we can all make music

the two of us

Six years before the 'Choir of Hard Knocks' on television gave the general public a reason to talk about singing, two rural Victorian women formed a partnership that has grown a unique singing culture. The extension of the Vocal Nosh model has communities across Victoria singing regularly. In 2000, as a Grapevine Music venture, Anne-Marie Holley and Fay White developed a training package to skill up singing teams across Victoria. Jane Coker talked to them about how they met and how it began for the Rural Women's Network.

Anne-Marie Holley:

When I saw Fay White running a Vocal Nosh in Newstead, I witnessed an experienced musician with excellent facilitation skills. The ability to work with a group of people who did not know each other, to include them all and get them to have fun together particularly appealed to me. As I watched the Vocal Nosh unfold, I recalled many conversations in rural communities.

They were the problem solving conversations about us, the people, and our communities.

'We need activities that aren't sport'. 'We want activities that men and women can do together'

At Vocal Nosh, not only were they doing it together, they were enjoying their difference in harmony.

'We are exhausted from the sheer volume of work involved in keeping our community going'. I watched buoyed and bubbly people nattering as they left the Nosh and saw that Fay had provided a way for people to be together with levity and energy. This didn't drain people.

'We have no voice. No one listens to us.'

The lament of isolation, of being unheard is a profound and dangerous pain-one I know first hand. I've seen its fruit frequently in rural communities and on farms. At Vocal Nosh, I had a voice, and experienced the joy of listening and being heard, singing together. And I didn't have to think of anything to say. I could just totally be 100% myself, follow the directions and it would work.

The Vocal Nosh was also touching some of my idiosyncratic passions.

I have a passion for democracy, and in community singing, we practiced democratic ideals. The public voice of women is fundamental to modern democracy. The more our voices are heard in public, the less vulnerable we are as a group. The more we practice using our voices in public, the less we will be silenced. Singing is a critical way for women's voices to occupy public space, and that makes all women safer.

I thought of communities who would lap this up. I thought of times when I had sat around the piano with rural women at the local hall after an event. And I remembered that I had thought,

'Who will play the piano for the next generation? How will they find simple joy like this together.'

It occurred to me that if we could train other people to do what Fay did, then communities around the State could sing. I think that the two things that make this project innovative are the model itself, which was Fay's work, and the development of an arts project that built cultural infrastructure-people with particular skills, an approach to practice that isn't based in place- its based in the communities.

Our project design contained many of my learnings as a rural woman. Other rural women's words reverberated in me and fuelled my arguments and my thoughts in the project design. One example was singing teams.

'Nothing ever happens in a country town with just one person doing it. You have to have a group of people.' These words, are recalled as one of Dorothy Dunn's edicts, no doubt issued outside the building while we were both having a smoke in the break, at a meeting in the mid 90's. I've stopped smoking, but have used the wisdom of Victoria's rural women often. The Surf Coast singing team are living proof of its Dorothy's wisdom. I'm sure you'll see many other womens' wisdoms in the project- a network of singing leaders!

Ummm-is that new? Thanks Rural Women's Network!!

Fay White:

I first met Anne-Marie Holley when she came to sing at Vocal Nosh in Newstead. This monthly singing session around a shared meal had been going about 18 months and grown from an enthusiastic group of about 15 to a regular 35 or 40 singers who came from the surrounding district. The development of the idea had been gradual for me, starting in childhood really.

I'd been lucky to grow up in a singing family and a singing community. I didn't realise till later that not everybody sang. I thought it was a natural thing you did at any time, every day. In the 60's I played guitar and sang at every opportunity but when I realised nobody was going to 'discover' me and I wasn't going to be Australia's answer to Joan Baez, I decided I had to make opportunities to 'just sing anyway'.

I started to organise house concerts with help from friends who had good-sized lounge-rooms. I'd read about people who were doing it and I thought, 'We can do that, we know about hospitality'. We'd get together 20 or 30 people in a house and I'd sing and people would join in. We'd usually follow the concert with happy chatting over a slap-up supper.

Then invitations came to lead singing workshops at festivals and music camps. I had trained as a teacher and loved teaching. I was also influenced by the singing practise of Frankie Armstrong, to whom I'd been introduced by The Boite. I started organising singing workshops and included lunch because I loved doing it. It only dawned on me slowly that the combination of singing and food was a deeply satisfying, time-honoured human activity. Lots of people know this of course, it's not unique to me.

When I moved back up here the people in Newstead said, 'We want to sing regularly', so I organised regular group singing with food and called it Vocal Nosh. People seemed to enjoy a 'free and fearless space' where they could make satisfying harmony quite quickly without the anxiety of performance or failure. It was the slow-growing fruit of many years, rather than a sudden flash of an idea.

Anne-Marie could see and describe what I was doing as a singing facilitator and articulate how it was valuable to community. She understood that shared leadership was more sustainable than being a lone ranger. Without her insight, Vocal Nosh would probably have gone no further than Newstead and I'd have probably burned out by now. The conjunction of both of our visions and skills was a very lucky one.

We were fortunate also at that time to be able to make connections with VicHealth and the National Rural Health Alliance. VicHealth asked, 'What can you do with music?' and we thought that providing musical and community minded people from communities across the State to gain some important modern skills, and to let them learn from each other was the best thing we could provide. In rural communities, there is no surplus cultural capital. Its almost impossible for people to experiment and fail and to develop confidence in something new quickly. We developed a proposal that VicHealth accepted and Anne-Marie and I started training community singing leaders and providing ongoing encouragement and support. After two years training about 60 leaders we teamed up with Community Music Victoria and the 'Victoria Sings' project was born.

5 years later, the project continues to grow, and has attracted the interest of the Department of Victorian Communities and Arts Victoria, as well as VicHealth. There are catalysts in four rural regions across the State, training and supporting singing leaders and helping the community at large understand, enjoy and promote the benefits of singing together.

Although there has been a revival of community singing across the western world, only the State of Victoria has a systematic approach that enables all segments of the community, and most particularly people in rural communities to have access.

For information about how to get involved in a singing group near you or about training opportunities for people who would like to get singing groups happening, contact Community Music Victoria.

we can all make music

the two of us

Anne-Marie Holley:

Fay White:

making a sound world together