The Ballyclare Male Choir is now half way through the current session under its new conductor Phyllis Boyd and long serving accompanist Rosemary Basher. The choir can also be pleased to have 4 new members to swell the ranks with three taking their places in the baritone section while the second tenors are delighted to welcome the return of a past member, after many years, in Jack Montgomery. Any budding first tenors out there would also be very welcome at 7.30pm on a Wednesday night in Ballyclare High School..

Phyllis can be more than pleased by the way the choir has settled into her way of teaching and conducting the choral music. Her introduction of something old and something new has been well received by the members and the Annual Concert in the Whitla Hall at Queens University on Friday 14th March should be an enjoyable evening. Phyllis will be airing a few of her new secular and sacred pieces such as My Dearest Dear from Ivor Novello's musical Dancing Years, When I fall in Love made popular by Nat King Cole, Alwyn Humphrey's arrangement of What would I do without my music and Bryan Davies arrangement of the spiritual Where shall I be.

Also featuring at the concert will be popular tenor Eugene O'Hagan and Fiddlers Galore. Tickets are already on sale from any choir member but Dick Grey will be glad to receive orders over the phone on 028 9336 7134. This is the event that choir relies on each year to keep its running costs in the black and if all 1000 seats were taken then that would be a great help.

One month before that though, Chairman Denis Boyd will be hosting the annual dinner in the Templeton Hotel on the 15th February. Choir members and their guests will be able to sit back and be entertained, for a change, by the Lindsay Chorale led by its conductor William (Billy) McCay.

After the annual dinner the choir enters a fairly busy few months with, in addition to the Annual Concert, other engagements in Ballynure, Ballinderry, Newcastle, Newtownabbey, Derriaghy and finishing the season with a church service in Larne on 4th May.

As in the past few years the choir chairman gets to choose a local charity to be supported by the choir. The members make voluntary subscriptions each week to the charity and the charity itself is invited to set up a fund raising refreshment bar at the annual concert. This time around chairman Denis Boyd chose the Friends of the Cancer Centre Charity based at the Belfast City Hospital's new development. From previous experience it would not be unusual for this charity to receive a figure approaching £900 from the choir members donations alone.

This choir website can be found using most of the popular web search engines. It is now one of very nearly 1800 choirs registered on British Choirs on the Net. It can also be found at gerontius.net and and on a Welsh based UK choir site called malevoicechoir.net. An international choir index site is managed by the Kvam family based in Iceland. It lists a host of male choirs from all over the world and Ballyclare can be found in the UK listing.