“ACCORDIONS AT MORLEY”
Annual Report for 2010 - 2011
Activities and Achievements
This has been a landmark year for the Club. 22 of us went to the Irish International Accordion Festival in Navan in April - our first trip abroad and our first competitive event. We were therefore thrilled to come second in the Senior Orchestra Class. (Several of us also competed in solo and duet classes.) Our chair, Alison Briggs, has written up the event for the Morley Magazine. There were two spin-offs from this success. One is that we have made our first CD, of which more below. Secondly, we decided that we needed percussion for the competition - so we borrowed a rival band’s percussionists for the event itself, and employed professionals for our final rehearsal in Morley. We felt this is such an enhancement to our performances - and good experience for our members - that we would make a feature of our concerts, starting with our 2011 summer concert. We are most grateful that the college is able and willing to lend us the percussion instruments, so we only have to pay for the players - though the college has helped with this as well.
As usual, we gave two of the Music Department’s series of Tuesday lunchtime concerts – our “traditional” one, the last before Christmas, on 14th December, and a summer one, on 7th June. The programmes are attached. Each included the Club performing as an ensemble, our leaders playing duets as Duo Esprit, and members playing solos and in smaller groups. The Christmas concert was agreat success, playing to a Holst Room packed with a record audience of 70. It included an impressive array of senior Morley academic staff, and a good number of other accordionists from as far afield as Wiltshire, and including Harlow and Guildford accordion clubs. It is good to be bringing people into Morley who would not otherwise have heard of the College. For our June concert we moved into the Emma Cons Hall. It was a celebration of our success in Ireland - we had percussion accompaniment and finished with the suite with which we won there. We also displayed a new talent, with one of our members singing with the James Bond suite. The concert was a triumph, and
broke the record again with an audience of about 90.
We held 24 meetings this year, including, the event in Ireland and our two concerts. The attendance record is attached. Average attendance was 20, the same as two years ago, and up from the 18.5 of last year. At our two concerts we fielded 19 and 24 accordionists respectively. The total number of attendances at meetings since the Club started has now passed 3200. The flourishing state of our Club reflects the synergy with the Beginners’ and Improvers’ Classes run by the College, and the Intermediate Accordion Club (IAC). The College Classes, which are taught by our orchestral leader, Julie North, moved from Saturdays to Monday mornings this academic year. Mondays did not prove popular, and the classes have moved to Wednesdays for 2011-2012, which is proving much better. We are proud to announce that the Principal has joined the Beginners’ Class.
The Future
Looking ahead, our success in Ireland has inspired us with the ambition to compete at the huge triennial festival at Innsbruck in May 2013, and we have embarked on a fund-raising programme to make this possible. Our first venture was to have a professional CD made of our June concert, which we’re selling selling as individuals and on our website www.morleyaccordions.org.uk We also have plans for an Orchestral Day at Ripley in November, organised jointly with two other accordion orchestras in our region (Tillingborne and Watford), and a Ceilidh in January.
We are becoming recognised as Morley Accordion Orchestra in the wider world and from our internal perspective, we have considerably “upped our game”, but these developments have a cost. The preparations for Ireland put a huge extra administrative load on our leaders, and we have decided to increase their fees. There are other potential costs - hiring percussionists and buying more music, for example. The Committee carefully considered the potential problems that an increase in fees might cause to our less well-off members, balanced against the need to remain solvent and keep an adequate reserve. We concluded that we would have to increase the basic fee per meeting from £8 to £9, but would hold the concessionary rate at £5, and seek to make it clear that the concession was intended to be available to meet need, rather than as an automatic reaction to age.
AGM and Accounts
We held our AGM on 7th October 2011 during one of our regular meetings. It was attended by 23 members and one of our musical directors. The accounts (examined by the appointed person) were presented by the Treasurer and approved. A copy is attached. They show a surplus for the year of £276, just under 10% of our turnover. This indicates that our budgeting for the year was broadly sound since we achieved an increase in average attendance of just under 10%. The budgetary plans for next year were explained and accepted.
The meeting elected the following for next year:
Chair: Alison Briggs, Secretary: Neil Sanders, Treasurer: Vivienne Colchester
Committee Members: Sarah Crisp, Shona Holmes, Sarah Lewendon, Lucy Neville, Chris Newport
Examiner of Accounts: Vanessa Benson
Acknowledgements
As always, we record our enormous gratitude to Ian Watson and Julie North, who have led our Club since its inception in 1999, and also to the College for providing our facilities and making us welcome as contributors to the activities of the Music Department.
Neil Sanders (Secretary)