Does your choir actually have a public following, or are you just kidding yourself?
When a choir first starts performing in public, most of the audience will be made up of friends and family. We hope that they will then tell their friends how wonderful we are and they will come to our next show. Word of mouth will spread like wild fire until we have a huge following.
But is that how it is for most performing choirs?
Looking at a breakdown of our summer concert audience this year and last, it turns out that many familiar names pop up. In fact, a large proportion of last year’s audience came again this year!
Does that mean we have a core audience who follow us around? Or maybe some people only come to our summer concerts rather than, say, our Christmas ones. Or are we kidding ourselves, and this ‘core’ audience is our only audience? Is it, in fact, the same group of friends and family (and maybe a few other ‘fans’ thrown in for good measure) who have been following us from the start?
Although we are a largish choir (80+ voices on the books), we don’t really play large venues. Our audiences usually only number between 100 and 130. We have become used to this, and possibly this is normal for a typical choir performance.
Not only does the word ‘choir’ conjure up a particular image and perhaps put off some punters, but we also don’t sing the usual choral repertoire. So even if there are choral enthusiasts out there, they probably aren’t the sort to appreciate our repertoire (“We want more songs in English!”).
Now that you’ve read this far, you might be expecting some answers. I’m afraid I don’t have any though!
My hunch is that, yes, much of our audience is made up of friends and family. And yes, we do have a small, core bunch of fans who follow us around. Trouble is, what do you do when you’ve exhausted these people? After all there are only so many times your mum and dad want to come to the same concert!
I remember reading in Simon Callow’s book Being an actor about the time when he was in his first long run of a play. He talks about friends and family coming to his dressing room after the performance. Gradually, over the months, these visits begin to drop away as all his friends and family have seen the show. Eventually nobody visits his dressing room and he feels rather alone.
It is at times like this when we see who our audience really is. After the long run of a play, or a long concert tour, or many years of choir performances, friends and family may fade away and we are left with true fans of our work (if we’re lucky!).
So I guess my next question is: how can we widen our audience beyond just friends and family? Assuming that there is an audience out there for our work, how can we reach them?
Have we become lazy in promoting our work and presenting concerts because we imagine that there is an audience? But in reality it’s just the same core group of people following us. Time perhaps to rejuvenate our approach, brush up our repertoire, put some pizazz into the show, push our publicity. It’s never the wrong time to re-examine how you might reach a new audience. Complacency is the enemy of good work!
I’d love to hear of your experiences with your choir. Do you just have a following of friends and family? Have you found ways of widening your audience?
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4 comments:
Hi Chris
I hope the fact you are writing means you are feeling better. The technique we have used with the SOAS choir is that each year's new choir has a brand new repertoire, we carry little or nothing over from year to year, but it's always a very diverse repertoire. The venue we use for the end of year concert is in the School of Oriental and African Studies (i.e. our home base) and it has about 400 seats - if we choose a weeknight we can fill the hall - in fact one year we filled it twice over.
The students in our choir came up with their own method: at the end of each practice we go to the reception area and sing whatever we have been practising. Most weeks a mobile phone recording of the impromptu performance makes it onto www.youtube.com within a day or so, I assume that one of the students takes care of that. The more formal performances have also been put up, last time I looked they had had thousands of hits. Regards, Deb
Hi Deb
I guess video is the way to go. I've not got around to that yet!
I would be worried though that the 'impromptu' performances might not be quite up to scratch and might give the choir a bad name if all and sundry can see it on YouTube. Obviously not a problem for you guys!
Chris
Hi Chris,
it is an interesting question to think who we expect to be our audience. In order to explore this question I would like to know the impossible, whether there were ancient performing traditions at all in communities e. g. in Megalithic times, or more helpful, whether the continuation of such traditions can be found e. g. in African tribes. Could it be that there was no place for "concerts", that "choir singing" meant simply the whole community singing together? In this case it would be very likely that communities would exchange and perform songs at gatherings esp. if they had different repertoires. Looking e. g. at the Welsh Eisteddfod or Zimbabwean choir competitions in the diamond mines of South Africa (in the absence of family and other entertainment!)on workfree Sundays suggests that there is a place for choir performance, not necessarily out of desperation. As an enthusiastic choir member, however, I much prefer to take part than to listen, although I do like to listen to other choirs in order to get to know new songs, to understand how they work and what makes them tick: choirs make an attentive audience. Audience participation could attract people,also small scale teaching after the performance, musical journeys with enlightening background information and embedding of choir singing in community/seasonal events. We should have or learn songs for every aspect of life, time of the day, year, weather, mood, landscape,celebration and social encounter.
Do people perhaps increasingly live out of tune and have completely changed or undevelopped listening skills?
Sonja
Hi Sonja
I think in the past - as in many cultures today - there was no distinction between audience and performer. In fact, there was no such special person as a 'performer', everyone joined in. Maybe sometimes one particular group from the community (e.g. the young boys, or the women) had a particular song/ dance to show, that's when the other members of the community would become the 'audience'.
The separation between audience and performer is a relatively modern one and doesn't hold in all cultures.
Audience participation and small scale teaching are all good ideas (I always teach the audience at least one song at every concert), but you have to get the audience to the concert in the first place! That's the difficult bit.
Chris
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