Posted In: Blog
New Arranger Welcome – Keely Hodgson
Earlier this month, we published a new collection from our latest arranger to join the team, Keely Hodgson. Keely is the last new arranger we will be adding to the website for a while now as we focus on consolidating and adding to everyone’s collections. That means this is probably the last Zoom chat for a bit as well, so we’re making the most of it!
New Arranger Welcome – Fiona Lander
Last week we published Fiona’s introductory collection of compositions and arrangements on ChoirCommunity. To accompany this launch, Craig chatted to Fiona over Zoom about her music influences and career.
New Arranger Welcome – Ed Aldcroft
We launched Ed’s exciting and varied initial collection of arrangements in mid-January on ChoirCommunity. Craig had a chance to catch up with Ed over Zoom (between the UK and Spain) the week after to talk about his musical influences and career.
New Arranger Welcome – Ben See
We kicked off 2022 by publishing a brand new music collection from composer, singer and choir leader Ben See. We’re now following up this launch with another in our series of Zoom interviews with Craig.
Introducing a New Series of Music Videos
We thought we’d try a new way of showcasing some of the great music we have on ChoirCommunity and especially the fantastic talent embodied in our wonderful team of arrangers. Each week, we’ll put a new video up on YouTube created by one (or sometimes more than one) of our arrangers of a song which is available from our library for download. The format will be a mixture of ‘virtual’ and live performance and we hope you’ll enjoy subscribing to the channel and having a listen each week.
The first video to be published is Wendy Sergeant’s version of I’m Still Standing, sung by Wendy herself along with Doug Watts (another of our team of arrangers), Catherine Smith and Katherine Everett. The video was created by Doug as part of the Portishead Festival of Song in 2020.
The sheet music and learning tracks for this arrangement can be downloaded from the website here.
Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel and click to receive notifications of videos as they come out each week at https://www.youtube.com/c/choircommunity
New Arranger Welcome – Tim Allen
We’re delighted to welcome the multi-talented Tim Allen to the team of arrangers this month and Craig has marked the occasion with another wide-ranging and often fascinating chat with Tim over Zoom.
Delivering a Better Browsing Experience
We’re constantly looking to find new ways to make the website better and easier to use, especially when it comes to search for the right piece of music! One of the things which has held us back is the way in which all the classification data – things like genre, voicing, difficulty level, accompaniment, choir type, etc. – have been grouped together as ‘categories’ or ‘tags’.
Well, this has now all changed, along with a brand new design for all the pages on the website where our arrangements are listed. Now you can filter any list by any of these categories independently, while also typing more specific search terms to find exactly what you want.
We hope you find the new page design easy to use and more importantly, enables you to find the best arrangements for your choir quickly and easily.
All the product pages still have the ability to preview the full scores, as well as listen to an excerpt of the ensemble learning track for every arrangement (well, nearly every one – we’re working on that!). All our learning tracks are all properly sung and recorded in high-quality audio as well to make the browsing experience as enjoyable and useful as possible.
Try out the new full catalogue search page here.
We hope you like the changes – please let us know by replying on this post, or emailing us directly at [email protected]
New Arranger Welcome – Jake Alexander
We’re delighted to welcome Jake Alexander to the growing team of ChoirCommunity arrangers this week. Jake is a multi-talented musician and instrumentalist, who spends his time in a wide range of musical activities, as well as writing and arranging choral music.
An Interview With Craig McLeish
It’s only taken four years, but we’ve finally got around to having a chat with Craig – Co-founder of, and prolific contributor to ChoirCommunity! Many thanks to Gitika Partington for taking Craig out of his comfort zone and putting him through the same sort of paces he has set for all our other arrangers over the last few months.
There are some great stories, as well as lots of insights into Craig’s approach to musical direction, arrangement and composition, influenced by exposure to some of the greatest musicians the country has produced from a very early age!
The Making of ‘Nothing Like Pilchards’
Despite the latest boom in Sea Shanty interest they have been a regular feature of the folk session that our resident soprano, Laura Featherstone has taken part in for many years. The annual Sea Shanty festival in Falmouth is also a very popular event every year, so they have always been big business down in Cornwall. However it’s fair to say that the same favourites are sung often, so Laura thought she would try and create something new!
New Arranger Welcome – Kate Shipway
This week, we’re delighted to welcome our newest arranger, Kate Shipway to the website. Kate is the first new arranger to come on board via our new ‘Artist Application’ process which we introduced at the end of 2020. Her submission was the one which really caught our eye so it’s great to be able to publish her first collection of songs and arrangements this week.
Zoom chat with Gitika Partington
In this week’s blog, we finally present a chat between Craig and our other founding arranger and ChoirCommunity co-director, Gitika Partington.
Gitika has been a wonderful supporter of the ChoirCommunity initiative since the very start and it’s been great to have her support (and of course here fantastic music) throughout the first three years.
Roslyn’s Lullaby – Sam Burns
This is worth a complete blog in its own right as it is such a lovely story with one of our own at the centre of it. Sam Burns is currently taking a sabbatical / on semi-retirement building a school in Portugal, but still managed to find time to help a little girl in Pennsylvania, with the help of his Bristol MAN Chorus, some sea shanties and a special lullaby….
New Arranger Welcome – Richard Salt
The first thing to sat about this blog is that Richard is not a new arranger at all – in fact he is one of the original three (along with Craig and Gitika) who helped to launch ChoirCommunity at the start of 2018. It’s just taken a little bit longer to get round to him – but then we haven’t had recorded a video chat with Craig or Gitika yet either!
In this Zoom chat, Craig and Richard talk about his musical influences and memories, as well as getting into the craft and joy of creating the perfect choral arrangement.
Richard has a fantastic collection of pop arrangements on the website which will add sparkle to any repertoire. Preview all his arrangements here.
New Arranger Welcome – Abi Moore
This is the first of a series of interview blogs (or vlogs?) introducing new artists as we welcome them to ChoirCommunity. Thanks in part to the deal we have signed with Hal Leonard, we have been able to expand no only our library of music, but also our team of arrangers, many of whom had songs which were effectively locked away in drawers until now.
Abi Moore is one of these talented musicians who contacted us well over a year ago to see if we could work together. It’s fantastic to be able to start offering her music now on ChoirCommunity and we thought it would be great to try out something new to support welcoming her, and our other new arrangers to the website.