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| Lesley Lear has an honours degree from Huddersfield School of Music (West Yorkshire, England) and, for three summers as a post-graduate, attended classes in singing, composition, piano and conducting at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy. She then taught in English schools for 17 years, co-writing musicals for performance and inspiring and encouraging many young people to enjoy making music. Following that and until recently, she taught adults singing, piano and guitar, and she still coaches for, and accompanies, performances. For 15 years, she was musical director of Leeds People's Choir, composing and arranging a large proportion of their a cappella repertoire, and she is regularly invited to conduct Come Sing Handel's Messiah at St. Mary's Church, Whitkirk, Leeds where, on 27 October 2007, she conducted a Come Sing of Fauré's Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine as well as selected choruses from Messiah. |
| Gilly Fordham trained as a drama teacher at Dartington College of Arts (Devon, England) and taught in London schools for 11 years. Then, following a year spent travelling England's waterways on a narrowboat, she lived on a commune in Shropshire for 4 years, co-running a smallholding and wholefood shop, and after that, for 13 years, at Laurieston Hall (Housing & Workers' Cooperative) in south west Scotland where, as well as smallholding work and cooking for large numbers of people, she organised and ran music-based holidays for up to 80 people at a time, played and sang in an international folk dance band, gained a wealth of experience in facilitating conflict resolution and group decision-making, and took some time off to become an Assertiveness Trainer. She's now a listening volunteer with Samaritans, has trained as a mentor to ex-offenders and is enrolled on Relate's Couple Counselling course. |
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| The two of us co-lead weekly term-time sessions
with the Otley
Singers
and
regularly provide new arrangements for their repertoire. We rarely teach songs solely
by ear, preferring to demystify written music by providing the opportunity to
learn to read
it, and believing
that
everyone should have access to this
universal language.
We don't
expect people to be able to read music,
and we always allow time for the parts to be learnt by ear, but it's
our experience
that if singers look at the written music while they're learning
songs by ear, most will, after a while, find that they're following the
music
and that they have, perhaps without realising, learnt at
least the rudiments of reading it. We believe that the emotional and physical benefits of singing, especially group-singing, are enormous, but asserting that 'everyone can sing' doesn't help people who believe they can't sing find access to these benefits. It's unlikely they'll have the confidence to join a choir, however informal and welcoming it is, and for 3 years we ran successful courses for small groups of 'Beginner Singers'. We're taking a break from this sort of work and pursuing different avenues for a while. |
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Primrose
Music, Baildon,
West
Yorkshire,
UK
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