Vancouver Chamber Choir: 40 years of glorious sound

By Stuart Derdeyn

VANCOUVER — Back in the early 1970s, future conservative
squares were dropping tabs of purple microdot, tuning into
laughable tracks such as “Almost Cut My Hair,” turning on to their
own self interest and dropping out of whatever it was that wasn’t
“cool” according to Madison Avenue advertising companies selling
them over-the-counter culture.

Fortunately, there were also people like Jon Washburn around.
The UBC graduate musicology student heard a different tune
altogether. Call it “get Bach.”

He admits he may have looked the hippie part and certainly
embraced the pervasive climate of starting new cultural ventures,
but the music he cozied up to wasn’t endless stoner noodling. He
wanted to establish an arts group to celebrate the human voice in
all its glory. He formed the humbly named Jon Washburn Singers in
1969.

“I was involved with a group of young people very driven to
start new groups during this particularly fertile time of the
Trudeau era’s local initiative cultural grants,” says Washburn. “In
1970, it was the Early Music Society and the New Music Society,
then, in 1971, the Vancouver Chamber Choir, a professional choir
paying members for every hour of rehearsal and performance time
from the start, arrived.”

There was nowhere else in Canada doing this at the time.
Particularly as the choir was a “daytime” one, meaning that the
usual talent pool of school music teachers and day jobbers couldn’t
participate. This model meant that the ensemble of freelancing
professionals could head out on tour immediately and that
rehearsals took place in the morning when voices were fresh and
minds alert. Washburn credits this with being key to the level of
excellence achieved very early on.