Unlike perhaps any other singing group in the UK, this choir uses songs to breathe new life into lost stories of the past. This means that the repertoire is unique and unusally diverse, created especially to reveal the spirit of very special places. The songs are delivered in glorious unaccompanied harmony with an informal style of delivery and great good humour.

The Musical Director works as researcher, arranger and composer as well as teaching repertoire and technique to the choir. Brilliant collaborators are also brought in to

help, most recently songwriter Tim Dalling, and violinist Bradley Creswick, leader of the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra. Guest workshop leaders, for example, Rowena Whitehead and Lester Simpson, also run special workshops for the choir.

This is a very special choir and the singers make a deep commitment to the singing, attending every week unless they've broken both legs, aswell as taking on in-depth preparation for pretty challenging performances. It works because the satisfaction and pleasure levels are really high too. There's a pride in reaching ever higher standards, and plenty of laughing that goes on every week. There's a lovely, open-hearted team spirit you'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

The choir sings unaccompanied (a capella)in three or four-part harmony. That's challenging stuff – making music out of thin air - but it can be the most rewarding too. In terms of who sings what, rather than the singer being forever labelled as soprano or tenor etc., so that they become ‘fixed' into one part forever and a day, in this choir, the parts of the harmony are labelled high, middle, low etc. In that way, singers are encouraged to extend the range of their voices and develop richer and/or lighter tones in their voices, giving them a greater variety and choice of expressive sound. In general the choir's songs are pitched lower than is usual in western classical music, which goes with the ‘natural', warm sound of the group.

In order to focus on raising the voices together, exploring ways to blend them to create the glorious, goose-pimpling sound of unaccompanied harmony singing, written music is not used, so no-one needs to be able to read music: all the songs are taught ‘by ear' in the traditional way. So singers don't need a vast amount of musical experience or expertise to get the most out of this choir. The songs are always taught in a spirit of fun, at a gentle pace, with plenty of singing through the lines so that you can get right inside the music and feel both confident and comfortable. The lyrics are written up on large sheets before being learned by heart!

To protect your voice, each singing session begins with a gentle warm-up and singers are encouraged to drink plenty of water throughout the evening. Vocal training is included in all weekly rehearsals, mostly embedded in the music (no terrifying solo exercises). The development of strong vocal technique, along with good posture and performing skills is both encouraged and expected, really because the choir has a sense of the beauty it can create when the whole team pulls together and becomes ´greater than the sum of the parts´.

The unique nature of the greatly contrasting songs we sing requires that the singers are invited to use a far wider variety of voice tonalities and colour than those choirs which specialise in one style of singing. This is important because the choir aims to create the atmospheres of different times and places - and that can't be achieved through an ‘all-purpose' voice sound. Being this expressive is demanding but somehow, finding new sonorities and timbre brings the odd experience of finding different parts of the personality that you didn't know you possessed.

Voices with a strong vibrato (wobble) or an operatic quality will need to change to a ‘straight-tone' or folk voice to marry with the sound of this choir, where a ‘natural' sound is used to communicate powerful emotions with down-to-earth honesty. The blending of voices in the ensemble, without individuals being obvious, is a priority. Other choirs choose to have a sound which is a collection of soloists; in this choir the voices are matched and balanced to build a sound that is ‘greater than the sum of the parts'. This in itself can be challenging for some singers – being asked to give up the sense of a separate self, matching tonality and volume to build a coherent group sound. There are, however, many opportunities for both small ensemble and solo singing because the size of performing groups and hence the texture of the sound is varied throughout all the choir's performances. Both learning ‘by ear' and blending the voice ask the sing ers to develop great listening skills. Above all, the sheer quality of the sound that is created through this level of commitment and attention to detail is absolutely beautiful, deeply satisfying, uplifting and moving, and worth every bit of the effort put in to create it.

This is a choir that aspires to national and international standards of artistic excellence; to build a reputation for great work, and to perform abroad.

For further information about joining the choir please 'Click Here'.