Scotland Sings aims to support and promote creative, healthy singing communities across Scotland by supporting their leaders. The project is led by a steering group from across the community singing sector, produced by Love Music and supported by Creative Scotland through multi-year funding.
Steering group
Ali Burns: Natural Voice Network specialist
Katy Lavinia Cooper: Head of Marketing and Trainer at Sing For Pleasure
Stephen Deazley: Artistic Director Love Music
Mary Ann Kennedy: Gaelic singer, composer and broadcaster
Andrew McTaggart: Director of Ayr Choral Union
Alison Reeves: Making Music Deputy CEO and Manager, Scotland
Penny Stone: Specialist in Singing for Health and wellbeing
Project history
2025 Song leaders’ gathering – Edinburgh
A day of song and warm-up sharing, singing, networking and learning from each other, facilitated by Penny Stone and Stephen Deazley.
2025 May – Sector consultation events
Following funding success, we held 3 events to consult with sector colleagues on how the programme should develop and what the priorities were.
2022 Comfort Of Voices weekend gathering
On Sat 24th and Sun 25th Sept 2022, we hosted Comfort Of Voices, a weekend gathering that took place in Glasgow and online for choir and song leaders at all levels of experience and working in any genre, living or working in Scotland for the benefit of Scottish communities. Representatives from choirs across the country and national organisations contributed to discussions and delegates sang together, learned from each other and networked with their peers. We discussed suggestions and practical solutions to best ensure sector resilience, future sustainability and growth, and started to explore what could be done at a strategic level to enable this change. Those conversations and the feedback collected around the weekend has led to the development of the sector support plan which formed the basis of Love Music’s multi-year funding application to Creative Scotland.
2021 song commissions
In 2021, we commissioned five songwriters to write new songs in collaboration with five community choirs. Written during the pandemic, the free choir songs were created to be accessible for online teaching and learning, and are accompanied by professionally recorded audio and video resources to support both choir leaders and choir members. Each of the five choirs involved in the project has recorded their own version of the songs which gives a good feel for how they might be interpreted, performed and enjoyed by other choirs. The feedback received in the choirs application stage and during this project about how isolated and separate from each other community choir and song leaders felt was the catalyst for producing the Comfort Of Voices gathering.