Specialized kinds of choirs have specialized kinds of needs, and Communities are a great way for conductors of those groups to connect with others in the same field. Friends of Joyful Noise is a community dedicated to choirs with therapeutic purposes or whose singers have disabilities. The group Joyful Noise (pictured below) performed at ACDA in Chicago earlier this year.
The two co-founders of the community “met” on ChoralNet ten years ago and have used ChoralNet’s tools to communicate since then — they only met in person this year. When the ChoralNet Communities were launched, they immeidately realized it would be the perfect place for them to get together and encourage others to join them.
A recent excerpt from the community’s blog:
I like to think of Allison and the wonderful singers of Joyful Noise as a wildflower garden and our wildflower seed keepers. They have collected the wildflower seeds and it is up to us to scatter them. We see the beautiful, wildly beautiful Joyful Noise Garden, not the kind of choir most of us have been trained to direct, but seeing them makes us want one for our own community. From the “seed sharing” in Chicago at ACDA, there is one new wildflower garden being tended in New Mexico and two more being planned in Illinois and Wisconsin. Will they be exactly like Joyful Noise? Most likely not, but they will have their own surprise sunflowers pop up and create beauty in their own place. And that is a good thing– a Joyful Thing!
Although this isn’t a huge community, it’s a pretty active one; almost every member has started a forum thread on some topic or other.
Gail Mrozak says