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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 singers for performances and auditions. 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 Sings at St. Mary's Church, Whitkirk (Leeds 15, UK) - the next one is Vivaldi's Gloria and Handel's Messiah choruses on 27 February 2010. |
| 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 at Crabapple, a commune in Shropshire, for 4 years, and after that, for 13 years, at Laurieston Hall (housing & workers' cooperative) in south west Scotland, where 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 group decision-making and conflict resolution, and took some time off to become an Assertiveness Trainer. In West Yorkshire now for 12 years, she recently trained as a couple counsellor with Relate and as a bereavement counsellor with Bradford Bereavement Support, and now works as a volunteer counsellor. |
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| For 8 years the two of us have been musical directors of the Otley
Singers, regularly providing 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 who wants it should have access to this
universal language.
We don't, though, expect people to be able to read music: we always allow time for the parts to be learnt by ear, and 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: in the past we've run several courses for 'Beginner Singers' and we're now setting up a new choir for women - Noteworthy Women - in Baildon (Bradford 17, West Yorkshire). Autumn 2009
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Primrose
Music, Baildon,
West
Yorkshire,
UK
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