The Grove Singers

(Registered Charity number 1041560)
Annual General Meeting
18 November 2018
1 Introduction
The AGM was held during our rehearsal of l8 November 2018. Present were John Fry (chairman), Peter Edmunds (committee, treasurer), Tim Rhys-Morgan (musical director) and many of the singers. Cavan Roberts (committee) sent his apologies.

2 Chairman’s speech
John thanked the singers for their support over the year. He reviewed the year’s concerts: it was a shame that the Thaxted concert was cancelled due to snow but we will finally perform the music this winter; the Westcliff and Linton concerts went well.
Future concerts include:
Chichester Psalms by Bernstein: to be performed with a small orchestra in a church in Belsize Park on 30 March 2019.
We will visit Poitiers in June 2019
We may visit Dresden in June 2020
John asked who owned a copy of the Chichester Psalms (about 10 people) and who would like to buy a copy (10 people). 10 people still need a copy of O Magnum Mysterium by Lauridsen.
John thanked the rest of the committee and Tim for their work during the year
He reminded the singers to pay their subscription for the year if they hadn’t already done so.

3 Re-election of the committee
John asked whether the singers were happy for the current committee to continue in office
This was agreed without opposition.

4 Musical director’s remarks
Tim said that he was happy with the direction the group was going in. He felt that we were gradually improving our appearance to the audience (rather than having our heads in the copies) and our attention to his conducting, in particular he now feels able to ask for more changes in time, such as rubato. He thanked the group for this and for their positive attitude.

5 Treasurer’s report
Peter reported that the choir bank account has more than £2,000, which allows us to plan the Belsize Park concert with a small orchestra. He proposed to keep the subscription unchanged for the current year.

 

6 Any other business
6.1 Rehearsal room
John asked the group whether they were happy with the rehearsal room in St Gabriel’s Hall.
The general mood was positive, especially if we can hire the Men’s Club room rather than the more gloomy room next door to it. St Barnabas’s hall (used previously) may be available in the New Year but we may decide to continue using St Gabriel’s. Singers should give their opinions to the committee.
6.2 Rehearsal dates
We now have rehearsal dates until July 2018. The committee and Tim should fix rehearsal dates beyond this ASAP.
6.3 Recruitment
We currently have 40-45 members but they don’t all sing in all concerts Tim would like some extra sopranos to support the highest notes. It was felt that a recruitment drive was needed. Frankie, Sylvia and Jan agreed to work together to make this happen. Some advertising should be placed on choir recruitment websites such as Gerontius and British Choirs on the Net.
We need to improve our website in order to attract extra singers. In particular:

• The “Join us” link doesn’t show anything at the moment.
• Emails sent using the website can be accessed from the website but don’t appear in anyone’s in-box. These emails should be forwarded to either John or Peter.
• We should update the area describing the tours we have done and those planned, as these could be attractive to prospective members.
• The “Join us” link should suggest that prospective singers come either for a trial rehearsal or for a trial period of three months followed by an informal voice assessment: not as scary as an audition but not automatic inclusion either. It should mention that Grove is not a weekly commitment: many singers can’t fit another
  weekly rehearsal into their lives.
• The Kensington Singers have a good website. we could use this for inspiration.
• Linking the website to Facebook: each singer who has a Facebook account should make a link from it to the Grove website.
• We should consider paying to have the Grove website appear higher in the Google rankings There may also be non-monetary methods of doing this.