WorldSong’s 10th anniversary concert last Saturday was a triumph — even if I do say so myself! At least in our terms it was a huge success and a big leap forward. - we had an audience three times our normal size (which made our 650-seat theatre look comfortably full)
- we ended up with the biggest choir we’ve ever had on stage (all but two of the choir managed to be at the concert: two members volunteered to help front of house, whilst two others had already booked holidays)
- we had a wide range of different configurations on stage (solos, men-only, women-only, conductorless, small groups, a big group filling the stage)
- the vast majority of choir members had risen to the challenge and learnt the words to pretty much all of the 33 songs that we sang (the Welsh one was quite hard!)
- we pulled off several challenging moves (entering from the back of the auditorium whilst singing, dancing to South African songs, being accompanied by drums)
- several songs were sung without me having to conduct them
We had a varied and mixed audience including quite a few ex-choir members, and a few singers from our sister choirs Woven Chords and Global Harmony. In the interval I met some people from
However, the most noticeable thing for me when the house lights went up at the end of the concert (I taught the audience a song as usual) was that the vast majority of the audience seemed to be well over 60 and mostly women! This is quite common and is often reflected in the choir itself and in the workshops that I run. Several of the choir had managed to persuade their children to come along, and almost without exception, they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So why can’t we attract a younger audience? There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having an older audience, but it would be nice to have a wide spread of ages, genders and nationalities. (This also applies to the choir and workshops: we sing songs from many different countries and cultures, and yet we attract mainly white, British singers).
Is it perhaps the words “choir” or “concert” which put younger people off? Do they simply have something better to do on a Saturday night? Is the make-up of our audience simply a reflection of the make-up of the choir? In which case, why can’t the choir attract younger people and people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds?
Continue reading ...
Stumble It!
3 comments:
As a 'younger' member of World Song (not wishing to offend any of my lovely fellow singers), I am not entirely sure that the make-up of our choir always reflects the age, gender etc. of our audience. At 33, I simply never invite my peers because I think they have more interesting, cool things to do on a whatever-day night so I do not help to swing the balance of our audience. So I don’t think it’s a reflection of age, but more because of the perception of singing in a ‘choir’ is uncool.
When I first started to sing again at 30, I kept my singing in a chorus/choir quiet from my friends and peers, as though it was some guilty secret. Why? If I had been good enough to sing solo I wouldn't have hesitated telling anyone, so why should telling people about singing in a choir be any different? I know it was because I was expecting people to say that it wasn’t cool and think that I lived my life like a spinster of the parish (patently untrue in my case :o) ). It wasn’t considered to be cool at school to sing in a choir (triple that reaction if you were male) and I didn’t think it would be any different at 30. As you pointed out, when someone says 'choir', images leap into my own head of either a children's choir or a church choir; 'choirs' make me think of groups of people who sing and who are filled with people from either end of the age spectrum and rarely anyone in between.
I think that the only way to address this is to start at the grass roots by changing the view that singing in a choir before the age of 50 is uncool. Once more people are encouraged to try singing harmonies in a group and experience the benefits for themselves, only then can we change people’s perception of singing in a choir.
I am one of the older members of the choir but I graduated into it via Chris Hoskins' Singing for the terrified group. She has attracted a wide range of ages and although I was the only man for ages when I left there was a few more regulars.
Dancing? Moving whilst singing? Solos? What is going on with WorldSong? ;-)
I'm looking forward to coming back now (not that I wasn't before!).
Paul in Koblenz
Post a Comment