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May 2009 |
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This newsletter is intended to inform, encourage and inspire you on your journey towards chartering as a Sweet Adelines chorus. We hope you enjoy this issue. |
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Transitions New
Step 1 Prospective Chapters Newly
Named Prospective Chapters New
Step 2 Prospective Chapter Submit Your Stories Belles
of Berkeley Chorus
Brenda
Rahn, director Prospective
Harmony Gateway Chorus
Peggy
Hall, public relations Prospective
Southwind Serenade Chorus
Denise
Baker Prospective
Syringa Sound Chorus
Judy
Craig, member Prospective
Barberina Chorus
Sharon
Bacher, member Prospective
Dubai Harmony Chorus
Prospective
Vocal Vibes Chorus
Debbie
Neilsen, Kerry Haddow, members |
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Nashville
welcomes Sweet Adelines International in 2009. The all-events registration
fee now covers admission to the Harmony Classic competitions, quartet
semifinals/finals, chorus semifinals/finals, Harmony Bazaar, and
education classes. Experience barbershop's future stars at the Rising
Star Quartet Competition. Tickets are sold separately for the Rising
Star competition with proceeds benefiting the Young Singers Foundation
and the Young Women in Harmony program. Register online for the Nashville Convention or Download the Registration form here. Please check out these exciting products available through the International Sales department: The Ann Minihane Anthology (songbook plus three learning CDs) - This Certified Music Arranger, who was especially fond of show tunes, had many arrangements published by Sweet Adelines International. Included within this book are three contest ballads, three contest uptunes and four show tunes. A must-have for any Sweet Adeline! "Being Your Own Vocal Teacher" presented by Peggy Gram. This DVD focuses on practical kinesthetic tools to use at home to become a more proficient singer and create more joy in your singing. Gain new insight into learning music and working it into your voice for maximum resonance, breath control, and tone quality. Increase your vocal range, quality of sound, plus much more. $25 (USD), plus shipping and handling. "To Move or Not to Move...That is the Question" presented by Renée Porzel. With this DVD learn techniques for making physical warmups fun and educational, techniques that keep visual elements integrated into the musical rehearsal plan, methods of designing choreography that support the musical plan created by the chorus director and so much more. $25 (USD), plus shipping and handling. Sing, Baby Sing! The Book is now available - Keep your collection going with the latest version in the very popular series. "The Perfect Blend" DVD and book by Timothy Seelig. This is a must-have for any choral director. More than 100 choral warmups. $50 (USD), plus shipping and handling. 2008 Hawaii International Competition recordings for quartet and chorus are now available DVD - $35.00 each and CD - $15.00 each The International Sales department is offering delivery of music purchased via e-mail as a .pdf attachment. At this time, it is not available as an immediate download when purchased through the International Sales Web site. If you would like this service, please contact a member of the sales department at 877.545.5441. Membership Campaign Bracelets Rubber bracelets embossed with real women. real harmony. real fun. are available for purchase for your next membership drive. These bracelets make a great gift to offer visitors, but most of all they are perfect for each chorus member to wear outside of rehearsal as an easy conversation starter. Buy yours today for $15 (USD) a dozen, or $1.50 (USD) each, plus shipping and handling. Cafepress.com Check out the Sweet Adelines International Online Store ( http://www.cafepress.com/sweetadelines ) through Cafepress.com for a variety of promotional materials. You can purchase T-shirts, pins, mugs, totes and more with the new membership campaign logo, corporate logo and YWIH logo. New and updated items will be added regularly, so check back often as our selection of promotional items continues to grow. Sweet Adelines on MySpace Music Check out the Sweet Adelines MySpace Music.com page at: www.myspace.com/sweetadelinesintl (http://www.myspace.com/sweetadelinesintl). Listen to champion quartet and chorus performances and find a variety of photos that relay the real harmony and the real fun that members truly enjoy. Sweet Adelines on Facebook.com If you are a member of Facebook.com please check out the Sweet Adelines International Facebook.com ( http://www.facebook.com/ ) page. Once you log in as a Facebook.com member search for Sweet Adelines International to open our page. Join a forum and chat directly with members to discover the real women within Sweet Adelines International. These pages are a resource tool and they are intended to provide information for women interested in singing. This is a great way to share your stories and photos with Sweet Adelines members and friends. We hope to make many new friends and inspire many new people to experience barbershop harmony. Be sure to spread the word and let your friends know to check us out. Sweet Adelines on Twitter.com Sweet Adelines International is now on Twitter.com (http://www.twitter.com/). If you are a member, be sure to follow us to get an insiders look at what goes on at the International Headquarters. Our page is listed as "SweetAdsIntl." Communications Department: |
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Belles
of Berkeley is officially chartered as of May 1, 2009. Hurray! It's
been a long time coming. We are holding our Chartering Party on
May 16 and plan to have a huge celebration. In the meantime, we
are still singing at every opportunity. Planned performances include
the Art Society's Earth Day, Concerts in the Park in July, and our
big show, "Rosie the Riveter" in November. The holiday season usually
brings three or four singouts also. The chorus boasts two quartets:
A TOUCH OF VELVET,
and one brand new quartet that hasn't yet shared their name. If
there was a show category called "The Chorus Having the Most Fun",
we would win. 
Along
with the daffodils and tulips of spring, Prospective Harmony Gateway
is blooming in Davison, Mich. Since the majority of our members
are well seasoned Sweet Adelines, our small ensemble was able to
do several performances over the Christmas season. We were invited
to entertain at a very traditional and annual Victorian Tea. We
all enjoyed it so much and were asked to entertain for them again
during the 2009 holiday season. Prospective Harmony Gateway also
has a performance coming up in July at a local senior center. We
have a 15-year-old with an awesome lead voice whom we have introduced
to the barbershop sound, she loves the chords and we love her. We
are taking her to competition to watch larger choruses in action
this month. In March we held a successful combination talent search/St.
Patty's Party/Guest Night. Our rehearsals are a fun, informative
learning experience and never last long enough. We are working on
a repertoire and have several new songs under our belt already.
Our director, Kris Williams, has experience as assistant director
and lead choreographer in larger choruses along with being a front
row dancer. She has a fabulous ear and does not allow us to sing
out of tune or drop pitch. We hope to see you all on the competition
stage one day in the future. 
Greetings
from Prospective Southwind Serenade Chorus. After much preparation
and rehearsal we have finally put it all together. Our local newspaper
published an article of our chorus and an ongoing invitation and
rehearsal reminder. At our first rehearsal we had eight new ladies
attend and 13 members of the Memphis City Sound Chorus arrive to
help us out. We also showed the DVD from the 2007 Calgary Chorus
Competition. All the ladies that attended were very impressed and
plan to join when they pass their audition in a few weeks. We sent
them home with music and learning CDs and had our second rehearsal
on Tuesday, April 21. Seven of the ladies from the previous rehearsal
returned (one had to work), and four new ladies came in. Because
of the learning CDs, everyone was ready to sing. Although new to
directing a barbershop chorus, our director, Jonathan Baker, has
been doing a great job adapting his band-directing skills and using
his barbershop-singing talent. After his instruction and some fine-tuning,
things really began to come together. Several of the ladies said
they knew of others who will be here next week. We are really excited
about all our newcomers and feel like we are off to a great start.
We want to send out a great big "thank you" to the Memphis
City Sound Chorus and we want to let everyone know how much we appreciate
all the help, encouragement and support that we have received.
Prospective
Syringa Sound, directed by Andy Maddox, is now averaging over 20
members per rehearsal. We’ve put the word out that we’re looking
for more members and getting quite a bit of interest. We hope to
complete our charter in time to compete in the 2010 regional competitions.
The group began in the fall of 2007 and by Christmas 2008 we had
15 regular attendees. We performed Christmas carols at the Boise
Towne Square Mall and sang while roaming the Idaho Botanical Garden
during their "Winter Aglow" celebration. In February we performed
at a Sweetheart’s Banquet. This was followed in April with a concert
for the residents and families of the Meadow Lake Retirement Community.
Both concerts were well received. By this time we had added red
sparkle scarves to our ensemble and did one choreographed number
to Cole Porter’s Anything Goes. We are hoping to perform
at one or more of the local Farmer's Markets in the near future.
Syringa Sound Chorus gets its name from the syringa flower (mock
orange) that is Idaho’s State Flower. It is a pure white flower
with four perfect petals, a fitting symbol for our four-part harmonies.
Since
our last article in February our group has made much progress in
preparing for new members. We have written a Welcome Book explaining
our chapter, mutual expectations and how we work. We have also made
progress in recording the different parts of the songs in our repertoire
and uploading them to a website. This month we gave a performance
at a rehabilitation hospital in Jerusalem. It was good to be performing
and both patients and nursing staff seemed very happy to hear us.
In Israel, we face the additional challenge that while we sing American
songs in English, most people are more comfortable in Hebrew. Thus,
our performance
was also an educational opportunity to tell them about Barbershop,
its history and style. It is essential to keep performing, since
this drives the group forward and motivates greater effort. Our
performance in Jerusalem highlighted our need for section rehearsals
and attention to choreography. Gestures need to be practiced and
synchronized to present a symphony of perfect harmony. 
It’s
five weeks to go before Dubai Harmony’s annual summer concert. Robin
is truly rocking in the treetop, the lion is sleeping in the quiet
jungle and there won’t be a dry eye in the house when the audience
hears That’s What Friends Are For. Our director Gayle Powell
puts us through our paces on I Will Survive at our Tuesday
night session at Jumeirah Primary School and seems pleased with
the result. Then 40 mouths drop open simultaneously as she announces:
“Now for the moves!” The leads have only just got their tongues
around the fast-moving words although the basses are looking smug
as there are a lot of “doong doong doongs” in the base line. This
season, as always in Dubai Harmony’s 16 year existence, we’ve been
battling with what is probably a unique problem for a potential
Sweet Adeline chorus and that is pronunciation. Dubai is a cosmopolitan
city, one of the seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates, and
at the last count we had 18 different nationalities in the choir.
Simple words like "father" or "whisper" come
out 18 different ways when we sing. Help was at hand, however, during
a two day retreat at a lovely coastal resort at Ras Al Khaimah as
a visiting master director from Holland, Martijn Hoeksema, soon
had us making the same shapes with our mouths to give us a more
unified sound. The United Nations nature of the chorus has its advantages
when we hold our annual welcome party for new singers and a mouth-watering
array of different foods and puddings appear on the table. In the
spirit of Sweet Adeline choruses everywhere, the accent in Dubai
Harmony is united in one respect in that of the friendship and support
it gives to its members. Should any Sweet Adeline anywhere in the
world find themselves in Dubai on a Tuesday night, just come along
- you would be very welcome. And if by chance you are capable of
directing a hard-working and enthusiastic barbershop chorus and
you or your husband’s work brings you here, you would be doubly
welcome as sadly, our director Gayle is going back to the UK. It
will be tough but to paraphrase the song, We Will Survive!
Prospective
Vocal Vibes take a leap towards chartering. With Lorraine Stackpoole
as our director, we are creating real harmony and having real fun
along the way. It has been a great year so far. We ran a successful
membership drive in February consisting of an all day workshop facilitated
by director of Murrumbidgee Magic Australia, Jill Harris. We followed
it up with six weeks of free voice lessons. There are many special
friendships forming already. We are ecstatic because we have managed
to retain 50% of the visitors from the membership drive. A new logo
is in progress which will give us a real presence and identity.
A Management Team has been formed and we have already started goal
setting towards chartering. There have been two articles in the
Local Community Newspaper and we are looking into Web site construction.
The chorus gets to design it's repertoire from scratch to suit the
new image and personality. It is important to have the goal of chartering
and becoming a high performing chorus in the future, but it's simply
great to be sharing the journey with an increasing band of wonderful
friends. 
International Convention and Competition