News: Member Blog

Unison Halifax 2022

The Unison Festival began in Edmonton in 1998, after the then artistic director of Edmonton Vocal Minority, David Garber, suggested a weekend choral festival to bring together Canadian LGBTQ choruses, who may not otherwise be able to attend the week-long GALA festivals that take place in the United States. Quickly gaining the support of the Edmonton LGBTQ community (the city’s Pride Day was even moved in order to coincide with the festival), the inaugural Canadian GALA Choruses Festival ’98 proved to be a resounding success, bringing together 15 choruses from all across Canada, eager to return for another festival. Since then the festival has been presented every four years. During the 2010 festival, the decision was made to create a formal national Unison organization, in order to develop and maintain formal guidelines regarding the hosting of futures Unison events. Unison has taken place in in Edmonton in 1998, Toronto in 2002, Vancouver in 2006, Winnipeg in 2010, Ottawa in 2014 and most recently in Calgary this past weekend. In Calgary, the Women Next Door, a Halifax based chorus, presented and won the bid to host Unison 2022 in Halifax! Partnering with the Nova Scotia Choral Federation, Choirs for Change and Xara Choral Theatre Unison will take place in Halifax as The Women Next Door celebrate their 30 Anniversary. Artistic Director Willi Zwozdesky, Vancouver, is no stranger to us on the east coast and is very excited that Unison 2022 will be hosted Nova Scotia!

NSCF would like to thank the following choirs for there support of this year’s Toss-a-Tune-ee campaign.  Donations this year total $1728.45 and will help support the our provincial youth choir and our National Youth Choir quartet.

Aeolian Singers
Annapolis Valley Honour Choir
Aylesford United Church Choir
Cape Breton Chorale
Coastal Voices
Dalhousie Health Professions Choir
Dartmouth Choral Society
Digby Choral Federation
Enchor East
First United Church Choir
Halifax Camerata Singers
King’s Chorale
North Mountain Chorus
Seton Canata Choir
South Shore Chorale

If you would still like to Toss-Tune-ee with your choir – it is never too late to participate.

We are now accepting applications to audition for the 2018 Nova Scotia Youth Choir.  For more details visit the NSYC webpage

http://www.choralcanada.org/activities-projects/choral-awards/

Starting Tuesday, February 6th to Thursday, February 8th, specially discounted one-year GrantStation memberships are available to eligible TechSoup Members for only $133! This is a $267 discount on our regular administrative fees.

TECHSOUP – If you are a member of Techsoup you don’t want to miss this offer.  If you are not a member of Techsoup it is worth looking into.  Techsoup distributes software donated by major developers soup as Microsoft to non profit and charities for a small administration fee. For more information about membership go to https://www.techsoupcanada.ca

Nominate an outstanding individual for a National Choral Award. We are currently accepting nominations for all categories!

NSCF has commissioned a series of 5 posters encouraging singers to join a choir and sharing statistics from the first ever Canadian Choral Census.  This series is now available as posters and concert program inserts for download from the NSCF website on our under About NSCF “Media” page .  You can request printed posters as well.  The series will appear weekly between now and Christmas on our webpage, Facebook page and in Enotes.