29/05/2022
All good things must come to an end.
I need to make the sad public announcement that on 11 April 2022 the membership of Vocal Evolution voted to wind up the chorus. At this point, aside from the administrative tasks needed to follow through with that decision we have ceased all activities as a chorus.
Many of you that are close to the club will already be aware of this, as we have reached out to people in our close network, but we felt it was important to inform the wider community, especially now that our application to wind up the group has been approved and we have begun distributing our assets.
So then, why this decision?
From the beginning, the goal of Vocal Evolution has been to perform at a high level, and we have achieved a fair amount of success towards our aims during our history. Over the last few years, however, we have struggled to maintain this level.
After a lot of thinking and a lengthy discussion amongst the Leadership and Music Teams early this year, it became clear to us the chorus couldn’t realistically continue in its current form whilst holding onto our A-level strategic goals. We acknowledged the harsh reality that we simply didn’t have the collective energy, will, or ability to continue to try and reverse the downward trend we’d observed, and this led us to put the resolution to a vote by the full membership.
Now, there is a *lot* of detail that I won’t touch on in this forum, but suffice to say the decision to recommend to the chorus that we pull up stumps certainly was not an easy one or in any way taken lightly.
Many of us have put in years of hard work to get Vocal Evolution to where it is, and we are all grateful to have reaped the rewards of that work in the genuine friendships that have been engendered as well as the multitude of wonderful memories that are the natural by-product of people working shoulder to shoulder for so long and achieving so much.
We have always been very proud that through our performances we have been able to present barbershop harmony to the public in a way that has surprised, delighted, and inspired our audiences, whether on the international contest stage or in small local community gigs. We also count it as a privilege to have been able to be a part of the barbershop harmony community in Australia and to have many of our members serve in various ways, big and small, to help build this wonderful community.
We all know that the singing never really ends. I know many of our members will continue their singing journey even as Vocal Evolution ends. I also know that they’ll take the positive VE spirit with them wherever they go next.
Many of us will be in Hobart in November for the BHA National Festival, and we look forward to seeing you all face-to-face – especially after this extended break.
We’ll see you all soon.
Adrian Gimpel
President
Vocal Evolution
