The Grace Darling
Singers
WHEN they first met in July, 1990, the members of The
Grace Darling Singers, based to the South of Manchester, had the intention of
doing "something different" from most choirs. The idea was to gather
together "a bunch of people who want to sing for the sheer pleasure of
singing" and rather than tackling the large-scale works of the cathedral
or concert hall, the Darlings might be able to dust down and share neglected
but worthwhile "non-masterpieces" for the fun of it. And if that
could be doing it for a good cause, so much the better.
WHY Grace
Darling, though? Wasn’t she something to do with lifeboats?
AT
the first rehearsals, there was not a great deal of music to choose from. There
was the Gesang der Moorsoldaten (words / music), which the prisoners in German
concentration camps sang as they marched to and from their forced labour. There
was the Temperance hymn Throw out the Life-Line .... And
there was The Grace Darling Song.
IT was certainly different. You would not really call
it a masterpiece. Was it worthwhile, though? Well, we do not sing it very often
now! But somehow the name stuck.
THE Grace Darling Singers came to develop a particular interest in
West Gallery Music, the vigorous, heart-felt
sacred music to be heard in English churches and chapels from about 1700 to
1850. You read about it in the novels of Hardy, for example. Much of that music
has lain neglected and unsung for generations, but we are fortunate that our
Musical Director, Sally Drage, is an academic specialist in the field, whose
researches constantly expand our repertoire. Some of the music we sing is by
composers quite local to our area.
OUR
horizons are not narrowly drawn, though. Our members relish events which are
special or unusual. We have sung in a remote Staffordshire church using the
music of Uriah
Davenport, who led the singing there for sixty years. We chartered a boat
called The Grace Darling and sang up and down the Avon at Stratford. We
have sung to ourselves in a Warwickshire church surrounded by the humps and
bumps of a deserted mediaeval village and have performed in the Cathedral in
Manchester and in a folk club in Cheshire. The only real
criterion for any activity is whether it will be fun and rewarding.
BESIDES
our Gallery Music, we also have a keen enthusiasm for American music stemming
from the same tradition. Settlers in the New World naturally took with them
their faith, their forms of worship and their sacred music. In the New World,
particularly in the more rural parts, the Shape Note and Sacred Harp traditions, grown out
of the Psalmody of the settlers, have continued to play a lively part in
worship and, like Gallery Music in England, they are enjoying a revival of
interest. The Grace Darling Singers have
a special affection for the compositions of William Billings
(1746-1800), whose New England Psalm-Singer (1770), engraved by Paul Revere, is held to be the first
collection of music entirely by an American, and for the music of Raymond C. Hamrick, the only living composer
whose work we regularly sing!
OUR
first concert was at All Saints' Church in Siddington, on 15th
November, 1991.
YES, they did
like it and we have been back since!