Love Singing is a community engagement initiative produced by Love Music and aimed at promoting and supporting creative, healthy singing communities across Scotland. Available for all choirs to access free of charge, it has launched five new songs for choirs across Scotland and beyond, formed through 5 new collaborations.
Love Music’s community choir at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh tried to find creative solutions to the challenges of singing together online and staying connected. The success of their first online term led to the concept for this national Love Singing project, which was to provide a structure to support and engage with the wider community singing sector during difficult times.
After a national call out to meet online and challenge each other with the aim of each making a new song relevant to our times and beyond that could be shared with others, five community choirs from across Scotland were chosen to collaborate with five professional songwriters.
With many community choirs existing ordinarily as isolated units, without the support or input of other choir leaders or organisations, the collaborative process in this project of getting together to learn from each other and exchange knowledge in the learning process gaining skills in the song writing challenge has been a blessing.
Now the songs are being sent out into the world, free for choirs and singing groups anywhere to use, with all being supported by a host of tailor-made easy to access musical resources, videos and audio. As many choirs are still meeting online, there are music scores formatted for screen sharing, as well as piano lead sheets and audio backing tracks to use in practice.
The songs, that are challenging yet accessible, have learning resources to provide support for online as well as in-person teaching. Their arrangements provide a starting point for choirs to make them their own as they are written to be flexible and easily rearranged for different voices.
The five choirs involved in the project are Lanarkshire’s Stonehouse Male Voice Choir; Sing Mor, a singing collective in the West Highlands; Falkirk’s Freedom Of Mind Community Choir; Perthshire’s Earnsong, and Fochabers Community Sing.
All the choir videos can be found at: https://sing.lovemusic.org.uk/songs and their learning resources can be found here: https://sing.lovemusic.org.uk/resources.
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 