THE director of a choir based in South East Cornwall has described how members adapted to the constraints of the pandemic and continued to sing together.

The Loveny Male Voice Choir has 45 members and has been conducted by musical director Marcus Alleyne for the past four years.

In March, not long after a victorious performance by the choir at the Wadebridge Festival of Music and Speech, the country went into full lockdown.

The night restrictions began also happened to be a Thursday – practice night – but just one week later the singers began meeting by Zoom.

As a professional musician, Marcus said it was vital for him to very quickly move his business online.

“It was also very important for the choir, so that we didn’t lose out on membership or lose out on the joy we get from singing,” he said.

“One of the challenges was engaging the members in using the technology, but some of the more technically minded members guided the others through each step of the process. With rehearsals being on a Thursday, we were also able to participate jointly in the clap for the NHS.”

Some weeks, the choir would not sing, but would simply bring a drink and a snack and spend time socialising together. As the lockdown wore on, Marcus realised that people were missing the one-to-one teaching input, and so he began smaller sectional meetings with individual groups of singers.

“We’ve done a couple of virtual concerts, and as part of this we asked the choir members to talk about their lives and their journey with Loveny – which in some cases has been 50 years,” said Marcus. “We took some of the old recordings that had been done on vinyl or cassette and put them in a digital format, and some of our soloists contributed performances.

“It was also important that we could offer performances to our listeners.”

While COVID stifled fundraising for the choir’s nominated charity, Penhaligon’s Friends, the virtual concerts included a link to the appeal.

Cornwall has a rich tradition of male voice singing and there are some 30 choirs in the county. The Truro City MVC created a YouTube video, featuring narrator John Larke, its own director Russell Pascoe, director of Mousehole MVC Steve Lawry, and Marcus of Loveny, with the aim of imparting advice to other groups on how to make a success of online rehearsals.

“Taking a choir online can be as little or as much as you need it to be,” said Marcus.

“Male voice choirs could be in a precarious position when we come out of the pandemic, so it’s really important we keep the ball rolling and don’t lose those hundreds of years of heritage we’ve worked so hard to sustain.”

The year 2020 saw Loveny Male Voice choir hold just 10 ‘normal’ practice sessions, and 10 ‘socially distanced’ sessions, some of which were made possible with the use of a member’s barn.

The 45 members are described as “very rich in memories” and therefore of a higher risk category.

While nothing has been planned in terms of live performances for 2021, the choir is determined to sing at least one concert on the bandstand at Padstow, because members know that there, they can socially distance if necessary.

And in the meantime, the laptops and the microphones are charged up and ready to roll.