Scales in the courtyard

Our choral group, 8+1, lived up to its name this afternoon - we're up to ten singers nowadays, and the former description is now merely a name - for our short gig in Benmore Gallery, a lovely stone building at the far end of Benmore Gardens. I think we were probably the first Music in the Gallery of the season, so we were happy to have an audience that more or less filled the upper gallery and delighted with the donation to our funds that said audience left behind...

The photo shows the singers warming up; there are no side-rooms at the venue, so we were outside in the courtyard, with the backdrop of the hills above Loch Eck and a fine rain on the breeze as we made our siren sounds (humming up and down) and sang our scales to the birds. Before the music began, a robin flew in and perched briefly on a music stand before miraculously finding its way out of the open door again - it would have been a distraction too far, even for us! 

8+1 has been in existence for 12 years now, with only a few changes in personnel; two of us first sang together under the direction of Mr PB over 43 years ago. We are very much a unit, and any new member is carefully recruited with regard to both singing ability and personality. I love the way we've improved so much over the years, the fact that our tuning is so good, the fact that we work so hard.

One sour note, as you might say, came at the end of the concert, when we discovered that an importunate member of the audience had recorded the whole performance on her phone. These phone recordings are inevitably dreadful; what makes it worse is that I've just discovered that this person - none of us knows her - happily uploads the most dreadful recordings to social media and leaves them there.

Not that anyone I know on Blipfoto would ever do anything so crass!