Anyone who reads my updates will know that I love my choir. I look forward to singing on a Friday night – the perfect way to unwind after a week at work.  Sadly, declining membership has been threatening the future of Ryedale Choral, despite everyone’s best efforts to recruit new members. When I joined the choir we had over 50 members and sang the great choral works like Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and ‘Israel in Egypt’ and  other classics of the choral repertoire. The remaining members hark back to those days and complain that we are only doing smaller works and carol concerts. They want to do the ‘Messiah’ (so do I) but at the moment we are lucky to be able to muster two male tenors and the redoubtable Kate. Without the voices we cannot do the great works. It is ironic that we are losing members because we don’t do serious music but we can’t do serious music  because we have lost so many members!  

          Now an even greater blow is threatening not only the future of Ryedale Choral, but also choirs throughout the north. In order to sing, choirs need song books and scores.  These are expensive and bulky to store, especially as a choir may only perform a piece once or twice in their history. Nor is it fair to burden members with the cost of buying their own scores on top of their membership fees. The usual practice is to borrow scores from a musical library, paying a fee for the privilege. In North Yorkshire we have always been lucky to be able to hire music from the superb collection at the Music and Drama library in Wakefield, a long established and greatly treasured resource. The beauty of the system was that we could order the music and it could be delivered and returned to Pickering library. This week came the news that the Music and Drama library has fallen victim to Government cutbacks and is to close in Spring 2012, and its comprehensive collection, built up over a long period, will either be broken up and divided among other libraries, mothballed or even sold off. This could be the end of Ryedale Choral and many other amateur choirs as well as threatening drama groups who borrow scripts. There are other music libraries, but the postage is prohibitive and they are much further away and less comprehensive than the Wakefield resource. There is a very real chance that this could be the final season for our 60 year old choir. As the library is to close in the middle of rehearsals for our spring concert of Italian music, with Vivaldi’s ‘Gloria’ as its centrepiece, as I write this there is some doubt about whether we will be able to borrow scores in January. Our December concert of carols, Christmas music and seasonal readings in Norton could well be our swan song. I and the other members of the choir sincerely hope not.

 Mary Cowton