November 2008

Harmony InSpires

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 28th November 2008

On Wednesday I visited the newly-renamed Harmony InSpires chorus near Oxford for a coaching session. They are one of the many success stories of barbershop choruses transforming themselves through running Learn to Sing courses, having more than doubled their numbers since the start of the autumn. If they get many more members they’re going to need to find a bigger hall to rehearse in!

One thing I found fascinating, though, was that coming in as an outsider, I really couldn’t tell easily who were the new members and who had been singing with them for years unless someone told me explicitly one way or the other. Just observing the body language as they sang and the social interactions, there was an incredible sense of consistency and of belonging to the same social and musical world, even though more than half had only joined in the last few weeks.

So I have several hypotheses as to why this might be the case:

Inaugural blog entry

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 26th November 2008

General

As this website has been getting nearer and nearer to being ready to be launched, I've kept thinking that I ought to do a bit of research into what the done thing is for one's very first blog post. But somehow, there have always been more pressing things to do - like getting the arrangements catalogue ready, or uploading cartoons.

The thing is, I don't think inaugural entries get read very much. By definition, the blog hasn't had much chance to build up a readership by the time they appear. So the only people who look at them are the blogger's friends, and people from the future who dig back into the archive to research how to do their own first post.

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