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Singing at St Dominic's in Kelvedon is not your average entertainment, this singing is for real, singing as part of a choir.
Care Homes often have sing-songs, a happy afternoon singing along, nothing wrong with that. But singing at St Dominic's in Kelvedon is not your average entertainment, this singing is for real, singing as part of a choir. It is hugely popular and we recently had our latest concert with an audience of families and friends. 20 residents sang in the choir.
As a Community Visitor to St Dominic's I kept reading how important singing was for our health, not just elderly people, all of us. I wanted our residents to sing, but in a way they might have done when younger, in a choir, a proper choir. It seemed a pipe dream, with my feeble musical skills how would I achieve this? I sidled up to the daughter of a resident one Christmas, her singing seemed, well, amazing, I had a chat and discovered she was a professionally trained singer, she had sung at Glynebourne. I became very interested, then I discovered she now taught singing ... Her sister was a gifted pianist, we had our choir mistress and accompanist. To cut a long story short, we began our choir.We do exercises and warm- ups, we practise over and over, Liz doesn't put up with second best although our average age is in the mid 90's.
Our latest concert had World War 1 songs, musical hall songs and we popped in a couple from the Sound of Music, we are good at that and are thinking of having a Sound of Music come and sing session! Wimples compulsory! The residents made the poppies everyone wore, they looked fantastic and sang beautifully.