A River Rather Than a Road

| vii →

Figures and Tables

| ix →

Acknowledgements

This book owes a great deal to so many people. If Sarah were alive she would want to acknowledge her debt to all the people who have sung with her over her rich life. These are now drawn together in the Sarah Morgan Foundation.¹ The Foundation has been particularly supportive of this book, especially Susanna Starling. I am very grateful to Sarah for the opening up of this world for me over our period of association as supervisor and student as well as collaborators in numerous musical projects. My co-supervisor was Professor Sandra Drower, and the Head of Research in the Faculty of Arts, Professor Inga Bryden, and the three examiners – Dr Peter Critten, Dr Olu Taiwo and Professor Ian Russell – helped me refine this.

In the production of this book I am grateful to Hannah Ward for her proofreading skills and to my personal assistant, Charlotte Osman. The University of Winchester provided research support; my colleagues Professor Elizabeth Stuart, Professor Joy Carter and Professor Simon Jobson have supported my work in a variety of ways. At North West University, South Africa, I am grateful to Hetta Potgieter, Liesl van der Merwe and Dirkie Nell for their continued encouragement and opportunities to share my work. Many friends have helped and encouraged me along the way, especially the Revd Wilma Roest, the Revd Bill Scott, the Revd David Page, Sue Lawes, Dr Carol Boulter, Ianthe Pratt and Myra Poole. I am very grateful to Lucy Melville at Peter Lang for her encouragement in setting up the series Music and Spirituality, in which this book sits.

I am grateful to my two sons, Matthew and Richard, and my granddaughter Scarlett for their continued encouragement of my creative enterprises.

The Revd Dr June Boyce-Tillman MBE FRSA, FHEA, Professor of Applied Music, Artistic Convenor for the Centre for the Arts as Wellbeing and the Tavener Centre for Music and Spirituality, University of Winchester; and Extraordinary Professor, North-West University, South Africa.

1 <https://www.facebook.com/sarahmorganfoundation/timeline>.

| 1 →

JUNE BOYCE-TILLMAN

Introduction

This book is an exploration of English community choirs, their music and their leadership from a very personal perspective, which brings together Sarah Morgan’s background as a folk musician, her career in training and facilitation, and her developing understanding of the world of the choir. Much of this book was originally submitted for a Professional Doctorate at the University of Winchester. Sadly, Sarah died before completing the degree. She was awarded the qualification posthumously. The submission for this qualification involved a context statement and a box of evidence (see the Appendix). The Sarah Morgan Foundation was concerned that her significant contribution to the field was made available to the wider public. As her Director of Studies at the university I have edited her context statement for this publication without the box of evidence (which is available at the University of Winchester). Chapters 2, 3 and 4 are exactly as Sarah wrote them. The Prelude and Postlude are mine and set out a frame for seeing the community choir as spiritual experience based on inclusion, the valuing of diversity and commitment to the musicality of everyone; it is seen as replacing in some ways the communal singing that characterized parish worship when most of a community attended church regularly. Chapter 1 is slightly adapted and Chapter 5 is completely my work as editor, as it was left only in draft at Sarah’s death. In the Prelude, Postlude and Chapter 5 the first person referred to is June Boyce-Tillman, but the first person for the other chapters is Sarah Morgan, which is the way that the original statement was written, reflecting Sarah’s own particular and inspiring story. In the chapters that Sarah wrote so close to her death a number of page references are missing which it has not been possible to find – they have been marked with an asterisk in the text. There is reference in these to the second song leaders’ course that she hoped to run but sadly was not able to. The literature upon which this book draws is hugely diverse, drawing on ← 1 | 2 → musicology, music therapy, community arts, spirituality, philosophy, theology, sociology and education. It is a cross-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary book and looks at the phenomenon of the community choir through a number of lenses associated with spirituality, in a way that draws on the methodology of crystallization (Ellingson 2008, 2009). So this is a review of Sarah Morgan’s work in many fields, leading to her achievement of the position of a highly regarded performer, choir leader, arranger and trainer. It is the story of a journey that I hope will inform other people’s journeys in this area.

The Revd Dr June Boyce-Tillman MBE.

| 3 →

JUNE BOYCE-TILLMAN