Workshops and performances. Saturday, September 16, 9am-7.15pm, Tim Murray Theatre, Canberra Grammar School, various times and costs. Social event. Sunday, September 17, 9am, National Arboretum.

More information and bookings: musicforcanberra.org.au.

Half a century after she founded the Canberra Children's Choir, Judith Clingan is back to lead it again for its 50th-anniversary celebrations. But she's hoping a bright younger director will be attracted by the publicity surrounding the choir's golden jubilee to take it into the future.

The Canberra Children's Choir will be celebrating its half-century with a weekend of events. On Friday, September 15 will be an evening of songs and stories for friends and past members. On Saturday, September 16 there'll be a day of workshops including some with choir alumni Christopher Lincoln Bogg, Geoff Badger Padma Newsome and Stephen Leek. That night, there'll be performances by former conductors and members and the night will finish with with Heavenly Grandfather's Banquet, an opera composed by Clingan. And on Sunday morning there will be a social breakfast.

Clingan had studied Early English and French at ANU but spent a lot of her spare time singing in the Australian National University Choral Society.

She wanted to form a children's choir, she says, "because I loved singing and was fond of children - more than adults' company" and having begun with a small group of children and discovering she had a flair for teaching music, after completing her Diploma of Education in Sydney she returned to Canberra and in 1967 put an ad in the paper calling for children and ended up with about 30.She wanted young people - divided into various groupings - to be able to develop their vocal talents.

One thing her early insistence on a pre-existing high standard of musical ability did result in was that "I created an extraordinary group of children - 90 per cent of them became professional musicians", including Barbara Gilby, now concertmaster of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra.

"I was very young - 22. I had never read a book about music education. I assumed people fell into two categories: either they could sing or they couldn't," she says.

She came to know better, however, especially after she became interested in the Kodaly method of teaching with its development of children's skills in areas such as intonation, rhythm,and musical complexity, and received a scholarship to study it in Hungary.

"Anyone can learn to sing. If you can talk, you can learn to sing," she says.

"It's what you do with what you've got."

Clingan led the choir until 1971, getting it well established, and again from 1975 to 1979, undertaking many other activities in the intervening years, including the founding and running of the Gaudeamus and Wayfarers choral groups.

One of the highlights of her time with the choir, she says, was being invited to record an album by EMI in Sydney in 1969 that had a cover painted by William Dobell and then performing on the grounds of the in-construction Sydney Opera House.

In 1970, the choir performed a Christmas opera, In Dulci Jubilio, by the Canberra School of Music's Donald Hollier, and have also performed it a couple more times in the years since. The following year, Clingan brought out a book, The Compleat Chorister, which she wrote, compiled and illustrated. In 1976 Clingan was invited to take part in the first National Choral Festival in Hobart.

"I took 60 young people from the Canberra Children's Choir."

Over the years the choir has performed a wide range of classical repertoire ranging from Bach to Britten. But there have been new, original works, too. In addition to organising and conducting Clingan was also writing material for the choir to perform including Songs of Middle Earth, musical settings of J.R.R. Tolkien texts. Her opera Heavenly Grandfather's Banquet was written for Wayfarers last year. It tells the story of how the animals of the Chinese zodiac were chosen and will feature both adults - including some former choir members - and children in the cast in the upcoming performance.

The numbers in the choir have fluctuated over the years and it is much smaller now than at its peak. Clingan is concerned it might be suffering from "umbrella syndrome": having become one of the organisations in Music for Everyone's ambit a few years ago, she feels it might have lost some of its individual identity and visibility as a choir. She hopes a new director with talent, energy and vision will be able to lift its profile and secure its future.