Westland Choirs' Festival

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 15

Westland Choirs' Festival

N and around Hokitika bandsmen and choristers are practising hard for the forthcoming Eight Choirs’ Festival on May 4 and 5. Training the two hundred feople who will take part is a nine-week job for Lloyd G. Peach, Music Specialist in the Adult Education Department of Canterbury University College. However, this is the fifth Music Festival he has organised, trained and conducted in the South, and as they have all been great successes he has every reason to hope that this Hokitika Festival, the first on the West Coast, will be the same. In these southern. Music Festivals each choir works on a group of about four contrasted pieces, making up different programmes and coming together for four massed items. By working to such a scheme, Mr. Peach hopes to achieve four main objectives. As each choir does a different programme the singing is non-competitive and thus tends to give the weaker groups confidence; it gives practice in community music-mak-ing by the people of the communities themselves; when choirs sing to one another there is a very good field for practical music appreciation, allowing for

the hearing of different styles of composition in music which is all good, tuneful stuff written by the best English composers. Then finally the public will get the chance to see and hear what Adult Education is doing in their community. Already in the Canterbury area these musical groups have become a permanent acquisition. Where do the people come from who are taking part in this Hokitika Festival? There is the Waitaha-Ross group, a mixed group of 24 members. The two choirs which have amalgamated for the Festival were founded by Mr. Peach four years ago. Only five of the members have pianos and the distance trayelled by some to get to rehearsals is as much as twenty miles each way. The weekly rehearsals have been held at a homestead about 27 miles south of Hokitika. The Countrywomen’s Institute Choir draws its members from in and around Hokitika and has been established many years. Some of its members are such keen singers they also belong to church and choral society choirs. The Male Voice Double Quartet has been formed as a tentative step towards founding a male voice choir in Westland. In that masculine country the rest of the way should not be too difficult. The other choirs taking part are the Westland Hospital Nurses’ Choir; a Combined Church Choir who sing four-part anthems; a Convent Old Girls’ Choir, formed from those ex-pupils. who have recently left school; and a_ 40-strong Hokitika District High School Mixed Choir. This choir has been taken from one form only so that it could. rehearse during normal singing periods. After each group has sung all the choirs will join in the massed singing, accompanied by the Hokitika Municipal Band. They will sing "Hey Diddle Diddle," by Ruth House, "Let Praise Devote Thy Work," by Clare Peach, which was specially written for the North Canterbury Festival in 1952, "Land of my Fathers" and Elgar's setting of "God Save the Queen." The first half of the second night’s performance will be broadcast by 3YZ Greymouth at 8.0 p.m. on Thursday, May 5. es