About The Festival
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The National Street Choir Festival is a long standing annual weekend of song that aims to create a connection and sense of community between choirs nationwide. It has been held in a different location, predominantly in the North of England, each year. The Festival celebrated its 25th anniversary in Manchester in 2007, moving to Brighton for 2008, and in 2009 is hosted in Whitby, North Yorkshire.
The festival was created initially to promote the development – through song – of a society free from all forms of oppression, exploitation, exclusion and violence. The festival is organised each year by a choir in a different town or city, with the aim of bringing our ideas and music directly to local audiences. The hope is to encourage more people to sing relevant songs – collectively, publicly and powerfully – as a contribution to progressive change. Over the last 25 years, the Festival has expanded to include not only choirs with a political agenda, but those community choirs who sing a wide repertoire, for the love of singing (itself a political act!) The range of participating choirs, and thus repertoire, has expanded to include world music, folk, pop, rap and soul, as well as the original protest songs at the heart of the Festival.
The Festival runs over an action packed weekend with choirs from all over the British Isles participating and singing in various corners of the chosen city or town. It opens on Friday evening with registration and a welcome event.
Saturday starts with a group rehearsal followed by an outdoor massed sing to the public. All participating choirs join together to sing a chosen repertoire that has been rehearsed independently prior to the Festival. The object of this is to engender a community spirit that is shared with the local people. Each choir is then able to busk in the host town or city to share their particular musical style with local people. In the evening there is a concert where each choir performs to the other choirs and local people. This is an exciting and supportive experience and will be held in 2009 in the Northern Lights Suite of Whitby Pavilion.
On Sunday there is a wide range of vocal workshops for the participating singers and members of the public to attend, and after the workshops, a final gathering and sing draws the Festival to a close.
The first National Street Band Festival was held in Sheffield in 1983. At the 1991 festival, held in Hackney, London, street choirs joined the bands and the event was renamed the ‘National Street Music Festival’. Bands and choirs continued together until the festival at Morecambe in 1997 when two separate festivals were mounted – one for bands and one for choirs. While the band festival faded out, the choirs continued from strength to strength as an annual event, now termed simply the ‘Street Choirs Festival’. The number of choirs attending has grown from eight in 1983 to twenty-six in Brighton in 2008. The festivals are part of the wider movements of political and community song, which includes many individual folk singers and songwriters, including Frankie Armstrong, the Copper Family and Billy Bragg – a patron of the festival.
Whitby Community Choir
Our choir was formed in 2004-5 by a small group of people who gathered together to sing simply for the love of it – no leader, no auditions and certainly with no intention of performing. However the love of singing soon led to sharing their singing with others in the community, at local events. Then in 2006, founder members Richard and Mary encouraged a very small group to go to the Street Choir Festival at the Sage Gateshead, and they caught the bug! The choir was then represented at Manchester in 2007 and Brighton in 2008, with the Street Choir Festival forming a key date in its musical calendar.
Today the choir has grown to around 25 members, meets on Wednesday evening 7.15-9.00, performs regularly in the local area under the leadership of Rebecca Gross and found itself in Brighton volunteering with a mixture of excitement and trepidation to host this amazing event!
We are looking forward to meeting friends old and new in July and hope you will have a wonderful time in Whitby.