Choral

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.

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?)

This is one of those ‘writing it out to see if I can work out what I think’ posts. I have been thinking recently a lot about the dynamic in which a choral director finds themselves being bullied by a member of their choir. Chris Rowbury wrote an insightful post on the kind of dynamic of which this is a particular type some time back, which prompted some painful and heartfelt conversations within various communities of choral directors in which I’m involved.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes to develop training and support for choir leaders – both musical and administrative – with the aim of both helping reduce its incidence and help people cope with and resolve difficult situations whilst keeping relationships and emotional health intact. It may be appropriate to blog about some of that in due course, though it’s currently at too early a stage to go into any detail.

The theme for our recent joint LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend was ‘The Listening Director’. It was originally sparked by a request from a delegate at LABBS Harmony College directors stream last year for more work on diagnostic listening skills in rehearsal (initial response: yes that’s very important, let’s do more on it!), and then kind of snowballed from there.

The more you think about the ways and contexts in which chorus directors have to listen, the more it asserts itself as the central skill of the job. It’s more important in many ways than actual conducting skills, because however elegant your technique looks, it doesn’t do any good unless you can effectively hear what you’re getting in response to your conducting. Whilst if you can get your ears into the detail of how your chorus is singing, your gestures intuitively adapt themselves to those needs.

So here’s another one in the genre of ‘if you haven’t got time to read the post, the title says it all anyway’. I’ve had a few conversations recently about my preference to avoid talking about intonation in rehearsal if I can possibly avoid it, and it seems that some people equate this with not caring about intonation. So I wanted to clarify things a bit.

First off, I love the sound of in-tune singing. And by this I mean both singing that maintains tonal integrity (key note staying in the same place) and singing in which all the parts are in tune with each other. Both horizontal and vertical in-tuneness, if you like. And it’s not just the way that good tuning is more consonant and cleaner to listen to at an acoustic level, it’s all the way that it brings with it beauties of tone colour - clarity, ring, luminosity – and expressiveness that you may not hear at other times.