cancer that would take her from us. She loved the poems of Rumi and I recall her reading his ecstatic Where Everything Is Music to me on my birthday. Late one night I was awake in the wee hours (you can imagine I do that a lot!) and with her in my thoughts I sat up and jotted down a little rhyme on Rumi’s theme.

The next morning I taught a couple of students and was just about to cross the floor from my piano to the computer when I found myself lingering, my fingers itching with something…..then I started to play, then I remembered that I’d penned a poem in the night and out came the song, done and dusted by lunchtime!
https://youtu.be/Uwc6wKN37WQ

I was with Cantabella for three years and we gathered  quite a fabulous collection of repertoire as the time rolled by. 
Time for another album! 
Kindly sponsored by the Australian Elizabethan Trust keen to support their alumni, Gorgeous Girls became something of a trump card for me.
Understand, that the ABC’s directive for the VoxSynergy album did come with the proviso that they wanted to capitalise on Vox’s popularity on Battle Of The Choirs, so whilst I tucked a couple of my more esoteric KateSongs in there, the overall flavour was contemporary.
With Gorgeous Girls I had total artistic say over the whole project.
By this time Sue Webster was on my block. At the time she was studying digital design and had a keen eye as a photographer too. 
So our cover was, well, “gorgeous” and the liner notes and images outstanding. 
Gorgeous Girls was the opening track, an arrangement of mine of two old songs, Greensleeves and Douce Dame Jolie, with a bunch of groovy little riffs thrown in, all kicked off with Indian finger cymbals setting the scene. 
I loved writing it for them and they did a wonderful job.
It’s really hard!!!
Shout out to Dave Newington who was co-producer with me and played on several of the tracks and Jack Earle our accompanist at the time. 

I had all sorts of plans for a treble voice festival to get some mileage out of the album and also share the love beyond the school walls…….
And I’d had fun putting it together so I was all set to roll another three years out and do it all again.
Sadly, my vision wasn’t shared by the powers that be and no interest was shown in what the girls had achieved. 
That was a first for me.
Disappointing.
So that was that……..

But never fear for SOS is near! 
And so’s the end of this epic! Phew!

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