West Sussex singers combine for Time Well Spent

Petworth Voices, Bolney Voices, Wisborough Glee, Valley Voices (Lavant Valley), Bellacapella and Chichester Festival Theatre Singers (plus Emily’s mum in Hexham) converged as the West Sussex Sings Virtual Choir to deliver Emily’s own song Time Well Spent.

You can enjoy the results on YouTube at https://youtu.be/oSPksnGn6TQ

“I actually borrowed the melody from Mr Mozart,” Emily says. “The whole thing is quite an interesting story. I was doing a project with Horsham that has not been celebrated enough because coronavirus arrived.

“It was a Horsham Year of Culture project, song-writing for children.

“I wrote a complete songbook, me and a few hundred children. Every primary school in the Horsham district was going to get a copy for free so that they could sing songs about the place in the place written by people from the place.

“I went and did workshops in six different schools and I wrote six song with the children and I wrote three songs independently.

“And we got as far as recording them. All the songs exist digitally, and they were on their way to the printers when life shut down with lockdown.

“I don’t know if it can happen now. I hope so. West Sussex Music did this in partnership with Horsham District Council and commissioned me to do the project. I have done my bit, and now it is up to West Sussex Music who understandably have got very different priorities right at the moment.

“But one of the songs was Time Well Spent.

“When you enter Horsham, there are signs saying ‘Welcome to Horsham’ and they also say ‘Time well spent.’ I hadn’t really noticed it until I started writing these songs.

“I didn’t grow up around here. I don’t have that knowledge you have when you grow up in a place.

“I had to go out and see what there was here, but I just thought it was a lovely little motto for Horsham, and that was the seed for the lyric.

“And I wanted to put the lyric to something that had been around in Horsham for years and years.

“I did a lot of research and I found that this tune by Mozart had been appropriated by a man in Warnham.

“He tended to play it on his fiddle, this tune by Mozart, and it became known as Michael Turner’s Waltz.”

Michael Turner, 1796-1885, was clerk and sexton of the Parish of Warnham from 1830 to 1880.

Emily wrote the piece a year ago, but its lyrics in the light of lockdown started to seem even more appropriate: “You hear a song and then you put it in a new context and it is so interesting the way that the lyrics can take on a new life. I am delighted. It is a really good song and then lockdown happened. It is lovely to go back to it now.”

And this time there was a greater familiarity with the whole process for many of the people taking part.

“The rehearsals are getting easier because everybody is getting their head around the technology, and I think people are losing their inhibitions about singing alone in their homes.

“It is about conquering the technology, and I have had so many people thanking me for forcing them to do this, for helping them to get rid of their anxieties around technology.

“They really feel that they have achieved something with this.

“They recorded their parts and sent them to me. I have had videos on all the different platforms.”

Putting it all together doesn’t necessarily get any quicker: “Putting the audio together takes a day and then editing the video takes a couple of days. But I love it. It is great. It is really satisfying to do. And because I know the members so well, for the video I have put people together who are friends; I have put married couples together that both sing. I have used it to try to tell a story as well. It is not just about the music.”

Whether Zoom collaborations will continue post-COVID, Emily suspect something certainly will, a great outlet for people who are carers or who have health issues and just cannot get out to real-life rehearsals.

“But I know that nothing can actually beat all being together in the same room singing, and I just can’t wait for that to happen.”