Dear our beloved Candlelight VOX community, I hope you are all travelling as well as you possibly can in this utterly chaotic year, and that you and your loved ones are healthy and safe! It's been a delight to see some of you over our Friday Zoom hangouts and to stay connected as best as we can. I am writing to you today from a quintessentially-quirky Melbourne café, with a lot of love in my heart for our journey together over the past three years - but I have some very bittersweet news for you today. As of January 2021, I am stepping aside from my position as Co-Artistic Director of Candlelight VOX. But - I am also beyond delighted to announce that Sam Cook and Aragorn Keuken will be joining Aidan on the Artistic Direction team for the 2021 season! I have full confidence that they will flourish working with you, and that you will guide each other through teaching and learning the way VOX does best. They've both already taken to the ideas and brainstorming phase like ducks to water!! A little on where this decision has come from… At the end of last year, Aidan and the committee and I sat down to have a very careful think about what we wanted the future of Candlelight VOX to look like - whether we wanted to aspire to become a professional ensemble, or remain true to Aidan and my original aims - that is, to be an environment exclusively for the learning and growth of its members. You may have noticed this solidified in our updated mission statement and goals at the start of the year. We went through various models of what this might look like - including a version where Aidan and I stayed on to artistic direct for the foreseeable future whilst helping other students plan their own programs each season - but ultimately realised that the best thing about our growth VOX has been not having the instruction of older peers or teachers spoon-feeding us the solutions to musical problems. It really hit me as we were preparing the PAUSE program last year that, yes - I'd learnt what I could learn in your beautiful company, that VOX had grown beyond just Aidan and I begging our friends to sing for us (in that everyone was coming forward with the most exquisite creative offers and owning the rehearsals as a shared space - just as we'd intended!!) - and that it was time for me to "take the leap" and look for further conducting opportunities. That being said - particularly for our first two programs - it would have been very helpful to have a kind voice to "nudge" us gently in the right direction when the water started to boil! So at Aidan's extremely kind suggestion, I'm moving into a "Conductor Emeritus" relationship with the choir, and perhaps for my own FOMO I'll run as General Assistant in next year's AGM, and continue to sing with the choir as a deputy (to come and help out occasionally - but in a way very conscious of following Sam, Aragorn, and Aidan's leadership.) With that in mind, the worst-kept "secret" plan for 2020 was for Path of Miracles to be my final program as Co-Artistic Director. The plan for this program at this stage is for me to continue solely with the smaller ensemble that had commenced work already, for a 2021 program as an independent project (stay tuned!!). Then, assessing the situation at the time, I'll potentially come back in a post-vaccine world to do the "big thing" as a massive music nerd-out with as many VOX singers and friends as possible. Wishing you all the love and light for the summer - and I look forward to seeing you all about very soon! Kindest, Grace x Also please enjoy the below videos from Ascension and PAUSE in 2019 - my technique may now be significantly cleaner... but these still remain some of the most profound days of my musical life :)
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