Last week I looked at the pros and cons of traditional choir formation vs. mixing parts up (Flying in choir formation – placing singers effectively).
Whichever approach you choose, there are still several choices to be made.
Over the last three weeks I’ve been looking at the traditional way of getting audiences to come to your concerts: identify what your choir does, describe that accurately, then get the word out.
This week I’m going to show you 20 other ideas to increase your concert audiences.
I’m sure there are plenty of other good ideas out there for increasing the size or composition of your audience. If you’re not afraid of other people stealing your best idea, do leave a comment and let us know your good ideas. The more the merrier!
In case you’ve missed any of the other three posts in this series on finding an audience, here they are:
Next week, I’ll be considering choirs that choose not to perform at all.
This is a revised version of a post which first appeared as How audiences affect us in December 2006.
I recently wrote about the importance of feedback when teaching and learning songs. In the absence of feedback, our most negative thoughts can raise their ugly heads.
It’s the same with performance. If an audience is unresponsive, we can start to believe that we’re not performing very well.
Audience dynamics are a very strange thing. Sometimes it’s as if you’re performing to the living dead, and yet afterwards you might have loads of people coming up to you saying how wonderful the concert was.
At other times the audience is far more animated and full of smiling faces, and yet there is hardly any feedback when the concert is over.
But however the audience respond, the first few moments of a concert tend to set the mood for the rest of the night.
At one Woven Chords concert we had around 60 singers so it took a while to get on stage. Usually people start clapping as soon as we enter, then it wanes a bit as they realise how many of us there are! But this time we entered in complete silence. There were around 120 people in the audience and you could have heard a pin drop.
I decided to make a joke of it and tiptoed from one side of the choir to the other asking in a loud stage whisper if the singers were OK. Gradually the audience began to laugh and warm to us, and when the final singer took their place, the whole audience applauded loudly.
It was a great concert – one of our best – but the audience was very unresponsive and sleepy throughout. The main reason was that the heating was oppressive. This was putting the audience to sleep and over-heating the singers on stage.
Despite this, we had loud encore calls, and the whole audience joined in with some songs at the end.
We once played to an elderly audience who were having their harvest supper. Unfortunately we were on after the meal. Not only did the venue stink of cabbage, but pretty much everyone in the audience nodded off during the concert!
Quite often our venues are churches. In the early days of WorldSong, we played in a church where there was no applause at all. This was very unexpected and completely threw us.
I realised that perhaps the audience weren’t used to seeing concerts in churches, so without trying to fish for applause, I did point out that clapping was allowed, and from then on the concert went with a swing!
I suppose with confidence and experience it is possible not to be affected by an audience’s response, but it still gets to me after over 25 years as a performer.
There I am up on stage trying my hardest and enjoying myself, but I only have to catch the eye of a seemingly disinterested or bored-looking audience member and all the doubts start creeping in: maybe they don’t like me; perhaps I’m not performing very well; it’s not their taste and there’s another hour and a half to go! etc. etc.
Of course, as a choir leader I have my back to the audience most of the time, but I do try to get them on my side with a bit of banter between songs and it sometimes feels like I’m a stand-up comic who’s dying! Usually, of course, it is our own internal critics talking and the audience are actually having a great time.
Once we did a wedding an sang Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s version of Amazing Grace. I was having such a great time conducting and was dancing around and joining in.
Afterwards the choir told me that if looks could kill, I would have been dead by then! Apparently pretty much the whole congregation – who had been expecting the well-known version of the song – looked daggers at the choir and were sour-faced throughout. Luckily I had my back to them!
It is very hard to keep positive and perform well when you are faced with a sea of blank, bored-looking faces. Sometimes you might spot and audience member who has dropped off to sleep. Once the whole of the front row grimaced as one (like they were sucking lemons) because they didn’t appreciate the finer points of clashing Georgian harmonies.
It’s easier said than done, but in many ways we have to sing for ourselves in a concert. We’ve done the preparation, we’re there because we love to sing, we’re all dressed up in our finery and look impressive. It’s just an added bonus if the audience like what we’re doing. WE like it, and that’s perhaps what counts the most.
So remember:
What kind of audience member are you? Do you smile all the time or frown in concentration? Do you whoop loudly at the end or clap politely? Are you the sort of audience member you’d like to have at one of your concerts?
How do you respond to a sea of blank faces? Do audiences affect how you perform? What kind of feedback do you want from an audience? Do you have any concert stories to tell?
I really, really don’t like performing outdoors (I’ll come to why in a moment)! But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so what can we do to make it work?
Since I haven’t performed outdoors that often, I would love to hear any advice from those of you who do it more often, or who perhaps even like it! Do drop by and leave a comment.
As I mentioned last time, a few of us sang at a friend’s wedding the other week. It was in a beautiful old village church with a wonderful acoustic. We managed to just about squeeze 18 people in front of fixed pews, next to a stone pulpit and between two tall pillars. (I chose not to sing from the choir stalls. Why on earth do they have these things? Don’t the two halves of the choir just end up singing to each other? I really can’t see the reasoning behind the design!). The organist reminded me that the main Woven Chords choir had sung there one Christmas and been very well received. Of course, those were the days when we had less than 40 members (and it was a tight squeeze even then!). He wondered why we hadn’t come back and I had to explain that it would be impossible to fit 80 singers into such a small church. In the early days we used to frequent such small village churches and hence manage six or so concerts each year. Those were the days!
It has always been difficult to find suitable venues for choirs. Churches are usually very welcoming (and often free!), but with their fixed architecture they can normally only accommodate small singing groups or choirs. Some of the more modern Methodist and Baptist churches have a more flexible layout and some even have stages, but not every town has one of these. Apart from large regional theatres (which tend not to take local community groups, or whose auditorium is just too large to fill), there are really not many venues available to us. Hence churches, which I now see more and more as a valuable community resource independent of any religious affiliation.
There are, however, certain small-minded individuals who think that, just because we perform in a church, that we must be a ‘church choir’, and since they’re not religious they wouldn’t want to come and see us would they? This is despite the many laudable local and rural music touring schemes (e.g. Music in Quiet Places) which see small instrumental and vocal ensembles regularly performing in churches. It’s a shame that these ‘certain people’ are so small minded, as they just don’t know what they’re missing!
The fact that we’re often performing in churches adds yet another stereotype image to what we do in addition to the word ‘choir’ which itself puts lots of people off. Which is why I’m more and more tempted to try and find theatrical rather than musical venues. I have a current bee in my bonnet about making singing performances more varied and interesting as I don’t think it’s enough these days for an audience to just see a static semi-circle of identically dressed singers standing on stage. More on this later!
Are there any other large choirs out there who have found a solution to finding suitable venues?
