Snippets in the life of the Singers
(we asked them to say a bit about themselves and why they sing)

Margaret Fancy - Soprano

I have been singing ever since we had an inspirational teacher at my secondary school.
(You can see from the colour of my hair that it was a long time ago!)
It was a co-ed grammar school so we had the benefit of men's voices too and every choir I have joined since then has been for mixed voices.

Due to moving up and down the country following my husband's work I have sung with many choirs, both large and small. This included one large choir in which Jonathan, son of David Wilcocks, was the director, two Bach choirs and a Symphony Chorus. The latter enabled me to experience many different conductors at concerts, professional soloists and orchestras and made me learn the music quickly.
In the 70's I was also a member of the Preston Cecilian Choral Society.

I first sang with the Lancaster Singers in Oct '09. That was also Marco's first performance as director with the Singers.
It has been a joy to come to rehearsals; everyone has made me feel so welcome. I am continually learning and look forward to those opportunities that have been planned for improving our singing and enjoyment.
My regular weariness disappears on a Tuesday evening's rehearsal.
For me - singing is wonderful!
  

Beatriz Conder - Alto

Why do I sing? Fundamentally because it makes me feel good; all that oxygen to the brain is even better than a large gin and tonic. And cheaper and healthier!
Also, I am a big believer in the power of community. And as I sing, I am aware of other voices around me - sometimes alongside me and at other times weavng in and out around me. I love the feeling of being part of something where my contribution counts but is just one component of many that come together to produce something that I couldn't do alone.
One of my jobs is to teach class music in schools. Lovely and satisfying as this is, at the end of some days I feel I've had my fill of wrong notes!
Choir practice is the perfect antidote at the end of such a day. Mostly the notes are in the right places and that is bliss for me.
 

Maggie Bremner - Alto

How can one live without singing? It's the icing on the cake of life! I have sung all my life; at school, in the church choir, in London in the sixties, in Oxford in the seventies and in Lancaster in the eighties, nineties and noughties. I indulged my love of singing vicariously when my sons were young and in the local Priory choir. What a marvellous musical education they had there. An exciting experience was in joining them and some members of the Lancaster Singers in the community choir accompanying the earlier Shakespeare productions by our local Duke's Theatre in Williamson Park, for the Theatre's well-established and highly successful summer 'Play in the Park' series.
It is fun singing with the Singers under the baton of director Marco. He works us hard in rehearsals and is so encouraging even when we are rubbish. I feel our singing technique is constantly improving and look forward to new and challenging work
  

Terry Wareham - soprano

As a child I loved singing at school and was in various school choirs, usually as an alto, often singing tenor when there was a shortage of tenors! After school I didn't sing for a while but was dragooned into the Trino Cement Works choir when teaching English in Italy by the slightly fierce head of the school I worked at. The choir mistress there swiftly dis-abused me of the notion that I was an alto and told me I was just lazy, proving the point by making me sing increasingly elevated scales. Back in the UK I joined the Milton Keynes Chorale and then the Lancaster Singers when I moved north in 1991. As a soprano of course!
 

Janet Hopkins - Alto

As a very young child I was used to hearing my mother singing - most of the time. She and father were Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiasts and frequently burst into song at appropriate (and inappropriate) moments. My mother sang to me a lot and especially at night before turning off the light. She started taking me to concerts as soon as I was old enough to sit still and listen. She also encouraged me to harmonise with her.
After singing in the school choir and whilst at university I joined the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. In 1970, I joined the Birmingham Choral Union, and in 1979, the Bekker Toonkunst Choir at Groningen in the Netherlands, under the leadership of Charles de Wolff. Last but not least, I joined the Lancaster Singers and have enjoyed the varies programme of choral music performed with them.
 

Janet (far right) with Maggie Bremner & Terry Wareham at the Annual Dinner

Alison Hui - Accompanist

Ever since I began music lessons at the age of five my life has been filled with music and song. At fourteen, I was given my first role as accompanist with two strict rules, 1) follow the choir no matter what and 2) don't stop even if you make a mistake because rule one is more important. I took my teacher's advice to heart and it has helped my development in the sensitive, collaborative art of accompanying.
I have enjoyed many rewarding musical collaborations. Predominantly I have worked as an accompanist and vocal coach for singers and choirs but I have also competed in the Canadian National Music Festival as part of the Duke Piano Trio and enjoyed acting as music director for professional music theatre productions of The Secret Garden and Beauty and the Beast.. I have also greatly enjoyed singing with both small 'a capella' choirs (including Divers Voyces here in Lancaster) and the University Regina Chamber Singers, winners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. Choral Competition.
I moved from Canada to Lancaster to pursue a PhD in Sociology and am delighted to have found a new musical family in the Singers. The passion for music transcends cultures but the volcabulary doesn't; I have become a student all over again as I get used to talking, not about quarter notes and eighth notes but crotchets and quavers!
  

Hermione Roff - Soprano

I have always been interested in music and singing. One of my earliest memories is of lying in bed and hearing my father singing excerpts from the Messiah with my Mum accompanying him on the piano. I have four brothers each of whom sang in our local cathedral choir. It was a source of envy and incomprehension that I was not allowed to do the same. It was such good training and seemed such fun. However as compensation I was allowed to join the Choral Society alongside my Mum and it was a high-light every Tuesday to go along and sing works like the Bach Passions and Gerontius and of composers like Britten and Faure......
Wherever we have lived I have always sought out a choir to sing with - Sheffield Bach Singers, Nottingham Harmonic, the Halle Choir, Chester Bach Singers. The repertoire of these choirs is so great. I find it a joy to sing about things I believe in and can enter into, in an emotional and intellectual way. Someone gave me a 'potshot' postcard with these words on it....
'Dieu m'estime quand je travail, mais il m'aime quand je chante.' (God esteems me when I work but he loves me when I sing)...............and that sums it up for me really.

Hermione is a music graduate but has spent most of her working life as a Child and Family Systemic Psychotherapist in the NHS. She has published a clinical book about her work with disadvantaged children and their parents (Wiley 2008).
 

Martin Clarke - Bass

I was introduced to singing at the ge of nine when I was dragged screaming into Holy Trinity Church choir in Southport. The regime for Church choirs in the late seventies was strict but I stuck with it 'persuaded' by my parents until the age of 15 when I went from 'scrubbed' Royal School of Church Music treble, to spotty bass overnight and the usual teenage activities crowded in.
Singing stopped for a while except for the renditions of Elton John and Queen with the obligatory 'air guitar'.
I returned to singing when I went to study Engineering where a girl friend approached me to sing in a German Choir which was 'very short of lads'. It would have been impolite to refuse and I found I enjoyed it (I mean the music!).
Since entering the world of work I've been a member of the London Oriana Choir and locally the Lytham Choral Society and Lytham Operatic Society where I had a distinguished(?) career as the third train conductor in 'Annie Get Your Gun' and a 'named' brigand in 'Carmen the Musical'. The latter group were great fun. The main problem was how to cope on stage with the deliberately calculated antics of fellow-members of the cast!
I joined the Singers in 1999. When not working or singing, my wife and I indulge our passion for sailing in Scotland.
I am living proof that anyone can enjoy making fantastic music in great company. Here's to the future!  
 

Gilian Sheath - Alto

I was introduced to classical singing with the 'Sound of the Trumpet' with the irrepresible Mrs Francis at Warrington Girls High School. Before that it was Mum and me singing along with 'South Pacific', 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers' and any other musicals Mum had vinyls of.
I joined the Bach choir in Birmingham as I wanted a night out in the middle of the week! With them I made three cds and toured to Leipzig, before the 'wall' came down and Lyons, France.
I do so enjoy Tuesday nights.
The grey matter is stimulated and the efforts of the day forgotten. Plus - there's always something to laugh about. All good therapy. Then there's the annual dinner. What fun that is!
 

John Nickols - 1st bass

A native of Croydon I came to Lancaster in 2007 having spent 40 years in the Nottingham/Derby area as a solicitor in company and commercial work.
At the age of 7 I sang in a very good church choir and a year later aged 8, took part in in a Festal Evensong in Canterbury Cathedral. That experience remains memorable. After school there followed singing with Southampton University Choral Society, Nottingham Harmonic Society and the Sinfonia Chorale, a forty strong chamber choir of which I was Chair for 18 years. It was in the Sinfonia Chorale that I met Pamela, a soprano, now my wife and together we share life in our home at St Michael's on Wyre, when not travelling together as clinical trials consultants and auditors.
I'm enjoying membership of the Singers and have been made very welcome.

John has sung in over 35 performmances of Handel's Messiah and enjoyed the last with the Singers as much as any.
 

Tony Guenault - whose wife Joan, is our Librarian

Joan and I were founder members of the Lancaster Singers. But our singing together dates from almost 10 years before that when we met in a small Christian choir in Cambridge (led by a John's College Choral Scholar). The choir was called the Ichthyan Singers - and a later member was Stephen Watson who sang with the us in the Lancaster Singers for a few years.

You may be amused that I was librarian for a while and that I remember saying out loud, that it was a choir, not a marriage bureau, on noticing several engagements within it. But clearly I was unable to practise what I preached!

Immediately after Cambridge I went out to Ottawa and sang a lot there. I was a Postdoctoral Fellow of the National Research Council - as was Denis McCaldin, now our outgoing Music Director, a couple of years before.

I recently had an amazing exchange of e-mail correspondence about my singing experiences at the time, resulting in the discovery of http://www.pembrokecommunitychoir.org/PCC/Gallery_files/Elijah%201961.jpg
Prizes for identifying me!" - Tony made that promise (DH)
 

Louise Wareing - Alto

I've always been around music thanks to my mum who was a pianist and music teacher. Since being in all-things musical at Kirkham Grammar School I have continued to sing in choirs wherever I have lived - Durham University, Blackburn, Suffolk and Cambridge - although most of them have been school choirs for I too, am a teacher.
One of my highlights was gaining entry to the dress rehearsal for 'Carols from Kings' through my membership of Cambridge Sixth Form College choir.
Having my first child Elizabeth brought me to the Lancaster Singers. I met the daughter of Cathleen Dawson, now a fellow-alto at a mums and toddlers group in Cambridge. When my husband and I decided to return to our northern 'roots' and live in Lancaster she put me in touch with her mum who introduced me to the Singers.
I now thoroughly enjoy being part of the group and learning and singing in such a focused and fun-environment.
It is a welcome diversion from looking after my two children and working part-time at Casterton School.
I hope to start singing lessons soon. It's never too late!
 

Veronica Dunne - Alto
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I have always loved singing in goups and started early at the age of three when I apparently stood on a pew in church and sang very loudly with the congregation, disregarding whatever hymn they were singing and giving my own rendition of The Beatles 'She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah...'!
However I soon learned to toe the line a bit more and sang my way through school in various choirs and productions - when I could escape being called on to accompany the choir.
Whilst syudying music at Birmingham University I sang under the memorable Ivor Keys, which included some of his rather unusual conpositions for voices. I then returned to my native Kent for a while and joined the London Oriana Choir for few years.
In 1994 I moved to sunny Lancaster and I sang with the Millenium Choir under Andy Whitfield for many years before I came to the Lancaster Singers.
I really enjoy our Tuesday ebenings and find it a welcome change from the primary school songs I teach and sing during the week as well as being very enervating - so good for the soul on a rainy evening!
 

Tony & Joan

Louise with Helen Terry at the
Annual Dinner