Time to go ...

When we arrived in Dunoon over 41 years ago, one of the first, sanity-saving things we did was start a choir. Mr PB directed; I sang alto. In these days it was a mixed-voice group of maybe 15; I can't remember what our maximum was. We called ourselves The Hesperians, and in these days we were described as the choir of Dunoon Grammar School Association. We rehearsed in the school - our first meetings were in what later became an art classroom, but most of them took place in the "new" music department which took shape in the playground perhaps 4 years later.

The Hesperians continued to sing into the 80s, giving up when we ran out of tenors; we tended to feel that this coincided with the imminent departure of the US Naval base in the Holy Loch, as some of our most enthusiastic men came from the navy. We sang such modern firsts as John Tavener's Funeral Ikos long before anyone else performed it, and our #2 son sang the treble solo in Fauré's Requiem a month before his voice broke. Tuesday nights were rehearsal nights, and that was that.

For the past 10 years we've run another choir, 8+1. It's an all-female group of 10 (I know, the maths don't work: we expanded) and we rehearse on a Tuesday night. Some of the music is familiar to past Hesperians, for some of them are still with us. But much of the music in the library is too big for such small forces, and there's a limit to what you can ask of female tenors and one baritone. So the music is going to a new home, to a choir that will be able to use it or to be disseminated to other groups. They will sing it and enjoy it, and that is a better fate than languishing in our loft. Today it came down from the loft, neatly tied in bundles, and it is all ready to go. Seeing some of it made me sad, but only for a moment: I shall probably not sing it again.

But tonight, I have the Funeral Ikos on the brain. Alleluia.