The sounds of choral music will fill the air on Saturday November 19 when Broken Creek, a chamber folk music duo of husband and wife Lachlan and Erin Heycox, bring their unique style to the Broken Hill Art Exchange (BHAE).
The pair, who have been married for nine years, will be running a pop-up choir workshop from 2pm until 4pm on the day, giving Broken Hill residents the chance to come together and sing.
Erin Heycox says that she loves choirs and admits to being “a bit of a choir nerd”.
“I’ve grown up singing in choirs, church choirs and school choirs,” she says.
“It’s what got me into uni, a choir scholarship, so it’s always been a big part of my life.
“I love conducting choirs and I think it’s really powerful because you can get people that might feel a bit uncomfortable or shy singing by themselves or thinking, I don’t sound like Beyonce, so therefore I shouldn’t sing.
“I like to say it is your human right to make music,” she laughs.
“It’s all a part of being human, that we make our own music. It’s only been very, very recently that you can flip on Spotify and just have music at your fingertips.
“Back in the day everyone made their own music, so we like sort of bring that back.
“It feels really good to do, really good to sing in a group.
“Also, we are a duo so it’s really nice to involve other people, I like vocal harmonies so getting more than two people singing is really thrilling.
“We have been doing these pop-up choir workshops across lots of different small towns and it’s been really nice to do since Covid, because for a lot of community choirs it has been difficult with so many restrictions.
“For many it has been hard to restart after things have been so up in the air for so long.
“It’s a one-off workshop so there is no long commitment, some people might come and go ‘I really love this’, and they want to keep coming and maybe it will kickstart a local community choir.
“People can expect a lot of fun from the workshop. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and so it will just loosen you up, with lots of games and a fun warm-up at the start.
“Then we move into learning a round, then an Australian sea shanty which is really fun, and then two parts of the song Here is my Home, which they will then form a part of the performance for the concert later that evening.”
The concert will see the launch of the duo’s new album Small Town Anthropologies which is a musical journey through Ireland, Scotland, and the Appalachian mountains of America.
There will be intricate arrangements of banjo, mandolin, guitar, violin and voice.
Broken Creek takes old songs that have been sung for hundreds of years and do a rewrite and update the arrangement.
They also write original pieces about small town rural Australia, as both grew up in small Victorian towns.
The concert will be begin at 7pm and go through till 10pm in the Broken Hill Art Exchange heritage courtyard.
Link to tickets: https://events.humanitix.com/broken-creek-concert-and-pop-up-choir-workshop-at-the-broken-hill-art-exchange
