Danksta believes that the choir and the orchestra are both appropriate metaphors for local government.

Think of your local - I mean regional - council as a chamber choir and orchestra that you and everyone else subscribes to whether or not you like its repertoire or its arrangement - or indeed if you ever even listen to it.

After all democracy means we have a right to be tone deaf when goverment makes noise that riles us instead of soothes the economy.
Our - Danksta emphasises "our" - SC Council Chamber Choir Orchestra is only just settling into its first season of concerts, recitals, rehearsals, masterclasses, and all the other activities that make up a musical organisation.

At least we, the audience, got an opportunity to choose the conductor and the leading instrumental soloists and virtuoso voices, although we never have any say in the appointment of the artistic director, concert master, piano tuner, piano mover, violin maker, guitar luthier, sound mixer, stage crew, box office or front-of-house and such like.

So the sunny ensemble of our environs is conducted - by popular demand - by a baton-wielding Bob with a handy harmonica that is hopefully in key with the warblers, strummers, pluckers, blowers and tappers that comprise the chamber choir and orchestra. If Paul Keating was the Pavarotti of treasurers-cum-prime ministers, then our Bob matches the Luciano profile and his operatic scales of passion in this local, sorry, regional venue.

To date the SC series of concerts and recitals seems to have stayed mostly in tune and on the beat during the early months of this new musical collaboration which was engineered by a tin-eared parliament.

This is in spite of the State Conservatorium ordering that 75,000 more seats have to be added to an already overcrowded and acoustically doubtful auditorium. Even Danksta doesn't play the squeezebox like that!

The show must go on, as they say, even when we don't know what's showing let alone what it's trying to stay on without falling off!

However, lately the chamber's music scores have become somewhat unsettled and out of order. Some bung notes have crept into the performance, and some dischord can definitely be discerned by the audience - every one of whom also moonlights as a critic!

Sheet music is the cause of all this Wagnerian wrangle and Beethoven beat-up. All singers and musicians need sheet music, and they also have to be able to sight-read it.

Somebody has to collect and look after the sheet music - namely the music librarian!

Somewhere has to have it arranged, compiled, minuted and shelved - namely a music library!

Since the core purpose of a chamber choir and orchestra is making music of every kind for everyone, so too is it the raison d'etre of the community that supports and funds it.

Such is the demand for music up and down the Coast and across the Hinterland, that this new music library has been 10 years in the composing and arranging alone. While most of the Coast is well served for sheet music and instruments and rehearsal rooms, it was decided that the chorus and chamber citizens of Cooroy and anywhere within cooee deeply deserved their own music library.

So what kind of musical organisation - one that claims to be listening as much as it is playing somebody-or-other's song (ours?) - what kind of group turns down the chance to found a brand new music library that has already found willing sponsors?

Danksta believes that the listeners and music-lovers have been let down by this out-of-tempo outrage!

To try to overcome this dissonant divide, that allegro of allegations, these petty pianissimos and those broken strings, Conductor Bob and the leading lights have retreated to a two-day Music Camp. Danksta understands that the address of the Music Camp is c/- Mare Tranquillium (Sea of Tranquility) which you can always find on a full moon night through your telescope.

Danksta delights in dramatic sturm und drang as much as anybody but local history is not based on hysteria and hype alone!

Too much temperamental turmoil on and off the council chamber stage invariably becomes a parochial tug of clashing tunes instead of an artistic and well-orchestrated triumph.

Danksta hopes that the SC Council Chamber Choir and Orchestra will deliver the artistic enterprise and vision that we deserve, and that its ongoing season of symphonies, concertos, interplays and arias compel us to yell BRAVO instead of BOO!!

The electorate has already learned not to expect perfect pitch but it knows how to wield a tuning folk come next subscription voting day!