NECOM Take Note - August Newsletter

I want to begin by congratulating all students (and supportive parents and teachers!) on making it through the AMEB examination period for another year. While there are still a dozen or so students sitting Trinity exams in November, we recently saw 74 students come through the doors of the Old Teachers College, ready to present their pieces for the chosen examiners. Like Eisteddfods, formal examinations offer musicians several important benefits, not least of which is the chance to present newly-learned pieces and receive written feedback. The more often we play/sing in front of people (even one examiner sitting in a room, which can actually be more formidable) the more in-control we become of our nerves. The greatest performers in the world still feel the familiar burst of nervous expectation while standing in the wings of a concert hall waiting to take to the stage, it’s just that (over time) they have learned to channel that energy from anxiety into anticipation. Other useful benefits in sitting for exams is that they give you a focus/reason to prepare new repertoire, from a graded syllabus that has been carefully compiled and revised over 100 years by some of the world’s leading authorities on instrumental and vocal performance. We look forward to presenting some of the outstanding results from our students’ exams in the next newsletter as they continue to come in.
I want to finish by focussing on the human voice. Two of my very favourite images from 2018 thus far have both come from August. What a proud moment for parents and teachers alike to watch (and hear) our fabulous Children’s Chorus performing alongside this country’s finest trained voices in Opera Australia’s Madame Butterfly. Then only a fortnight later we were treated to some outstanding choral singing at the annual Winter Choral Concert, with one of the highlights for me being the joy on the faces of the Side-by-Side Choir from the Armidale High School Support Group as they sang three numbers, one of which was their own original song. With those two events finished for another year, Gondwana Choir auditions happening on the first day of September and the final preparations going into this year’s New England Sings!, the hallowed halls of the Old Teachers College are ringing with the sounds of vocal music more than usual. The human voice is the most personal of all the instruments. We discover we have one in our first minutes of being alive, and within months we start learning to control the pitch by stretching and relaxing our vocal folds. Babies can start making singing and whistling sounds before turning three months of age, and will likely be singing simple songs within their first two years. Singing offers something immediate for the singer (giver) and the listener (receiver), and even singing alone has been proven to change mood, pulse-rate, anxiety, etc. If you’ve never sung in a choir, you are yet to learn the joy of combining your voice with others and working on a blended sound. Much research is being carried out on the effects of singing on dementia patients and others with learning impairments, such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, and Alzheimer’s. Singing is personal, therapeutic and possibly the oldest of all art forms. We are delighted to see the continued expansion of our choral programs at NECOM, under the guidance of some of the state’s most outstanding choral directors. We look forward to seeing you at our biennial celebration of the human voice (and Australian composers!) when New England Sings! returns in October.

Mr Russell Bauer
CEO, NECOM