Canal music is a festival first for choir
THREE hundred years after Handel’s Water Music was first performed on the River Thames, a contemporary work inspired by the Ashby Canal had its premiere on the Leicestershire waterway.
Reflections, by retired teacher Michael Dix, from Dadlington, was peformed for the first time in public by Stoke Golding community choir Ambion Voices at a variety night held at Market Bosworth Marina as part of this year’s Market Bosworth Festival.
Like Handel’s classic opus, Reflections is a three-part work, but instead of minuets, airs and hornpipes, it features three songs representing three eras of canal use.
Music graduate Mr Dix said: “I was no longer writing songs for children. There was a hole in my creative life so I offered to write something for them (Ambion Voices).
“I wanted to write something that was pertinent to the choir and reflected our local area.
“The Ashby Canal skirts both villages.”
He described the first song as “folksy”, being about the canal in its industrial heyday, when it was used to transport coal from Moira.
The second, reflective piece represents the canal was in decline and the third “more jolly” song borrows lyrics from wellknown, water-based tunes - like Messing About on the River - to celebrate the waterway’s current leisure and tourist use.
Jane White, who leads Ambion Voices together with Rachel ReesJones, said: “The choir feels very honoured to have had this amazing piece written for them.”
All-female Ambion Voices was formed by villagers mainly from Dadlington and Stoke Golding to sing for the official cortege when the coffin carrying the remains of Richard III stopped in Dadlington on its way to Leicester Cathedral for reinterment in March 2015.
Choir member Liz Alun-Jones, who is chairman of Market Bosworth Festival, saw the new water music as a perfect draw for the 2017 event and it was given its “world premiere” at a sell-out show in Market Bosworth Marina’s newly opened Cafe 1804 as part of the town’s festival in June.