One of my projects as I settle in with Rainbow Voices is setting up processes to involve choir members in choosing our repertoire. The plan is to harvest ideas from choir members and our audiences, and then have small working groups to compile programmes from these ideas for our main performances each year. As part of that process I was writing some guidance notes for the working groups, and realised that they may be useful to other folk too, so am publishing them here. Indeed, a lot of what follows is drawn from materials I have written for conductor training and/or conversations I have had with conductors I have been mentoring, so some of you may have seen parts of this in other contexts already!

1. Sourcing material

• Assume you’ll be considering at least 3 times as many pieces as you’ll actually sing, better up to 5 times as many
• Crowd-source ideas from within the ensemble
• Keep an ‘ideas bucket’ on the go all the time
• Look both for song ideas (and then investigate choral arrangements), and for original choral music and existing arrangements (what choirs are already singing)
• Youtube is your friend

Selfie or it didn't happen...

I spent a richly rewarding day on Saturday sight-singing through choral music by women. The day, hosted by the Association of British Choral Directors, was the brainchild of Amy Bebbington, who led us through the repertoire with clarity of gesture and purpose, and shared insights into the pieces’ backgrounds and musical detail. We also had the pleasure of the company of three of the composers whose music we sang, along with several publishers and agents. One of the things abcd has always been good at is connecting people who want to supply choral music with people who want to sing it.

Starting with a new choir last month has had me thinking a lot about warm-ups. What does this particular group of people need?, where needs are conceived both in vocal/musical terms and social/emotional terms. And with my first few weeks with Rainbow Voices having been preceded by an audition in which they decided to have me carry on as their new MD, and then followed a few weeks into term by a New Members evening, I have also been thinking about the difference between your regular, weekly warm-up and workshop warm-ups which set up stand-alone occasions rather than forming part of an ongoing working relationships.

From a structural perspective, I approach both types of warm-up in the same way (as outlined here). The rational objectives for both are the same: to prepare body and mind for singing together. But the emotional needs of the singers in the different scenarios are distinctly different.

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

Another one here that emerges from a series of conversations with people in different parts of my musical life. ‘Performance-readiness’ sounds like it should be a relatively easy thing to define, but my observation is that there are wildly different views on what people take it mean in practice.

So at one extreme there is the position that a piece needs to be highly polished before it is fit to be shared with others. And, while in many ways I like the commitment to high standards this view implies, in practice it often serves as a procrastination tactic. ‘I’m not ready yet, I need to practice more,’ is a way of avoiding the risks inherent in a performing situation by hiding behind an activity that you’re never going to be judged harshly for wanting to undertake. Doing more practice is always a Good Thing, and so can usefully be deployed to deflect criticism for holding back from performance.

I have been thinking about perfect pitch for a couple of weeks since an interesting conversation about it with a barbershop friend. It’s one of those things that is often – well, usually – taken as an indicator of high musical skill, with connotations of special talent not vouchsafed to ordinary folk. Its very name suggests that it is not merely a Good Thing to have, but The Best. I think some of these assumptions bear a bit of interrogation.

First off, let’s think about what perfect pitch is: essentially an unusually reliable and accurate memory for pitch. It is a rare capacity when it manifests with the level of consistency that allows someone to identify and/or produce notes immediately and intuitively and be confident that they are right. But it is this consistency rather than the fact of pitch memory itself that is unusual.

It is apparently over a decade since I last worked with Heartbeat (where did all that time go?!), and I see that back then I was remarking on the number of new faces that had arrived since my previous visit. This time I was struck by how many faces I recognised even after all this time; I don’t know how much of a chorus’s story you can infer from just two snapshots, but it does feel like there’s something in there.

Anyway, I remembered the chorus as being a lot of fun to work with, and that remains true. You can tell there’s a fundamental sense of up-for-it-ness in the room if on the first song you start work on you ask them, ‘Shall I be a complete bitch right from the get-go?’ and they all nod cheerfully. Accordingly we started out with an exercise that mercilessly reveals any and all flaws in rhythmic precision and found ourselves 10 minutes later with a much tighter execution.

Just a short one today to share some news. I have just been offered, and accepted, the role of MD for Rainbow Voices, to start in September 2024. Rainbow Voices are an SATB choir for LGBT+ people and their friends, based in South Birmingham but with a catchment area across the West Midlands. Their MD of the last five years, Rosie Howarth, has had to move on, and I am enjoying a smooth and well-organised handover, finding the choir in good shape both vocally and in spirits. (Interesting how often the two go together isn’t it?)