New Forest Community Choir
About Our Choir
NFCC exists to sing together for enjoyment. We've been singing together for many years now but give new members a warm welcome. You don't need any musical knowledge - just a desire to sing!
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Over the years we have enjoyed many benefits – the pleasure of making music, new friendships, exploring different areas of music, developing our own voices with the attendant health benefits (both mental and physical!) – but all by-products of singing together for fun!
About Our Musical Director,
Kirsteen Freer
Kirsteen has loved music since early childhood. She studied piano, singing and violin at music college. After receiving her Diploma in Music, she went on to work with adults and children, with and without learning difficulties, teaching piano and using music, singing and folk dancing in a therapeutic way.
She has sung in many different types of choirs over the years and now runs two A capella choirs, 'Sing for Joy (the Ringwood Community Choir) and NFCC. Her varied experience includes providing accompaniment for village pantomimes, playing recorder and calling dances in a ceilidh band, as well as running singing and folk dance workshops.
About our singing
For thousands of years all over the world people have sung — to express joy, celebration and grief, to aid healing, to accompany work, devotion and the rituals of life — without worrying about having a "good" voice or "getting it right". Singing has been a part of life, a way of binding communities.
Each person's voice is as unique as their fingerprint: the voice we are born with is capable of freely expressing a full range of emotions, thoughts and experience - this is what we mean by the "natural voice".
Natural Voice is about celebrating the voice you were born with, rather than trying to train it to an ideal of perfection. It's about building accepting, non-judgmental communities that sing together. It's about welcoming all voices into a group without audition and working from there to make a group sound. It's about making learning by ear accessible to the whole group so that nobody needs to be able to read music.
Creating an accepting community is an essential element of our approach: a community where singing together is a natural experience that is open and accessible to all.
