Voices are a 22-voice choir who have been singing together in Sydney for the past four and a half years. After more than four years we feel we have grown immensely as musicians and as human beings. We still struggle with questions of motivation, leadership, listening and cultural appropriation of music, and we probably always will, but we have shared a strong knowledge of musics from across the globe, and of our voices and sounds, inside and out. Both the group that make up the choir and the material we sing have evolved slowly. Over the years members have come and gone, travelled, involved themselves in many various personal projects artistic and political, spiritual and recuperative.
Relationships begin, continue and end, and children are born into the world.
Those who have left are often still in contact with those who stay, and when members finish their travels they come back to the group. Our repertoire started with a couple of African songs which we didn t really understand, and a collection of bits and pieces of songs and voice improvisations. Now we hear and understand a whole range of material and have greater appreciation for the subtleties of voice and the meaning of song lyrics. We have learnt from the songs we sing and from the many people who have taught and inspired us along the way. Sometimes we are not very good at being together, but we crave this interaction and so we work hard at it.