Often, when leading a singing workshop, singers will start putting chairs out or standing in a circle.
It’s maybe not the way I’d planned, but I’ll usually go with it. It turns out my singers are often more capable than they realise.
I’m rarely fixed on how to arrange the singers. Sometimes we’ll work in a circle, sometimes we’ll face a wall so I can put large lyric sheets up. Sometimes we’ll stand, other times we’ll sit in rows.
It depends on the songs I’m teaching, the layout of the space, and the mood I’m in.
But singers often have ideas of their own.
I’m usually happy to go along with them because it’s clearly something that makes people feel comfortable. I also enjoy responding to what happens in the moment. The way singers organise themselves can be a challenge, but it often throws up new ideas too.
It made me wonder: if singers can decide how to organise the room, what else can I leave in their hands?
We are all dispensable.
It’s a good idea for choir leaders not to believe they’re vital to the success of their choir. See Your job as a choir leader is to disappear.
The more we can empower our singers, the better. It’s important that they realise how accomplished they are and don’t rely entirely on the leader.
Here are a couple of occasions when singers were forced to step up and I realised just how capable they were.
not feeling well during a concert
We had a concert and I was feeling under the weather. I thought I’d be able to cope, but when it came to it, I realised I wasn’t up to much.
Instead of leading the warm up, I slumped in the corner trying to conserve my energy. One singer started a warm-up exercise that everyone knew. Then someone else began the next one. In this way the choir took on responsibility for running the warm up themselves.
I just about managed to croak my way through the concert and the audience didn’t notice a thing.
getting stuck on the way to rehearsal
One choir I led was over an hour’s drive from home. One week I got stuck in a horrendous traffic jam. It soon became clear that I wasn’t going to make the rehearsal at all.
Fortunately we had a telephone tree. I rang one of the singers, explained the situation, suggested which songs it would be good to run through, and gave them the starting notes.
The rehearsal went ahead with different singers leading each song.
other ways to empower your singers
In both examples, the singers perhaps didn’t realise how capable they were until they were forced to step up.
Rather than leaving things to chance, here are a couple of ideas to help empower your singers.
ask for volunteers to lead a song – choose a song that the group knows well, give the starting notes, then let individual singers lead and conduct it.
walk away when conducting – there’s a strange thing that happens once a song has been learnt. Even when the singers have nailed it, and even when I’ve stopped helping or conducting, they still feel they need me standing in front of them. To prove that they don’t, try walking away halfway through a song. There may be a slight wobble and a moment of panic, but things soon settle as the singers realise they can do it perfectly well on their own.
You might also enjoy Choir leaders, are you doing too much for your singers?
One warning though: it’s not possible to hand over every decision to your singers. A choir is not a democracy, there will be as many different opinions as there are singers. See Why a choir can never be truly democratic.
Chris Rowbury
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