Farewell

This time last year, I announced my intention to retire from DepList management in 2020, shortly after the 20th anniversary of DepList's foundation at the beginning of the millennium. In fact DepList probably started before then, sometime in 1998 or 1999 (goodness, how long ago that seems!), as a landline and email-based resource in the form of a simple mailing list for invited members, whereby messages could be easily sent to the membership. Emails in those days could only be created and received on personal computers. Mobile phones were common but not ubiquitous, and were not designed to receive and send emails. The iPhone and other types of smartphone were some years into the future.

The addition of a website marked the official birth of DepList as a more comprehensive resource, which allowed non-members to advertise jobs online. From 2000 until its demise on 1st May 2020, the website evolved to incorporate new technologies and was rebuilt several times.

I decided last year that I would not renew the Deplist.com domain name when it reached the end of its paid-up term, so accordingly, I now leave the field open to whoever has the energy to continue the concept. It takes a lot of dedication and hard work. Good luck!

With grateful thanks to all the DepList members,

Corinne

UPDATE, January 2026

I’m popping up now just to reflect on some of the changes that have taken place since 2020. Although I have long since lost touch with the professional singing community, and I cannot find an online DepList equivalent, I am guessing, and assuming, that WhatsApp groups have been formed to take over many of the functions of the old DepList. How I wish WhatsApp had been around during my twenty years looking after DepList! How much easier it would have made the “instant messaging” side of things. The vetting and standards side of the coin is a different matter, but one day, I have no doubt that Artificial Intelligence will be able to take care of that too.

Parry's Judith

DepList member William Vann is conducting the first London performance in 130 years of Parry’s oratorio Judith on Wednesday 3rd April 2019 at the Royal Festival Hall. Sarah Fox sings the title role and will be joined by Kathryn Rudge, Toby Spence and Henry Waddington.

You can book your tickets here.

Other concerts coming up:

Pizza Express Art Song Series in Chelsea

• Gareth John, 6th March
• Katie Bray, 10th April

Recital with Jack Liebeck at Leighton House, 12th March 

St Matthew Passion, Cadogan Hall, 17th April

Rapid Response on New Year's Day

On New Year’s Day an organist was due to play for a service in northwest London at noon. At 9.36 a.m. he was sitting in a stationary, broken-down train outside Hastings, with little prospect of getting to his destination in time. So he sent an SOS to DepList from his mobile phone. Twenty minutes later he’d found a substitute able to deputise for him. He reported later that it was a very good organist too, well able to cope with the unusual liturgical demands of the church in question.

When DepList was launched back in 2000, mobile phones were by no means ubiquitous, and they certainly couldn’t send and receive emails — unless you owned a Blackberry. The concept of emailing from a train belonged to the remote future. DepList was a way of quickly contacting lots of people without having to telephone them individually, but you had to be sitting at a computer screen at home or at work to do this. Jobs took days or at best hours to fill, not minutes. In those early days, many members did not own a mobile phone and relied on landlines, answering machines and PC-based emails. Since then, advances in technology have worked very much in DepList’s favour without us having to do very much. DepList is far more useful now than when it first started. And it’s stories like this one that make it worth the effort of keeping DepList alive and relevant.

Associate Member Advertising

Our advert placing facilities for associate members have moved over to our Wordpress system, which we use for our non-nember advertising forms. This means that in future, all associate members will have to log in to our Members' Area before they can place an advertisement. The old forms will be disabled and the common password will no longer work. Each member will be able to create their own password to log in to the system.

Changes to DepList site

JotForm, the outfit that we have used for some years to create our contact forms, advertising forms, and all manner of other forms, has restructured its pricing plans recently. It is US-based, and it has imposed the kinds of charges that have become prohibitive for a non-commercial organisation like ours, what with Brexit and the falling value of the pound. We can continue to use JotForm for our existing contact forms, but we can no longer create new forms or receive more than 10 paid adverts per month without incurring high charges. Clearly, we need to change the way we do things! So just as we recently moved our servers from America back to Britain, where hosting is half the price, we're now going over to a Wordpress-based system for our forms. They don't look as pretty, they're a lot more trouble to create, and they don't have as many facilities as JotForm's forms, but at least we won't have to raise our advertising fees for the time being, even though we will no longer be offering free trial adverts for first-time users, as from today. After 16 years, I don't think DepList has to establish its credentials, and I reckon most people in the business have heard of us now so there is no need to make as much effort to get our name out there and attract sceptical customers. Your bookmarks will need updating as and when we replace our old forms with new ones. So far, all of our advertising forms have been replaced except those for Associate Members, which will stay as they are until such time as JotForm increases its restrictions yet further.

The Beauty of the Human Voice

Elisabeth Meister was for several years a DepList member during the early part of her career. Hear her on the beauty of the human voice. (You will need to sit through an advert before the video starts.)

Let's break our records

November saw 36 jobs advertised on DepList. That's more than one per day. Let's break our December records this Advent. We have more than enough members to go around, so any visitors to this site looking for well qualified and experienced singers, organists, pianists, conductors and choral directors, try placing an advert. If it's your first time of using DepList, there's no charge. If you've used us before, it only costs £2.00 and you'll have your money back if you don't fill the job.