'The Best Thing I Ever Joined'

Monday December 12 2022

Members of the Junior Choir of St Machar’s Ranfurly Church, Bridge of Weir, share their journey.

In September 2021 St Machar’s Ranfurly Church in Bridge of Weir (re)started a Junior Choir. We advertised in the village and received some interest. The first rehearsal saw three children attend. By the October holidays we had nine loyal attenders in the P3–P7 age bracket
attending, and since January 2022 that number has grown to 14 children, who all attend on a regular basis.

We cover a wide repertoire covering several genres mixing sacred and secular. Our first term saw us sing songs which tied in with Harvest, the COP26 conference which had been held in Glasgow [15 miles from Bridge of Weir], Hallowe’en and Christmas. Our spring term saw our focus switch towards Easter and the summer term was preparation for Music Sunday.
We have sung songs from Harry Potter and Mary Poppins; rapped about Christmas; and sung children’s hymns including Lord of the Dance and Have you heard the raindrops?. Lord of the Dance was a particular favourite and some of the choir sang it to their class in school.

Singing a wide range of music from all over the world has allowed us to learn about different countries and cultures – Touch the earth lightly is a hymn by the late New Zealand hymnwriter Shirley Erena Murray and is inspired by the Maori people. We’ve also learned a Brazilian children’s song as one of our singers comes from Sao Paulo.

Our rehearsals initially began with a game which involved jumping in and out of a circle and introducing ourselves, as being in a choir is all about making new friends! As Atticus, in P4, remarks: “I really like choir, I’ve been doing it from the start. All the people are nice there. Singing is just straight up great”.

We do a lot of warm-ups which focus our minds on our breathing and how we use our voices to sing. The warm-ups include breathing exercises, making all sorts of noises to exercise
different parts of our voices, and sing up and down scales. We then spend the rest of our rehearsals working on our songs. Since January the choir has been working towards the Royal School of Church Music’s Voice for Life White Level. This programme can be undertaken by
singers of any age. The learning outcomes have been as follows: Using the voice well where we learn about posture, breathing and how our voices work; Musical skills and understanding where we learn about pulse, notation, counting, reading music; Repertoire helps us understand a bit more about the music we are singing (what the words mean, why it was written, what the text is about etc); Belonging to the choir where we learn about what it means to be in a choir – arriving on time, bringing the right music, watching the conductor, and encouraging us to tell the conductor if we’ll be missing at a particular concert, service or rehearsal. The skills we learn at choir stand us in good stead for other aspects of life too.

Sunday June 12 2022 was Music Sunday, where churches are encouraged to celebrate the musicians who lead their worship or are in some way associated with their church. At St Machar’s we held a gala concert where the junior and adult choirs sang together for the first time and the Junior Choir were presented with their White Level Voice for Life certificates.

The reasons for coming to choir are simple: “I made new friends”, “I love choir” and the St Machar’s Ranfurly Junior Choir is “The best thing I ever joined”.

If you are under 30 with a Church of Scotland connection, and would like to write for this column, please contact us on magazine@lifeandwork.org