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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.

For someone coming to a regular rehearsal, they are entering a safe space, where they have friends and prior experience of satisfying musical experiences. The warm-up here serves experientially to let the distractions of Real Life fade into the background and help people find their selves as group members. Hence, a degree of continuity, with familiar exercises repeated week to week serve not only to support longer-term skill development but are also a means to performative construction of the singers’ identities as choir members.

(And, indeed, mine as choir leader. It’s only a few weeks in but I’m already getting the strongly affirmative effect of seeing the same faces and hearing the same voices each week: it makes you feel, yes, these are the right people to be with.)

For someone coming to a workshop, they are coming into a space that, whilst clearly appealing at some levels (otherwise they wouldn’t come!), is also in some ways unfamiliar and therefore less automatically psychologically safe. They bring a lot more arousal into the event, which can make for an exciting experience, but can also leave them feeling uncertain, and with a need to secure themselves behind emotional barriers while they suss the whole thing out.

The warm-up in this situation needs not just to prepare the voice but also to reassure the participants that it’s going to be all right so they can relax and let their voices and imaginations come out to play. There are multiple ways to do this, but I tend to foreground a degree of silliness and playfulness, as having everyone including the workshop leader being slightly undignified not just offers the powerful social glue of laughter, but also signals that we’re not here to be judgemental about anyone.

For my audition with Rainbow Voices, I consciously chose a workshop-style warm-up. Whilst I obviously wanted the occasion to lead to an ongoing working relationship, it was still a first encounter in which the singers didn’t know entirely what to expect. And, whilst some elements of the event were deeply familiar (it was in their regular rehearsal venue, and they all knew each other), the unfamiliar element carried with it higher stakes than a normal workshop, since the outcome would affect us all for an indefinite time into the future.

Hence, rather than teaching the technique of bubbling (as I did once we got into regular rehearsals), we went for a motorbike ride together. And the words for a scalic exercise with the twin technical purposes of range and articulation were ‘knickers and socks’. (I invented this exercise while hanging out laundry, obvs.) And the fun thing about a first-encounter warm-up is that you can wheel out all your standard jokes that you know and trust (what comedians refer to as ‘bankers’), confident that they’ll land and get the sniggers in the right places.

Of course, now I’ve got the gig and burned through a pile of my bankers in the audition and first week, I’ll need to be more creative again with the daft stuff. But the fun thing now is that we get to invent in-jokes out of our shared experience, and with it generate the power of the call-back. And as we get to know each other, the need for humour as an agent of reassurance becomes less acute. We’re still going to have a laugh together (I wouldn’t have accepted the post if that weren’t going to possible), but there’s scope to explore a wider range of emotional registers on our musical journey.

Humour isn’t the only emotional register with which to break the ice; it’s just one that I’m particularly comfortable with. But there are times when a calm and meditative vibe will better meet the need of the participants and the occasion’s musical aims. Expertise is also a powerful means to reassure people: they like to be able to trust a leader’s skills. But expertise alone can risk being distancing; people want to know they can trust you as a human being as well as a technician.

Anyway, this was a useful set of reflections to have as I planned my warm-up for tonight's New Members Evening. It involves a certain amount of playfulness as you might expect from all this, and also foregrounds opportunities for people to interact with each other within the musical flow. We want our guests to feel they're already part of the team by the time we start learning some music together.