Happy Thanksgiving, from Da Camera Singers!
Da Camera Singers, VanEs Retreat weekend 2019. Photo: Erik Visser
New normal, new opportunities
Dear friends, families and supporters of Da Camera Singers,
Happy Thanksgiving to you! It’s October, and autumn is here. We’ve made it through the first month of the new choral season in the time of covid and I’m pleasantly surprised and more than a little bit relieved by how well things are going! Taking stock of the past seven months, I can’t help but notice how these strange times have shaped our choral activities that have brought us new opportunities for community and growth. On this Thanksgiving weekend, there are many new things to be grateful for in our choir world:
New sense of community
Throughout the spring and summer, the singers of Da Camera took the opportunity to meet virtually for some really fruitful and inspiring discussion around vision and who we are as a choir. We held small group discussions, our AGM, and a full-choir town hall meeting. We also had a lot of fun in our members’ facebook group taking the opportunity to get to know each other in ways we wouldn’t have time to do in a normal rehearsal through weekly discussion topics that were sometimes musical, but often not. This was a great opportunity for me to get to know the singers better – having had only two thirds of a season with Da Camera after being appointed artistic director in the summer of 2019. I’m sure that under normal circumstances I wouldn’t already know as much as I now know about who adores which novels, which singer revels in German music, coffee, and dogs above all else, the details of members’ hobbies and home projects, and which chorister creates brilliant nail art with intricate nail polishing techniques! It really feels to me as though we’ve grown closer as a choir family, even though we haven’t been physically together.
