Sometime we undervalue the role played by our Choir in creating new friendships but equally important, is there a role that the choir can have in reuniting long lost friends from the past?
On Monday 16th March we were visited by Richard Nelson from Charleston in the USA as a guest of accompanist Stephen Berry. We are always thrilled to receive visitors, especially those from overseas and in almost every case they go back home to promote the talents and wonderful sound of a Welsh Male Voice Choir
Richard was very impressed with both our numbers and the sound we produced. He was also very appreciative of the level of detail which went into the rehearsal, particularly Nidaros – his musical background meant that he could distinguish differences before and after!
I asked Stephen how it came about that he was a friend of Richard so I’ll quote the e-mail sent by Stephen which also brings back memories of his first concert with the Choir in Portishead in 2007.
” Richard and I were contemporaries at St Julian’s boys grammar school in Newport and was prominent when I formed my first orchestra at the age of 17. Richard, with no previous musical experience, joined to play percussion – and, as his family lived in a very large house (which is now a nursing home), was the means of providing rehearsal facilities as the lounge was large enough to accommodate the full orchestra, including such large items as timpani and harp. His mum was an enthusiastic supporter (thank goodness!) and she provided copious amounts of tea and coffee throughout rehearsals, which lasted anything up to three hours! Our first major success was a performance of Dvorak’s New World symphony a year after we formed.
Unfortunately I lost touch with him after he left Newport for university, as his parents moved to Brussels and then Puerto Rico, before finally returning to Newport, where his mother still lives. However, the main interest in all of this is that we were reunited as a direct result of Caldicot Male Voice Choir! Just after I joined, the then-PR man (John Ashcroft) put a piece into the South Wales Argus about my appointment. Richard’s mother saw it and sent it on to him in Charleston. At the time, Frank Thomas was administering our first rudimentary website and Richard contacted him via this to pass on his details to me.
I can remember vividly on the bus going to my very first concert with the choir (in Portishead), Frank passing me a copy of the e-mail he had had from Richard and I was able to contact him again. He visited me some four years ago when he was over and contacted me again a month ago about another visit. I suggested he come to a choir rehearsal, given his active involvement with choirs and bands now and in the past. Because of the energy and enthusiasm he has always put into everything he had done, his first initiation into music as a percussionist in a very amateur orchestra soon led to far greater things and he has performed with many prestigious groups in the USA.”
In a similar vein, Stephen’s story reminded me of a similar re-uniting of an old school friend:-
Baritone choristers, Dave Currie and Lyn Gauntlett were best friends at Hartridge High School in the sixties but when Dave left school to start an apprenticeship they lost touch since Dave lived on the west side of the Usk and Lyn stayed on at school to study ‘A’ levels before going to University in Canterbury. After finishing his apprenticeship and meeting his wife, Dave and Beryl emigrated to South Africa where they lived for 25 years, running their own cabinet making business before returning with their two children Bronwen and Rhiannon to Newport.
Meanwhile Lyn came back to Gwent to work firstly as Assistant Public Analyst and then as an analytical research chemist at Parke Davis, Pontypool before moving back to Kent in 1994 to head a Pharmaceutical Product Development department at the Glaxo-Wellcome site in Dartford where he remained for 4 years before becoming a consultant chemist and finally moving back to Monmouthshire in 2005.
When Lyn joined the choir 6 years ago (it it really that long ago?) Dave sat next to him and Lyn noticed his name on a copy (By Babyon’s Wave). Asked if he went to Hartridge in the sixties and was his nickname ‘Scoffy’ because he used to eat all the unwanted sandwiches at lunch time (no change there, then). Dave replied “Yes that’s me. Who the ‘ell are you? Are you ‘Gaffer’?” So it turned out that Dave and Lyn were re-united after 45 years. Lyn was called ‘Gaffer’ because in everything they did within the ‘gang’ he looked as if he was in charge.
These two related stories show how the choir, with the power of the internet can bring about old friends coming together after many years, although if you don’t want to meet up with old friends from the past, then perhaps you shouldn’t join the choir.
Lyn would be interested in any other nostalgic stories in a similar vein to these because, ask yourselves, ‘how much do I really know about the blokes sitting around me in the choir’?