St Mary Redcliffe A Year at Redcliffe Magazine 2022

Worship
Music
It was the best of times;
it was the worst of times
(Charles Dickens – A tale of Two Cities)
Since writing the last APCM music report
in 2019, lots of things had changed due to
the pandemic and the series of lockdowns
from March 2020 onwards. Even tracing
back some of the choir records during the
two world wars in the twentieth century, it
appears that rehearsals and services mostly
continued uninterrupted. I wonder how
historians of future generations will view
the physical closure of church buildings
across the UK, as happened in Spring 2020?
Thankfully in the past six months, the
choirs and other musical elements at SMR
have been able to get back on track, which
is good news. It’s taken quite a lot of careful
planning, especially with the boys choir,
where 70% of the boys have joined in the
past two years and are learning from scratch.
The reorganisation of the Sunday services
works well for the choir: the shorter Mattins
(half an hour) is popular with the singers – it
would be good to further develop the reach
of this. There is no doubt that livestreaming
has added to the church staff workload, with
the added pressures, although there are
plenty of benefits too.
Many things are going well again. One
measure of success is numbers in our choirs:
we currently have 18 boys, 22 girls and
16 adults. A recruitment drive in summer
2020 through social media and choir parent
support brought us 20 new boys and girl
choristers- a fantastic result! The spirit
of goodwill in Lockdown One was a real
benefit here. There was a good momentum
at a time when many other things seemed
to stop.
Dan Tyndall and I organised two webinars
for Directors of Music and some clergy at
other major churches to discuss recruitment
and retention of choristers, along with a
separate strand to look at livestreaming. This
was really fruitful, along with the excellent
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