Greetings from Westcoast Harmony Chorus!

We hope everyone is keeping strong and doing their best to stay together in these unusual times. “Staying Strong Together’ has been the mantra we have adopted here at WHC and despite so many barriers in the current situation, we truly are feeling strong and together.

Very quickly, once it became clear we were not going to be practicing in person any time soon, our amazing Director Anne Downton, plus our music and management teams got busy planning virtual zoom rehearsals, a virtual song release, and educational and collaborative projects to keep the chorus engaged, learning and moving forward.

The virtual chorus projects have been a huge learning curve in terms of editing, production and collaboration yet they also have been instrumental in keeping everyone busy learning and singing. We completed “O Canada’ which was released for Canada Day and are currently working on ‘Go The Distance’ to be completed in late November/Early December. While this has been an incredible amount of work it has also been so rewarding.

We are still ‘rehearsing’ weekly and have been enjoying a fairly large attendance rate ranging between 50-70 people signing in to the zoom link. Our rehearsals have a mix of break out rooms and sessions with the entire chorus. The break out rooms are a smorgasbord of wonderful choices members can pick from including, music learning and word sound polishing, socializing and even lessons on making  signature cocktails. We also get together in our sections and sing through our repertoire.

For education, we have had guest coaches attend our rehearsals and we had a joint rehearsal with Alamo Metro and worked together on “As Long as I’m Singing”.  We are also planning a mini educational workshop in collaboration with Alamo Metro.

For our Christmas plans we are in the planning stages of a virtual Christmas party, with lots of fun, laughs, games, entertainment and even an ugly sweater contest.