BRADFORD Festival Choral Society is holding online rehearsals for the first time in its 164-year history.

Communal singing on the internet has become a popular way of coping with life in lockdown. Tom Leech, Musical Director of BFCS, said the historic choir, founded in 1856, is developing online resources to enable greater numbers of people to sing from home.

More than 70 of the choir’s 120-strong membership joined the first online rehearsal, at a few hours’ notice. “We were able to do this because in my work as Director of the Diocese of Leeds Singing Programme we’ve been at the forefront of developing ways to rehearse with young choirs online - we had 100-plus members of Bradford Catholic Youth Choir (BCYC) taking part in rehearsal last week - so having exhaustively tested the technology and changes to teaching methods needed for this kind of delivery, it was quickly applied to BFCS,” said Mr Leech. “It’s been so successful that my colleagues in the DoL singing programme and I led a day’s online workshop for Directors of Music in all the country’s cathedrals.

“The young singers in BCYC have gone from singing live to the nation on BBC1 on Christmas Day, to suddenly having no choir. It’s a similar feeling for the adults in BFCS. Singing together has a magical feeling, lots of musicians feel the loss of that collaborative experience at the moment. It’s important that charities don’t mothball the needs of people they work for; we have to push ourselves to find solutions. With BFCS it’s working out how to adapt choir to technology available - that’s meant a lot of re-thinking for me and our Assistant Musical Director, Chris Pulleyn.”

Mr Leech added: “In the coming term we’re going to re-plan our repertoire for members singing from home, and develop online resources. A rehearsal is a rich experience with a lot of learning about the voice, musical theory, cultural context of the music; you can’t fit this all into a shorter online rehearsal but we’re going to find a way though! With the BCYC singers, we’re talking to sound engineers about making composite recordings, edited together in a studio. We want to be as creative as we can in adversity, for singers to experience the wonderful “falling away” of the outside world when they sing, and hopefully come out of this crisis with some positive memories.”

Choir chairman Rob Voakes said: “We were disappointed to postpone a major performance to November and were wondering how to keep members engaged. It was great to see names appearing one-by-one on the ‘chat’ screen. After two weeks of lockdown it proved how eager people were to meet.” Visit bradfordfestivalchoralsociety.org.uk