Choir to produce online singing workshops

The Brunswick Women’s Choir has been awarded a significant grant by VicHealth to develop and deliver a series of online singing workshops in 2011. The workshops will be available as video files for streaming or download via YouTube and our own website for no charge. An audio file of each song will be recorded in constituent parts (alto, soprano, tenor etc) for download, and the notated music will be available in PDF, also for no charge.

The public health benefits of singing and community arts participation are well-documented. The project aims to improve individual and social health through singing as a group activity, and to extend these benefits to those who may otherwise be unable to participate in a community choir due to distance, socio-economic circumstances, or physical health.

Further, the project will contribute to the important work of sharing and keeping alive a significant Indigenous language, Yorta Yorta (originally spoken in Northern Victorian/Southern NSW around Echuca), as some of the repertoire incorporates the Yorta Yorta language.

Choir member Jenny Reed was the creative dynamo behind the grant application. She says, “In December 2009 I was casually perusing The Age newspaper when I spied a little advertisement for a new grant from VicHealth. It was for innovative projects relating to social connection, the arts, and new technology. I immediately thought of the singing workshops we’d conducted at festivals and as part of our New Zealand and Central Australian tours, and what fun we’d had. I imagined doing online singing workshops with some of the songs in Yorta Yorta that Lou Bennett had written with and for us, and other songs in our repertoire, maybe starting with easier songs and graduating to more difficult ones. Anyone in the world could go to YouTube or our website to download the music, words, and audio files and then participate in a multimedia workshop either at home or in a community setting. Each module could be repeated until the songs were learnt. It would increase people’s social connections and mental and physical health through the shared group-singing experience. We feel very lucky to be the recipient of this grant!”