Our People
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People are what make the world go round, and we’re no exception. We have men to sing, officers to lead and organise us, musicians to guide and direct our singing, a front-of-house team to manage our performances, a stage management team to leave things lying around for us to trip over, and of course lots of people who used to be part of the choir but no longer are.
The Choir
The choir has four sections, one for each voice, and each voice spans two octaves. Here they are, in descending order of voice pitch:
At the high end of the scale are the First Tenors, sometimes called Top Tenors (especially by themselves); they can sing notes from the B below middle-C to the second B above middle-C.
Next come the Second Tenors, whose music is generally a few notes lower than the first tenors’, though not always.
Thirdly come the Baritones, also known as First Basses, who sing notes from the G above middle-C down to the second G below middle-C.
Finally we have the Basses, who really are basses and go down from the F above middle-C to the second F below middle-C.
The ranges used in male-voice choirs differ from other usage, but that’s because we have no ladies to sing the highest notes!
Either first or second tenors can have the melody at any given time, the other group supplying a harmonising or contrasting part. Sometimes the baritones have the melody, though, and occasionally even the basses.
Of course people don’t fit into neat pigeon-holes, and so we have some voices that go even higher than the usual tenor’s top note or lower than the bottom of the bass range. Thus we can cover all notes between the third F below middle-C and the third E above middle-C, but with only one or two voices at the extremes.
Each section now has about 17 members (since 24 men joined from the Come & Sing project in early 2011), which is enough to make a rich, smooth, mellifluous sound. We pride ourselves on the width of our dynamic range – all the way from a whisper to a room-filling roar!
The choirmen are all amateurs, in it because we love it. You can read a few notes of introduction by each of the gents by clicking their pictures in the Choirmen’s page (or in the frames in the pictures above if you aren’t using Internet Explorer). We have a brief history of the choir here.
Updated 18 June 2011