Senior Choristers and roughly twenty members of Trinity’s Adult Choir are thrilled to have been accepted to serve as choir in residence at Wells Cathedral in England for a week in July 2024. Many of our adults have taken similar trips to sing in England, most recently in 2017, when they sang at Gloucester Cathedral and filled a four day residency at Christ Church, Oxford.
Many cathedrals have sung choral services every day when their Cathedral Schools are in session. During summer holiday, other choirs are welcome to audition to serve as choir in residence for a week at a time. For our choirs, this process began a year ago, when we recorded our audition music just after Easter 2022.
Singing a full residency is a great privilege; we are tasked with carrying on a tradition that has been taking place for hundreds of years in a space built nearly 850 years ago. It is also a prodigious undertaking. Over the course of the week, our choirs will sing over fifty pieces of music during seven services and be expected to exhibit professional chorister deportment. I am particularly proud of and excited for our young choristers to have this opportunity. For most of our Senior Choristers, this will be their first trip to Europe and for some, their first time on an airplane. It will be a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I am confident the choristers (youth and adults alike) will bring back many new skills to integrate into their roles at Trinity, while also creating lifelong memories.
Our hope is to make it possible for all eighteen of our current Senior Choristers, who are in grades 5-11, to participate. As you can imagine, traveling to England in the summer is costly. Senior Choristers will be housed at Wells Cathedral School and will eat most meals in the school dining hall. While our week is filled with work, we will have one free day to visit Salisbury and Stonehenge. Our other excursions will be budget friendly local explorations.
We have established a fundraising goal of $70,000. Many of our families have several choristers singing on this trip and we want to be able to substantially subsidize all of our youth chorister’s costs. To reach this goal, we will have numerous fundraisers over the course of the next year that will reach the larger community of people outside of Trinity as well as “in-house” opportunities to give as well. Chorister parent Stacy DeWolf has generously volunteered to chair our fundraising committee, which has plans for car washes, bake sales, a large yard sale this summer, a Hymn-a-thon next fall, continued monthly Pizza Dinners and the opportunity to “Sponsor a Chorister.” A myriad of skills are necessary for these events; please contact Stacy if you would like to help at stacy_dewolf@yahoo.com.
Our inaugural fundraiser is in the form of an “envelope board” at the back of the church. This is a very simple way to give a small amount of money, ranging from $1 to $200 (although we will happily accept more!) There are instructions inside the envelope. Thank you for your generosity!
As we work on preparing the music, singing Evensong as often as we are able, and fundraising, we covet your prayers, encouragement and continued support. If you’re interested in following the choristers, please like our new Facebook page (found by searching “Trinity Choristers Staunton Virginia”). New choristers (youth and adults) are always welcome and enthusiastic parishioners keep us energized and renewed.
Photo: Robbie Lawson.
