In 72 days the fun starts!
#HHsing2025
All choirs and quartets are busy preparing for this international event. Show your choir or quartet’s preparations with #HHsing2025 on socials or send it to sing2025@hollandharmony.nl
Sing! Information
Behind the scenes, we are working hard to organise this fantastic event. More relevant information will be added to this page.
November 2024:
– Competitions are fully booked
– Announcement of the order of performance
– Check out our guests!
Theater Orpheus Apeldoorn:
This fantastic theater will be home for our event, check it out.
Hotels:
We made a list of all available hotels in or nearby Apeldoorn
Event city: Apeldoorn
We will tell you more about the charming city of Apeldoorn where we will be guests
More about:
Request:
Would you also like to do contribute in the organisation or as a volunteer during the convention? Please contact convention manager Yvonne van Schaik. Together we can have a look at how you can contribute!
Sing! Pitch
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Updates Sing! 2025 Barbershop Convention
We have created a special newsletter for all convention updates: Sing! Pitch
- Sing! Pitch 3 – 24 December 2024
Reservation rooms – Songs - Sing! Pitch 2 – December 2024
Festival Stage – Lunch, Dinner, Extra Tickets, and Ordering Details – Infodesk – Social media update
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Sing! Pitch Newsletter ! November 2024 :
Hello Convention Attendees,
Welcome and thank you all for your enthusiastic participation in the Holland Harmony Sing! 2025 convention. With over 700 registrations and fully booked competitions, we believe this convention deserves its very own Sing! 2025 Newsletter.
We are excited to introduce a new name for it: Sing! Pitch. You can expect more ‘Pitches’ to follow. Our aim is to keep you, as participants, well-informed about important matters related to the convention. Until now, updates have only been available in the Holland Harmony Newsletter, which is published monthly. However, we want to respond more swiftly to current developments. Of course, we will continue to keep regular readers of the Holland Harmony Newsletter updated about convention news. Additionally, this Sing! Pitch will be sent to our many international participants to ensure they stay informed as well. That’s why we have provided you with this English version of this Pitch.
A regular feature will be the schedule and deadlines, allowing you to quickly see when orders, submissions, or registrations need to be made.
In this Pitch, you will also find information about:The option to hire a rehearsal spacePayment for registrationsFull competition and draw (participants)And… (drumroll) our second guest!
Happy reading!
Yvonne van Schaik
Your Convention Manager
Venue Hire: Rehearsals and Preparations
From our evaluation of the previous event, it became clear that you would appreciate having more space for preparation. For this reason, we have engaged in discussions with Orpheus to explore the available options.
Naturally, we will again have smaller rehearsal or relaxation rooms available for hire, just as we did in 2023. These rooms are designed for smaller groups of up to 20 people and can be booked for 1.5 hours at a cost of €15. However, there is now also an option to hire larger rooms for 1.5 hours, intended for bigger groups, at a cost of €120. It is essential to book these spaces in advance for effective scheduling. Please email sing2025@hollandharmony.nl by 31 December with the subject line ‘rehearsal spaces’ and addressed to Louis Smits.
In 2025, we will also be reinstating the rehearsal rooms, known as PrepRooms. You will have access to these rooms 20 minutes before you take the stage to prepare. Our couriers will collect you from these PrepRooms. These rooms are, of course, available at no cost. A schedule and further information will follow.
Full Competition and Draw!
As mentioned in the Holland Harmony Newsletter, we have a fantastic lineup of participants and are fully booked. With careful planning, our programming team has successfully accommodated 31 quartets in the competition on Friday. Of these, 19 are from Holland Harmony, while an impressive 12 quartets will participate in the international competition, representing LABBS, BABS, Sweet Adelines International (SAI), Snobs, and Bing. This means that it is truly an international gathering.
On Saturday, the competition for choirs is also fully booked. Twelve choirs from Holland Harmony will compete, alongside seven in the Open competition. Representation is diverse, including SAI, LABBS, BABS, and Bing.
And, of course, you are very eager to see the programme and competition schedule. The results of the draw will be available on the Sing! Facebook page at https://facebook.com/Sing2025hollandharmonyand on our website, Sing! 2025 Barbershop Convention – Holland Harmony. So do keep an eye on those!
Payment for Registrations
The deadline for participation payments has now passed. It’s encouraging to see that most choirs and quartets have already settled their fees. Those who have yet to pay will have received a reminder.
If you find yourself unexpectedly unable to attend, we advise you to take out cancellation insurance. Holland Harmony incurs costs based on registrations, making it impossible to issue refunds for participant cancellations. This ensures we can rely on successfully completing this project, as a convention, from a financial standpoint.
Guests!!!
By now, you may have met our second guest via our Facebook page: the quartet Trailblazers. This quartet won the BABS quartets competition in 2023 and has had the honour of competing twice in the international BHS competition due to their high score. Check out a preview here: Trailblazers | BABS Quartet Final 2023. The four members also sing in the choir Meantime, our first guest. Trailblazers enjoys a light-hearted approach to music, often performing songs with a cheeky twist. We are excited to have them on board! 😉
We are equally delighted to welcome the guest choir Meantime, the current champions of BABS, who achieved an impressive score of 85.1%. Take a look at them here: Meantime Chorus | 2024 BABS Male Chorus Contest. Both groups will represent BABS at the European Convention in Helsingborg, and we are thrilled they will also be joining us in Apeldoorn.
Overview
Below is an overview of what is currently known.
| Activity | Deadline |
|---|---|
| Payment for registrations | 28 October 2024 |
| Lunch/dinner/ticket orders | Via choir/quartet by 31 January 2024 |
| Song submissions | To follow |
| Room reservations | 31 December 2024 |
| Room payments | To follow |
| Festival stage submissions | To follow |
| Final participant submissions (badge creation) | To follow |
| Volunteer sign-ups | To follow |
| Submissions for app and Facebook for quartets and choirs | To follow |
Updates Sing!
Update April 2024
Spring has started and at the moment the sun is shining and I see all happy faces. Now that might be different when you read this article, but positivity is definitely in the air!
Registrations have started
But that’s probably because registrations for Sing! are open on March 28! 2025 for HH choirs and quartets has started. And it’s going crazy! We are happy to report that we already have 12 choir and 12 quartet requests, including a few requests from abroad.
In fact, the first real registration comes from Sweden, the quartet Beyond. Good news and this gives the Sing! Team even more energy to make it another wonderful convention. For those who do not yet have an application form, you can request it via: Sing2025@hollandharmony.nl. And do it quickly! Because from 28
Next April we will also invite all non-HH choirs and quartets.
Also accessible to non-barbershop choirs
And this year, thanks to our diligent communications team, we are also going a step further. We have a first here in the Netherlands: we are also going to make our convention accessible to non-barbershop choirs! We will do this using press releases and social media and of course we will also contact the Apeldoorn Choir Federation, for example.
write to. The Festival Stage gives them a great opportunity to ‘give it a try’, but they are also welcome to take part in the Open competition on Saturday 29 March. And if you also sing in another non-barbershop choir, throw a ball about it…
Still a lot to figure out
While we are all busy getting the applications in, the Location Team is busy with preparations on location. This team consists of Ragnhild van Dijk and myself, Yvonne van Schaik. We are busy with the singing rooms, catering and decoration. We also look at the technology, for example we find out how much
microphones we actually really need now. Of course we are supported by the ‘old hands in the profession’ because without their experience it would be a complex job. On the day itself we already have some volunteers who will support us, but more volunteers are welcome! Think of ushers, couriers, etc. You know us
email address: sing2025@hollandharmony.nl
Just share!
Fact of the month: actually more of a question of the month, for you! There are many conventions taking place in the coming months that most of you will likely attend or participate in. How nice is it to draw the attention of the choirs and quartets you meet there to our convention!
Sing! 2025 convention manager
Update March 2024
It’s going to be “convention” again!
Sometimes wisdom comes with time. Or is it just the freshness of spring that made us realize that we have a communication problem.
On March 1, the entire Sing! 2025 Team together in Orpheus to get to know each other better and go through all tasks. It soon became apparent that there was a misunderstanding in the barbershop world: our Festival was not seen by everyone as a convention with a competitive element. After much deliberation, we have therefore decided to revive the festival in its old guise, and from today we are talking about the Sing again! 2025 barbershop convention.
Team meeting in Theater Orpheus
So this monthly update comes from your Sing! 2025 convention manager. And with pride, because during the meeting in Orpheus it turned out that we do not just have a group of volunteers to organize the convention again in 2025. The team is full of enthusiasm, driven and very knowledgeable. As a convention manager I feel in good hands.
After a short tour through a now empty theater, ideas began to bubble to the surface. We received an update from all teams and each update raised additional questions that we are now working on. We were quickly able to tick off various components, such as the extra singing space for choirs, the menu for the convention and the decoration of the stage, and we made sure that there was sufficient light for our 6-member jury. In the near future we will continue to introduce the teams in this newsletter and share more tips and information.
Registrations begin
I have a few more important announcements for this month. This month the new Holland Harmony website will go live, and then we will also open registrations for the quartets and choirs. An important milestone and also a bit exciting. Although, the first registration has already been received, the Spellbound barbershop choir from Cyprus, so we already know who will bite the head off.
Program Sing! 2025 | Sing! 2025 program team
The program is broadly known. We start on Friday with the semi-finals of the quartet competition. We end this day with the new Festival Stage and an afterglow.
The choir competition will be held on Saturday. There is a competition for all Holland Harmony choirs and an Open competition for international choirs and choirs that are not affiliated with a barbershop organization. The final for the quartets will also take place on Saturday. No fewer than 6 Holland Harmony and 6 International Quartets will sing in the final next year! We conclude with a Show of Champions and of course the afterglow.
A bonus for Sing! 2025 is also when an evaluation will be given for all HH choirs and quartets. For the quartets singing in the final and all choirs this will be on Saturday and for the other quartets on Friday.
Contest Rules | Sing! 2025 competition team
As with every convention, the Contest Rules have also been revised this time. We derive our Contest Rules from BHS and we often adopt changes from them. For example, groups of 9 people or more (including the conductor) may also participate. Or that a quartet that reaches a final place is not allowed to repeat songs from a preliminary round of the same competition.
The regulations for Sing! 2025 will soon be available on our new website!
For questions regarding the Contest Rules or qualification for BHS, please contact competition.management.sing@gmail.com.