I’m sure you’ve noticed that it’s that time of year again — the time when so many choirs are busy with Christmas concerts.
But will you be doing the same old Christmas songs that you wheel out year after year? The songs that your audience expects?
Many choirs perform outdoors during the winter, especially in the run-up to Christmas.
Here are some tips to help make the experience as pleasurable as possible.
Some choirs (believe it or not) are already researching new songs for their
Christmas concert repertoire in August. Some even begin rehearsing their
Christmas concert in the summer!
If you feel like you’re on an endless concert roller coaster and want to get off, here are some thoughts that may help.
What could be more true to the spirit of Christmas than standing in a crowded pub and singing Christmas carols?
Especially if the tunes are only to be heard in a few towns and villages near Sheffield, in South Yorkshire.
It’s the day after Christmas Day and, however well or badly it went, there can be a sense of a let-down.
After any big event like Christmas or an important choir concert, there needs to be a transition back to ‘normal’. This is not always easy! Here are some ideas of how to deal with the come down.
It’s that time of year when choirs get asked to sing at all manner of Christmas events.
Some of those will be outdoors. How best to deal with the challenges?
Many choirs are gearing up for their annual Christmas concert.
Do you repeat the same songs each year or add new ones to your repertoire? Let’s look at the pros and cons.
I thought I’d do a round-up of posts I’ve made over the years which are relevant in some way to Christmas.
Part one was last week. Here is part two.
I thought I’d do a round-up of posts I’ve made over the years which are relevant in some way to Christmas.
Here is part one. Part two follows next week.
I couldn’t let Christmas pass without a final post before this blog goes into ‘pause’ mode (see Time to hit pause on this blog).
Also, being a numbers nerd, I needed to publish post number 800 to finish on a round number!
Once again a concert is looming. Time to figure out what songs to sing. WorldSong has a repertoire of around 190 songs so it’s not as though we don’t have many to choose from! However, some of these are warm-up songs, some are songs we’ve not done for many years, some we’ve done too many times recently, and some are only known to a few long-serving members of the choir. To make things slightly easier, this next concert is our Christmas one, so we’ll need to include all our Christmas songs. To date we have learnt 10 Christmas songs in WorldSong, and plan to learn two more this term. That makes choosing songs slightly easier, but it still means there’s lots of space to fill and doesn’t help with the running order.
My normal method is to look at what songs we’ve sung in the last concert and try not to duplicate that entirely. I always put all the new songs we’ve learnt this term into the concert. This means that any new members can join in with at least six or so songs without having to tackle any of our vast back catalogue. I also try and keep in songs that are relatively new, perhaps all those learnt in the last two terms. However, I do like to ring the changes so if someone comes to several concerts in a row they don’t just keep hearing the same set. I also try and accommodate those people who perhaps only come to see us once a year at our Christmas or Spring concerts.
I keep good records of the songs we’ve sung in each concert, so I look up the last couple we’ve done, and the same time slot a year earlier. I cut out songs that we’ve done in both of the last two concerts, plus most of what we did the same time last year. I add all our new ones, and a few that we’ve not sung for a year or more. Then I look at the spread of genres and countries of origin and try to get a good cross-section. Finally I look at the mix of upbeat versus gentle songs and again try to find a balance.
I have rough timings of all the songs in our repertoire, and I reckon that as a rule of thumb, we need about 2/3 of song material to fill a concert. So, for a 90 minute concert (two 45 minute halves), we’ll need 60 minutes of song material. The rest of the time is taken up with my between song banter and singers getting into position. I find that this formula is pretty accurate and we usually come in on time.
Since most of our songs are very short, we tend to get through 30 or so in a 90 minute concert, so the next problem is to find some sensible kind of running order. There is no one way of doing this, and I may use a different method each time. And as I pointed out in an earlier post (Order, order!) I wonder if the audience notice any way!
I did start a trend a way back of joining songs together. These segue ways only work if I can force several songs into the same key, and seem to work best (for some reason) with African songs. I guess if I tried a little harder I could squeeze enough songs together into some kind of medley that we could fill up a complete concert!
Well, Christmas is upon us and it’s over a week since my last choir performance. As usual, I am exhausted after a busy term and looking forward to two completely free weekends. I seem to be able to keep the energy up during term-time, but then my body realises it’s holiday time and just falls into a heap! Time to take a well-earned rest for two whole weeks, but already my mind is turning to the week after New Year when I will have to begin planning songs (and new ideas!) for next term. It’s a task I look forward to: finding songs from countries which we perhaps haven’t done before; making new arrangements of songs that I’ve recently discovered; trying to put a new slant on some of the old repertoire; developing my arranging skills by taking some simple songs and making them work for a choir; thinking up new ways to keep the choir invigorated and to help people develop confidence in their voices; coming up with new challenges for the choir so that we have something to aim for.
Unlike many choirs who might start preparing their Christmas concert in the summer, we try to leave things until at least November. This means that we only add two new Christmas songs to our repertoire each year. We now have about a dozen Christmas songs in our repertoire, so if you come and see us in 2020 we should be able to manage a complete concert of seasonal fare!
This is one time of year when most people sing. Even those who don’t think of themselves as “singers” find themselves singing along to well-known carols. Of course, way back when there was far more community singing going on. Nowadays though somebody might try to start a song and even if other people recognise it and sort of know the tune, it’s almost guaranteed that nobody remembers anything beyond the first verse. Which is one reason I started these choirs in the first place. I love to sing with other people, especially in harmony, so I figured that if I taught a load of people the same songs, at least we’d have some repertoire in common. This is indeed true, but it did take a long time before somebody could start off a song and all the other parts joined in without having to find their words, or stand next to someone in the same part, or check the starting notes. In fact I remember the very first time it happened in
