What is your measure of success? – choir leading and self-reflection

How do you know if a choir session or singing workshop or performance has been a success?

photo by shadowkilla_tk

And if it has gone badly, how does that feed back into your teaching and choir directing?

What exactly is the point of your choir?

I often get people writing to me for advice about choirs.

Some of them don’t agree with the direction their choir leader is taking them, some find the repertoire too hard, some have trouble with singers next to them singing out of tune, some worry about getting their part right for the next concert.

photo by Jeff Lutz

But before I can answer I need to know what kind of choir they belong to. What is the point of their choir?

Avoiding the ‘C’ word: choir

If I say ‘choir’, an image will pop into most people’s minds.

• a bunch of fidgety 7-year-olds screeching out a barely recognisable version of Once in Royal David’s City at the school nativity play
• a group of loud old white men with fruity voices singing in Welsh
• rows and rows of posh people holding music books and singing in superior upper-class accents
• an angelic cluster of fresh-faced boys with ruffles around their necks facing sideways onto the congregation during a very serious, important service in a big, old church
• a sea of exuberant black faces dressed in identical floor-length robes moving and singing with uncontained joy whilst battling against some loud guitars and an over-amplified drum kit

I may well have missed out your favourite image, but you get the idea!

These common images either leave me cold or make me feel excluded. They’re either really bad examples of what a choir can be, or seem to be a special club which wouldn’t have me as a a member.

the choral world

I flail around the web trying to find like-minded souls, but if I use search terms such as ‘choir’ or ‘choral’ I stumble into parallel universes that I simply don’t relate to.

This is the impression I get:

• much of the choral world exists in the USA (with a small, but significant outcrop in Singapore)
• most choirs are faith-based, usually Christian, and based in churches
• most choirs use written music which is often referred to as ‘choral literature’ and is usually Western Classical music
• choirs are formal, old-fashioned and predictable with an aging membership and aging audience
• there are countless choral festivals across the world, many in Europe, but rather than just celebrating choral singing, they insist on measuring, comparing, testing and judging choirs through competition

OK, OK, you’re bound to tell me that your choir isn’t like that and there are exciting choirs out there who don’t fit these stereotypes. And I’m sure there are.

My point is that this is the impression created by the choral world, whether intended or not.

what’s in a name?

As soon as you use the word ‘choir’ in your group’s name, or say that you sing ‘choral music’, the danger is that all these stereotypes come into play. In which case, you may well be putting off potential choir members and audiences for your performances.

I mean, what impression would you get from:

The Anytown Ladies Institute Choral Society

or

The Somewhere and District Municipal Choir ?

what can we do about this?

It’s going to be really, really hard to change the cliched images that are associated with the word ‘choir’. After all, they have been built up over hundreds of years.

The thing that we can change directly is the name we give to our group. There are many ways of avoiding the ‘C’ word, some more successful than others. I’ll give a few examples below, but I’d love to hear from you about other solutions.

• subverting the traditional: The Spooky Men’s Chorale or The Feral Choir
• using an evocative foreign name: Libana or Chechelele
• saying what you do: Singing for Fun or Singing Our Socks Off
• using a pun: Only Men Aloud or Vocal chords
• using an alternative word to ‘choir’: Sheeptown Songsters or The Singers’ Circle
• a mixture of the above: Kitka women’s vocal ensemble

What’s you ‘choir’ called? Do you think using the word ‘choir’ puts people off? What other alternatives are there to the dreaded ‘C’ word?

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Will the last choir standing please turn out the light?

Since it’s the summer holidays here, my contact with singing and choirs has been somewhat limited (I’m not one of those people who sing around the house all the time – especially when I’m on holiday myself!). I’ve been listening to some CDs for pleasure (and not work!) for a change, and also watching TV (too much for my own good!). Despite my best intentions, I have been following BBC One’s Last Choir Standing.

Putting aside my earlier reservations (Singing competitions are for losers) about it simply being a typical Saturday evening light entertainment show in the mould of Strictly Come Dancing, it does seem to have captured the nation’s imagination. Actually, I’m assuming that it has because I don’t have the viewing figures to hand, nor are we told how many people actually bother to phone in and vote. For all we know, most of the country is away on holiday and it’s only me and the guy next door who actually watches it! Mind you, if the viewing figures dropped dramatically, I imagine they would shift the programme to a later slot or onto BBC Two.

So far we have been subjected to very typical big choirs, all of which (to my mind) have been coarse, simplistic and samey. And at the other extreme, a few small, very upbeat gospel choirs. So far all the boxes of what the general public imagines a ‘choir’ to be have been ticked (including the awful professional singing in the breaks which have been middle-of-the-road easy-listening opera-lite with plenty of wobbly voices).

We’ve also had our fair share of choral ‘choreography’ (from ‘moving in time to the music’ to ‘general hand waving’ to ‘dancing about a bit’). Interestingly, despite what I’ve said in earlier posts (What are you looking at?) about wanting to watch something as well as just listening to the singing, some choirs have been moving so much that I’ve been shouting at the TV for them to “just stand still for a bloody moment so I can focus on what you’re singing!”. Clearly there is a balance between standing still like a stuffed animal with a stiff upper lip, and jigging around all over the place.

I’m sure this series will do a lot to encourage people to take up singing (again) and to join choirs. At least I hope they do. Many of us who run choirs hope to be inundated by new members in the autumn. The only reason that this may not happen is if viewers feel that the choirs they see on TV are so good that they couldn’t possibly do as well themselves. Shame.

It does worry me slightly though what will happen when the series is over. Will the BBC have any kind of follow-through to maintain the momentum of the interest that they’ve generated? Or will the last choir standing just turn the lights out and everything will go dark? Perhaps part of the solution is the website which I hope they will continue to update.

The website which accompanies the series seems quite slick. There are several opportunities for viewers to air their views, most of which seem rather uninformed and simplistic. I was rather interested in the The Great Choir Debate (nothing like a bit of BBC hype!) which poses 10 questions about choirs and singing. I’m going to list them here and will be returning to them in later posts.

In the meantime, it would be great to hear from some of you (anyone out there?). What do you think of the TV programme? Do you have any answers to the questions below? Do you agree with the ‘experts’ comments on the website? So come on all you lurkers out there, put finger to keyboard and have a go!

1. Good indicators
   What’s the one thing an untrained person can look for in a choir that indicates how good they are?
   
2. Singing benefits
   Are there any surprising benefits from singing in a choir?
   
3. Choir fashion
   What should a choir wear, and should points be deducted if they look terrible?!
   
4. Song selection
   Is there anything a choir shouldn’t sing?
   
5. Singing at school
   Should singing be compulsory in schools?
   
6. Singing ability
   Can anybody sing in a choir?
   
7. Choreography
   Should choirs include ‘choreography’ in their performance?
8. Competitions
   Is the world of choral singing competitive?
   
9. Conductors
   Is there anything conductors do that sets the alarm bells ringing?
10. Choir size
    How many people does it take to make a choir?

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Singing competitions are for losers

Quite a few choir members have come up to me over the last few months to ask why we don’t enter the Last Choir Standing competition. I tell them that’s it’s just not something that I’m interested in.

In fact, I wouldn’t want to go into any singing competition, let alone one that’s televised and is basically a prime-time light entertainment reality TV human interest razzmatazz knock-out competition which doesn’t really have much to do with singing. I talked a little bit about the Natural Voice objection to competitions in an earlier post OK you win - facing the competition.

For those people not based in the UK, Last Choir Standing is a televised knock-out competition to find the ‘best’ choir in the country (interestingly I thought the BBC already had a perfectly good choir competition: BBC Radio 3 Choir of the Year! – but maybe that's too highbrow for prime-time). It is produced for the BBC and has been airing in the prime-time light-entertainment slot on a Saturday evening. It was originally going to be called Choir Wars, but there was a great deal of hoo ha about this, hence the name change.

I heard a radio programme recently about the philosophy of sport. Apparently one of the tennis players at Wimbledon this year had decided to stop reading philosophy during the competition as it was affecting his game adversely! There was then a discussion about what philosophers have to say about sports. One philosopher (I forget who) basically said that sports competitions – especially grand slams and knock-out competitions – are for losers. That is, everyone except the one eventual winner loses. So sports people and knock-out competitors need to get used to the fact that for the vast majority of the time they will be losing.

Why do people want to go in for these sorts of things? I guess it’s people who need some kind of external validation about their self-worth (see an interesting post about Where you get your personal worth from). As a choir leader, I know when we’re good and when we’re not quite up to scratch – and the singers pretty much know too. We’ve made CDs and performed regularly to appreciative audiences. Even when an audience has been luke-warm, we often know we’ve done really well. And sometimes exuberant ovations can’t hide the fact that we weren’t at our best (I've touched on this disparity between the audience's experience and the singers' experience in a previous post How was it for you?). We know when we’re doing well, without the need for outside judgment.

And what if we do go in for a competition and lose? What will that do to the choir’s self-confidence? Perhaps it will spur the choir on to work harder so they can do better next year. But then surely the focus becomes on the competition and not on the joys of singing?

And what if we actually win? That will boost our confidence enormously (but we could always sabotage this if we’re not feeling inner confidence: the judges weren’t that discriminating; the other competitors weren’t of a very high standard; not many choirs went in for the competition; etc. etc.). But it may well only last temporarily. Where do we go then? Bigger and better competitions? Or do we just enter again the next year with even more pressure to win? We’ve won once, won’t it be rather devastating to come second the next time? (This reminds me of those restaurants who boast that they won an award in 2002, or the village that won Best Village in Bloom in 1998 – how come they’ve become so bad in the intervening years?)

For some choirs, competitions are pretty much their sole purpose. Most barbershop choirs exist to compete and attend conventions. There is, of course, room for this, but personally I’m in it because I love singing!

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OK, you win – facing the competition

As a member of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network (NVPN), I share with them the philosophy that everyone can sing and that “vocalising, creativity and song should be accessible to all regardless of previous musical ability or experience”. This means that “creating a sense of an accepting community is an essential element of our approach in working with groups”. Too often, adults who (re-)discover singing have been put off as children, told to stand at the back and shut up or just mime. Many people are also put off by musical jargon and the belief that you can only sing if you understand musical theory and can read music. Then there are others who look at our culture’s role models – pop bands, opera singers, TV stars – and think that because they don’t sound like them, then they can’t ‘sing’.

Expressing one’s self vocally is a very liberating thing, but is also very personal and puts us in a very vulnerable position. It is all too easy to scare people into not opening their mouths at all! As NVPN members we do all we can to encourage people to find their own voice, to not compare themselves to others or to carry around a false notion of some kind of singing ‘standard’ that they need to adhere to. In our draft code of practice there is the following statement: “I will always work in ways that are unlocking, freeing, allowing, releasing, discovering rather than imposing, stress-free, forgiving, non-judgmental and encouraging”.

So, in the NVPN spirit of trying to encourage as many people as possible to sing and believing that everyone can sing – regardless of talent or experience – how am I to respond to the notion of singing competitions?

I don’t know if it’s just that time of year, but I’ve been inundated recently with unsolicited emails inviting my choirs to attend various singing competitions across Europe. And recently the NVPN has been contacted by a BBC researcher who’s working on a new reality TV programme called Choir Wars. This is to be a “new Saturday night primetime entertainment show”. It is a “nationwide search to find the nation’s favourite choir”.

Over the last few years, TV has done quite a good job of making singing in choirs popular again (see my first ever post Choirs are becoming cool). Most of these programmes were very encouraging and seemed to promote the idea that everyone can sing (although there was always some kind of selection process and the necessity to read musical scores at some point). But why jump on the X-Factor/ Battle of the Bands/ Stars in Their Eyes/ Fame Academy reality bandwagon and make the whole thing competitive? And why on earth use a word like war??!! Sure, maybe it makes good TV as we get to see choirs being humiliated by the judges and singers in tears as they fail to reach the final, but what good does it do to try and encourage the public to believe that everyone can be a music-maker? I really don’t think people are going to rush off and join choirs after seeing Choir Wars!

I guess I can understand the idea behind sporting competitions – you’ve put a lot of work into training and the only way to see if it has paid off is to try your luck against somebody else. But where the arts and music is concerned, isn’t creating a beautiful sound and having pleasure whilst doing it enough in itself? (in a recent Guardian online poll, 65% of respondents thought that Choir Wars was one reality show too far).

I’m not doubting that different people have different amounts of talent and ability, but why does there have to be competition in the arts? Why can’t they make a TV show that takes any group of adults, without auditions and without using written music, and show that it is possible to create a fantastic group sound. This is what I’ve been doing over the last 10 years. I have worked with hundreds of adults over that time, and not one of them couldn’t sing. We have performed to acclaim in a variety of venues and made CDs which sell well and receive considerable praise. All this without awarding points or prizes, setting one person or choir against another, or telling singers that they just aren’t good enough. Why not celebrate an approach that is non-judgmental and encouraging rather than one which is all about competition, failure, confrontation, conflict, hostility, value judgments, humiliation, etc.?

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND ALL THE BEST FOR 2008

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