WATCH: Children’s choir sing harmonies for zoo

Sunday 19 July 2020

A group of local singers, aged six to 12, have released their own version of a jungle-themed classic tune, which they learned throughout lockdown, in a bid to raise funds for Jersey Zoo.

The Musical Originals Training Choir rehearsed ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ via Zoom over the last few weeks under the direction of Imogen Nicholls MBE.

The original Musical Originals Training Choir was the National Children’s Choir of the Year in 2016 and those children have now moved on to the senior choir. 

The new Training Choir was formed in January with a completely new group of children - most of whom Ms Nicholls had never taught before.

Video: The Musical Originals Training Choir features singers aged six to 12.

With lockdown forcing all islanders to stay at home, the Singing Teacher and Choral Director had to adapt to ensure the young voices could keep singing.

In addition to teaching over the computer, she created backing tracks for the children to practice. 

While the system has worked quite well, even with 27 children on the same screen, the Choir Director admitted that the process has been time-consuming. Rather than being able to hear the children live, she had to listen to the individual tracks of the children singing.

“The worst thing is that children cannot learn from each other, younger children learn from the older children,” she explained.

“It’s always the way it has worked. Right now, that cannot happen, they all have to learn from me, in a way it is a pity. It’s been sad.” 

Pictured: The choir decided to use the track to raise funds for Jersey Zoo.

The Choir was able to rehearse their own version of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ and each child then recorded their parts on their mobile phones.

“The lock-down hit us hard but we continued to meet on Zoom every Saturday morning and through a series of audio tracks and video lessons, we have produced, what I think anyway, is a pretty decent performance engineered magnificently, by local composer and tech guru, Christina Orchard,” the Choir Director said.  

The track, which features two soloists, Rubie Le Masurier and Hannah Moulson, has a “rather random arrangement” as Ms Nicholls explained. 

With the youngest singer in the choir being just six, Ms Nicholls had to come up with simple harmonies for the youngest voices.

Once recorded, the choir decided to use the track to raise funds for Jersey Zoo. The video, edited by senior choir member, Kyleigh Melville, features images of the Zoo’s residents along footage of the children singing. 

So far, the choir’s JustGiving page has raised £250.

“We had this song any way, the children really enjoyed it,” Ms Nicholls said.

“When we emailed the children, all but one or two were members of the zoo and we all knew of the zoo suffering a great deal from people not going. Animals are incredibly important to children. Conservation is the future and children are the future, so we wanted to tie all that in.”