Where does the music reside?

I met a painter in a gallery today and he asked me if I was an artist or had any interest in fine art. I told him that I didn’t paint, but that I worked with music and that I was also fascinated by the creative process. He then asked me: “Where do you think the music resides? Is it in the written score?”. I was rather lost for words at that moment and didn’t really understand the question. Finally I answered: “I believe that music resides in the humanity of the people creating it”.

We went on to talk about how some people are attracted to the purity of the written score and the idea of the perfect realisation of it in practice. Of course, one can never perfectly realise a written piece of music (not least because music notation is not an exact system) because the people who create the music are error-prone and not perfect creatures. But even if we could do that, wouldn’t that be rather like machine-produced music? I for one don’t really enjoy choral concerts where the singing is so, so, ever so precise. The enunciation is perfect, as is the blend of voices – so much so that it can sometimes sound like a single voice singing. No! Give me some humanity! I love the different textures of all the individuals in the choir, I appreciate everyone’s unique contribution to the overall sound. I enjoy it when not everyone is singing exactly the same pitch – that is where the harmonics, overtones and fullness of the sound come from. I adore it when each person’s timing is slightly different, when small errors are made. In short, I love it when all the imperfections that we human beings are made up of are fully expressed through the singing.

I have heard singers who have ‘beautiful’ voices, who sing perfectly in tune, whose technique and talent are remarkable, and yet they leave me unmoved. However, I can hear some rusty old recording of a group of elderly villagers in the Balkans giving voice to an age-old traditional song, and I can be almost moved to tears. They are communicating with me, they are telling me the story, they are working as one to express their humanity and their joy, and I in turn am moved.

This weekend I was in the rare position of running three entirely different workshops in three different places with three different sets of participants. It reinforced for me what happens in workshops. All three were open access, no experience necessary, no musical scores in sight, no real expectations (except to have fun!), and yet they all produced the most wonderful, magical sounds. The whole experience was uplifting both for me and the participants. It reminded me how universal singing is, and how egalitarian and levelling singing harmony together can be. I had no idea who these people were, what they did for a living, or if they had had any singing training or experience. The only instruction was to sing a part that they felt was comfortably within their own range. People ended up standing next to strangers who they had only just met, and yet they worked as a team helping to create an overall sound. Nobody was really worried about whether they had a ‘beautiful’ voice or not as they were soon taken over by the music itself. And I just stood back and listened to the most beautiful harmony singing and was moved once more by the power of the music. And where did the music reside at that moment? In the hearts and souls of every single person who made up the group.

Yet still – unfortunately – people believe that they can’t ‘sing’ or that music-making is not meant for them. One of the workshop participants wrote to me: “I’m completely new to this kind of thing, having believed all my life that singing in choirs was something that ‘other people’ do.” Luckily he realised that singing is open to all of us and has now joined a local choir.

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Who is our audience?

WorldSong’s 10^th anniversary concert last Saturday was a triumph — even if I do say so myself! At least in our terms it was a huge success and a big leap forward.

• we had an audience three times our normal size (which made our 650-seat theatre look comfortably full)
• we ended up with the biggest choir we’ve ever had on stage (all but two of the choir managed to be at the concert: two members volunteered to help front of house, whilst two others had already booked holidays)
• we had a wide range of different configurations on stage (solos, men-only, women-only, conductorless, small groups, a big group filling the stage)
• the vast majority of choir members had risen to the challenge and learnt the words to pretty much all of the 33 songs that we sang (the Welsh one was quite hard!)
• we pulled off several challenging moves (entering from the back of the auditorium whilst singing, dancing to South African songs, being accompanied by drums)
• several songs were sung without me having to conduct them

We had a varied and mixed audience including quite a few ex-choir members, and a few singers from our sister choirs Woven Chords and Global Harmony. In the interval I met some people from Swaziland, Slovakia and Uganda, and I know there were audience members from Poland, Lithuania and South Africa.

However, the most noticeable thing for me when the house lights went up at the end of the concert (I taught the audience a song as usual) was that the vast majority of the audience seemed to be well over 60 and mostly women! This is quite common and is often reflected in the choir itself and in the workshops that I run. Several of the choir had managed to persuade their children to come along, and almost without exception, they thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So why can’t we attract a younger audience? There’s nothing wrong, of course, with having an older audience, but it would be nice to have a wide spread of ages, genders and nationalities. (This also applies to the choir and workshops: we sing songs from many different countries and cultures, and yet we attract mainly white, British singers).

Is it perhaps the words “choir” or “concert” which put younger people off? Do they simply have something better to do on a Saturday night? Is the make-up of our audience simply a reflection of the make-up of the choir? In which case, why can’t the choir attract younger people and people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds?

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It's just a bit of hand waving

Sometimes I describe my job as simply being the guy who stands at the front of the choir and waves his arms about. “I point, you sing” is what I often tell the choir. That is basically what the job entails when we’re performing for the public, but it can all too often go wrong. There was a point in our concert last Saturday when I made a gesture which was misinterpreted and suddenly only one part was singing! We managed to recover quite well, and I’m sure the audience didn’t notice anything amiss, but it reminded me how important it is that the choir know exactly what I mean at any point.

Sometimes after a whole bunch of new people have joined the choir, I run through some of my basic hand gestures and tell them what they mean. When I first began conducting choirs, I thought that all my gestures were self-evident and that most conductors would use similar hand movements. How wrong I was! So since then I have regularly double-checked that the choir know what I intend.

As choral directors, we all do things differently, but the common point is that we need to be clearly understood by our choir. I use one gesture which I have been told is a real no-no, but which seems to work for me and the choirs that I lead. It is to raise my two index fingers vertically (as if pointing to the sky) which is a signal that something is about to happen. It’s a kind of “heads up” to people that they should pay attention because we’ll be doing something significant in a moment like coming to the end of the song, or repeating the last section, or speeding up. I have been told that this gesture is too subtle and vague to be useful. However I find it to be very effective, but only after you have rehearsed the song properly so that the choir know what to expect. It means that I can often dispense with counting in a performance (“how many times do we repeat that section?”) so everyone can really be in the moment, repeating parts as many times as it feels right to do them in any given concert.

I now realise that when I began this work I used to assume quite a lot. Now I work very hard to try and be aware of when I’m making assumptions. For example, when I’m teaching a song by ear I signal where the tune goes up and down by raising and lowering my horizontal hand. This is just a rough map of course, but it helps people when they’re learning. I can be slightly more subtle too by indicating big jumps in notes, and sometimes angling my hand slightly to indicate semi-tones.

Once I was running a workshop and a French guy asked my why I was moving my hand up and down in the air whilst teaching the song. I explained that as my hand moved higher it meant the notes were higher, and when I moved it lower it meant that the notes were lower. Then he asked what “higher” and “lower” meant! It was then that I realised that this is not innate knowledge but just a convention. If someone is familiar with a piano, then we could equally well describe notes as being more “left” or more “right”. It has become a convention (related to sound frequency) to talk about “higher” and “lower”, but we cannot assume that everyone knows what this means!

It’s good then to re-assess every now and then and to make sure that you are communicating with your choir members as clearly and accurately as you can. Do not assume that they always know what you mean!

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Order, order!

It’s that time of year when summer concerts come around and I have to think of a programme of songs. Selecting the songs is not too difficult as I always include all the new songs we’ve learnt this term (so new people can join in the performance), several that are relatively new to the choir (songs that we’ve learnt over the last year or so), some golden oldies which I revive from the past, and some choir and audience favourites.

However, I try and keep in mind audience members who perhaps have been to our last few concerts or maybe come just once a year to our summer concert. I don’t ever want an audience to feel that they come to the same concert each time so I try and keep ‘repeats’ to a minimum, but also balance that with the fact that it’s always nice to hear a few familiar songs. I like to think that I’ve got the balance right, but I haven’t ever had any specific feedback from audience members. I reckon that as long as there’s sufficient variety (and we do have lots of songs to choose from!) then there should be something to please everybody.

Also, WorldSong are about to release a new live CD so I’ve had to choose the songs for that. That wasn’t too difficult either as I was limited mainly by the quality of any recordings that we had (and, of course, whether we were singing in tune on that day!).

What I find harder though, having chosen the songs, is to find a suitable running order. There are many schools of thought: some people group songs from the same country or style, whilst others sprinkle the different genres throughout the concert or CD and focus on aspects such as the dynamics of a particular song, whether it is anthemic or gentle, smooth or rhythmic. I am of this latter school, although I do sometimes put two songs together if they are from the same part of the world, and maybe stick in a song with English lyrics if I feel there’s been a run of foreign ones.

I often wonder how much this matters. I spend a long time thinking of the running order for each of our concerts, and I’ve spent even longer on the new CD. But does it really matter to audiences? Do they notice the ‘journey’ through a concert, or do they just take the songs one at a time? And with the CD, people can jump about and play tracks in any order they choose, so is the running order of any importance at all? I guess I hang on to the fact that nobody has ever commented on the running order, and being the optimist that I am, I assume that means that I’m doing it right since it’s not noticeable!

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What a performance!

None of the choirs or singing groups that I run were formed as performing groups. I’ve always made it clear that our main priority is simply to have fun and to sing together. However, life being what it is, performance opportunities arise and people like to perform! I make sure that everyone understands that performance is an added bonus and is totally optional and in no way compulsory. Yet almost all choir members always want to perform! That is the way of the world. I guess having put all that hard work into learning and perfecting songs, it’s inevitable that people want to share them with others.

So we perform. And we do – even if I do say it myself – perform to a high standard. We often sell out many of our regular local gigs, and have a strong following amongst our audience. But this brings its own problems. Whilst each week the emphasis is on learning new songs and having fun singing them, plus reviving a few “oldies”, there has to come a time when we “rehearse” for our upcoming concert.

Many other choirs are performing choirs and can have a dozen or more concerts each year. This means that their emphasis is very different from ours: each week’s session is a rehearsal for the next concert, always brushing up performance skills and honing songs drawn from a relatively small repertoire. We, however, have a repertoire well in excess of 150 songs to draw upon (not all of which are up to speed at any given time) and we perform usually only three times a year.

The skill then is to balance fun singing sessions with the more serious business of getting songs ready for the next concert. The usual plan is to introduce a bunch of new songs at the beginning of each term (roughly 12 weeks), whilst going over some golden oldies at the end of each session. As the concert approaches, I stop introducing new material and just focus on polishing the old stuff up. Two weeks before the concert we spend one session running through the first half of the concert and the next weekly session running the second half. On the day of the concert we have a full rehearsal in the afternoon running the whole concert in order.

Since many of our songs are relatively short (between one and three minutes long) it means we use up a lot of repertoire in a concert! Our usual concerts are two halves of 45 minutes each, which may mean we get through up to 30 songs – most of which are in foreign languages. That’s a lot of material to get through in a term whilst still trying to have fun!

There is always a slight frustration that if only we had a little more time to work on the songs, then the concert would be even better. And if we were a proper performance choir then we could work on performance skills each week and really get good! But I think we’ve got the balance right.

If we never performed, there would never be a need to really hone in on a song, get the subtleties right, play with the dynamics, find the right voice for it, really get to grips with the strange words, find the joy of actually singing the song rather than feeling that you never quite know it properly.

Yet if we performed all the time we would lose a lot of the fun from our weekly sessions, there would be more pressure to “get it right”, our performances might end up just that little bit too slick (our audiences really like our laid-back informal approach coupled with accomplished singing ability), we wouldn’t be able to keep adding fabulous songs to our repertoire, we couldn’t afford to experiment and play around with songs or to try to learn something really complex without the pressure of having to deliver at a certain time.

Why not come along to one of our gigs and see for yourself? Woven Chords annual summer concert at Grimsthorpe Castle on 14th July is sold out I’m afraid, but you can come and celebrate WorldSong’s 10^th anniversary by helping us to fill a 650-seat theatre in Coventry on 21^st July!

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Making a song and dance of it

From my experience with choirs and singing groups it appears on the face of it that we are a rhythmically challenged nation!

I often try to introduce a bit of clapping or steps or syncopation into our warm-ups and songs and am always amazed at the apparent lack of co-ordination and body-awareness amongst the group. As soon as I begin teaching some simple dance steps, or try to clap a simple rhythm that is not on the beat, several people just sit out and don’t even bother to try because they “know” they can’t do it. And some people sit out because “I’ve come here to sing, not dance!”

But of course, we do all have a good sense of rhythm, it’s just that we don’t practice it very often. Rather like people who think they can’t “sing” because they can’t immediately pick up a tune – they are simply out of practice with their listening skills.

It seems to me that this is a cultural phenomenon. Ours has become a very visual and rational/ mental culture. We use our eyes and thinking brains far more than our ears and bodies. Once people have sung in a choir for some time, they get in contact again with their innate listening abilities. They learn to trust their ears and not just their eyes. Similarly, given time and patience, I believe that people can re-discover their innate sense of rhythm and body-awareness.

In this culture we tend to compartmentalise different activities. So, for example, when we’re singing we’re singing, we’re not dancing, so we don’t need to pay any attention to our bodies. And when we’re dancing or clapping out a rhythm, we don’t need our voices. I came across this time and time again when I used to teach at drama school. The lessons themselves were compartmentalised: a movement class followed by a voice class followed by a tap class. When I arrived and tried to teach everything at the same time, there were a lot of confused students!

However, in many other cultures – notably many African cultures – there is very little if any separation between dance, vocal melody and rhythm. You only have to see a group of South Africans for instance singing a song and you cannot see where the dance ends and the song begins – it is all the same thing. So when teaching songs from these cultures, we often find it difficult. It is no good trying to count some complex off-beat rhythm in your head using your conscious brain, it’s just too hard. You have to let your body “dance” the rhythm and then the song’s timing will come automatically. Similarly with the complex 7/8 rhythms common in the Balkans – just learn the dance at the same time and it comes easy!

Often we have found ourselves carrying out a complex task such as patting our head whilst rubbing our tummy and find that sweet moment when it all falls into place. But then as soon as we begin to think (“great, it’s working” or “I hope I’m getting it right”) it all goes disastrously wrong! We need to trust our intuition, our body intelligence, our non-rational brain which is just getting on with the task quite nicely thank you.

The Natural Voice approach to singing which I follow places the relationship between breath, body and voice at its heart. We believe that you simply can’t separate these components to be fully in the song. And it’s no coincidence that much of our repertoire comes from cultures which don’t make these separations.

I once met an instrumentalist who wouldn’t even begin to learn tunes from another culture until she’d been to a few dance classes from that culture. She needed to embed the culture’s “dance” into her body before she even picked up her instrument.

A few years back I was taught an amazing Ysaye Barnwell gospel-like song called Lawd it’s midnight. This is an amazing song with some quite tricky rhythms. We learnt it by having the sheet music in our hands and it took a long time to get it right. Most of the difficulties were to do with the cross rhythms. It occurred to me afterwards that we probably would have learnt it a lot faster if we had put the music down and simply let the rhythms into our bodies!

So next time somebody asks you to move or dance at the same time as you're singing, they're not trying to make life difficult for you, they're actually making it easier for you to learn the song. Just go with it!

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What is it that you do exactly?

Sometimes it’s easier to say what we don’t do!

This is what we DON'T DO
We don’t sing classical music (well, actually, we do sing the occasional “classical” song – like Plaisir d’Amour – but the bulk of our repertoire is not the typical Western classical canon).

We don’t sing pop songs (well, actually, I recently taught Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t worry, be happy”, and I have tried versions of U2 and the Beatles, but it doesn’t make up the bulk of our repertoire).

We don’t sing folk songs (well, actually, we do sing some English folk songs, although not many – and usually the arrangements are a little unusual – and most of our foreign songs could be said to be “folk” or traditional).

We are not a gospel choir (well, actually, we do sing quite a few gospel and spiritual numbers although we are not a church choir).

We don’t sing close harmony or barbershop (I’m not even sure what “close harmony” means! But as soon as you use words like acappella – which simply means singing without instrumental accompaniment – people immediately assume we sing barbershop).

We aren’t a religious choir (well, actually, we do sing many religious songs – who said the devil has all the best tunes! – but we are definitely a secular choir).

We aren’t like the local choral society or parish singers (now that is true, especially in the sense that we don’t stand in neat rows identically dressed with books in our hands).

We don’t do songs from the shows or easy listening music (that’s true too – mainly because I don’t like musicals!).

And this is what we DO do
So what is it that we do do, and why is it important?

We sing unaccompanied songs in harmony. That is, we don’t involve musical instruments, and most of the time we’re not all singing the tune in unison.

We sing songs from all around the world (in the original foreign language!), usually from cultures and traditions where there is a strong harmony tradition like Eastern Europe, New Zealand, USA, South Africa. That is why we hardly ever do songs from Asia or South America: they simply don’t have a harmony singing tradition. That’s also why we don’t often do British or Irish folk songs. Although there is a harmony singing tradition in this country, songs are often delicate and story-driven so don’t really work (in my opinion) with a large choir. Same with pop songs.

Now we know what we do, the trouble is it’s hard to explain it to potential audience members for our concerts, or participants in our workshops. I’ve tried many different ways over the years, but we still get audience members saying things like: “Oh, that’s what you do ! I really enjoyed it”. How come they were surprised? Hadn't we explained what we do before they came? We know by now that if we just get people along to our workshops or concerts that (usually) they really enjoy themselves. The hard bit is just getting them through the door.

Most people just don’t have the reference points for phrases like world music or acappella or unaccompanied harmony singing. There was a point when we could refer to adverts on television. At one point Ladysmith Black Mambazo (male South African singers, sung with Paul Simon) were used to advertise Heinz baked beans, and the Bulgarian state women’s choir (made a famous CD called Les Mysteres des Voix Bulgares) were used on a car advert. But it’s not happened recently.

So for concerts we rely a lot on word of mouth and friends bringing people along. For workshops, I went through a period of designing several more popular, accessible workshops just to get people singing in harmony (e.g. ABBA, Beatles, gospel, Paul Simon – see our workshops page for more details. Shameless plug: I will be running a residential weekend version of my Paul Simon Songbook workshop in September in the Cotswolds). Having got people along and introduced them to the joys of harmony singing, I can then slip in the odd Balkan song without them noticing!

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Playing catch up PART THREE

Following on from the last two posts, Playing catch up PART ONE and PART TWO, here are some more mundane mumblings looking back at my earlier posts from April and May. Now we’re up to date!

Sounds of silence
Rehearsals for our specially composed piece RUHE are proceeding apace. We are very grateful to Paul in Germany for his help with some of the pronunciation. Although the Koblenz accent is noticeable, at least the whole choir is speaking with one voice as it were. Also, at Fi’s suggestion (many thanks Fi for pointing us towards Sible’s 1999 restoration) we have added the percussion parts for single clave and empty maraca. We toyed with the idea of using Steve Reich’s recent addition of the sound of one hand clapping, but realised that we were simply taking too much on. So, stay tuned, and we look forward to your attendance at the premiere in July. (PS I promise to send the score out to the many of you who wrote in to request it. Unfortunately there has been a run on invisible ink recently, hence the delay).

Coach tour sing-a-long
I pointed out in Singing from the same hymn sheet that one of the reasons I had originally started a choir was that people would at least have some songs in common that they could sing together. So I was extremely heartened by our journey back from the Royal Festival Hall last Saturday. I was sitting in the middle of the coach and there was pretty much non-stop singing from the back half of the bus. Admittedly a few of the songs petered out or deteriorated into unison singing, but I was mightily impressed by the number of songs in harmony that the choir were able to sing without start notes and in full harmony! I could tell by the sound that people were really enjoying themselves and were really giving full voice to the songs. Yes, we had a few “Roll out the barrel” equivalents, but also loads of Georgian, Maori, gospel, African – and even Bosnian Sephardic songs. I was proud as proud could be!

Being in the moment
Many times things just go totally wrong in a rehearsal or at a performance. Often times it’s just not clear what the reason is so I’ve often blamed it on the weather in the past (well, you have to blame it on something!). Thinking about the phenomenon has made me believe more and more in the principle of “living in the now” or “being in the moment”. If you’ve done all your preparation and you come to the rehearsal or performance without expectation, you will always be rewarded – often in unexpected ways. But if you come to the warm-up or concert with a particular outcome in mind, you will almost always be disappointed. A hard skill to practice perhaps, but a very worthwhile one.

Different strokes for different folks
Undoubtedly the “flavour” of the three choirs Woven Chords, WorldSong and Global Harmony is very different (Vive la différence). So it was fascinating last Saturday to combine these three choirs into one large one and to see that the whole functioned as a completely different, fourth flavour of group. The only thing the singers had in common was that they had all learn the same songs (and many, not all, of them had been conducted by me at some point). I was worried that it would be hard to blend three disparate groups together, but it was as if we had been singing together for years! The audience on the South Bank couldn’t believe that we hadn’t really rehearsed together.

The other big difference for me in London on Saturday was the dynamics and make-up of the audience. It made me realise that so often we play to a white, middle class audience, and yet here was an audience made up of people with a much wider range of ages, races and cultures, all enjoying our varied programme. I do wish that the membership of the choirs reflected better the make-up of the community in which we work. Coventry for example is a multi-racial and multi-cultural city, and yet the vast majority of the choir are white. I really don’t know how to change this.

All those silent years
I still don’t know why so many people stop singing between school and their 30s and 40s, but I had another phone call this week from a bloke who wants to come to one of my workshops and said he hasn’t sung for 25 years!

Youth is wasted on the young
I got my copy of Sound Sense’s magazine today and almost all of the articles were about youth singing and music initiatives, or special interest groups like the disabled or the elderly. I know I might sound like some dyed-in-the-wool Tory, but I really wonder why the vast majority of people are seemingly ignored by the funding bodies. Or is it just me?

Mapping the song
I am still persisting with using a musical map to teach a version of La Bamba. I was rather wary when I first unveiled my attempt, but most people seemed to find it useful. We did seem to go faster after I started using the wall charts. Trouble is there are so many of them and it takes ages to put them up on the wall! I just hope that at some point the song will sink in and I can stop using the things. I have found though that since I’ve started putting song lyrics on wall charts, people learn the words much more quickly, even if I do end up handing out the lyrics.

Well, that’s the end of my trawl through my past posts. I hope it’s given you some food for thought and perhaps a greater overview of the topics that I’ve covered since last December. I do appreciate all of you who read this blog, even if you’re not moved to add comments.

However … do try to post a comment now and again, even if it’s just a one liner. I hope to create more of a dialogue and am always looking for new ideas and suggestions. Thanks for reading!

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Playing catch up PART TWO

Following on from last week’s post, Playing catch up PART ONE, here are some more random ramblings looking back at my earlier posts from February and March.

Choirs are still cool!
First off, I read an interesting article in the Guardian last week that chimed in with my very first post way back in December 2006: Choirs are becoming cool. The article is called Choral satisfaction and begins with the sentence: “First it was knitting and embroidery, now choir practice is cool.” The article covers several choirs and makes interesting reading.

Trust in your listening skills
The post Papa’s got a brand new song threw up a couple of comments. Fiona made the very valid point that “a player or singer who plays/ sings by ear is no less a musician than the one who reads the quavers and stave”. Yet we are still a mainly visual culture so people feel much more comfortable with something to look at. The majority of people find it very hard to just listen and take time to let something sink in. We want a quick fix and often don’t have the patience to listen again and again to a song, but expect to pick it up in a couple of goes (and then think we can’t ‘sing’ because we can’t learnt it fast enough!). The thing to remember is that in learning by ear, we’re trying to short-circuit a process that takes many years in most aural cultures. As Paul points out in his comment, a modern correlate to this is to use MP3s or a parts CD in the car, and simply listen to your part again and again. Although this is very effective, the main drawback, as Paul points out, is that it takes away the social and communal aspect of learning in a group.

Men’s songs
Where did you get that song? is uppermost in my mind at the moment as I’m trying to find suitable songs for my forthcoming men’s harmony singing workshop. This is a very specific area, so is a little harder to research. I’m trying to identify cultures where men sing together traditionally, i.e. there are special ‘men songs’ in the culture, rather than just a male voice version of a song. The obvious ones spring to mind: Republic of Georgia, chain gangs in the US, South African mbube tradition (e.g. Ladysmith Black Mambazo), Russian church music, sea shanties, etc. I’m sure there are more, and all suggestions will be gratefully received!

Harmony singing traditions across the globe
On a similar note, it would be really useful to identify those cultures in the world which have a harmony singing tradition. I’m often asked by choir members why we don’t sing songs from India or the Middle East for example. Sure, there may be Western choral arrangements of songs from those parts of the world, but there is not an indigenous unaccompanied harmony singing tradition. I’m very tempted to go back to college to study ethnomusicology just to find out! I remember a Georgian ethnomusicologist once telling me about a European country which is bisected by the Danube, and regions south of the river don’t have a harmony singing tradition, whereas those regions north of the river do. Go figure!

How the brain remembers songs
I’m still absolutely fascinated by the Singing memory. Again recently I have been in a position where I’m about to sing a song I’ve not sung for ages and have no idea how it goes, or what the words are, then I open my mouth and it all comes tumbling out! Does anybody else have the same experience? Also, I need to know the first word of a song sometimes to just remember how the tune goes, which proves to me at least that the words and melody are stored together in the brain. And the thing that never, ever ceases to amaze me is how the choir might leave a song alone for maybe a year or so which has not been going particularly well, then a year later, with no practice in between, they sing it perfectly! The secret is to leave the brain alone and it somehow manages to sort everything out without our conscious intervention.

Singing the oldies
Thinking of the new singers in our choir, I’ve recently made another parts CD for WorldSong as we have a big anniversary concert coming up in the summer. This means that we now have seven parts CDs available, covering around 90 songs. As time goes by therefore, it becomes more and more daunting for new members as they realise that they have such a lot of past repertoire to catch up with (WorldSong now have about 190 songs in our repertoire, including rounds and warm-up songs). I try to make it very clear that there is absolutely no necessity to learn any of the oldies. I always make sure that there are at least half a dozen songs that new members can join in with in their first concert. I suggest that people make a note of any old songs they hear that they really like, and then take plenty of time to learn them from a parts CD one at a time. Nevertheless, there are still people who feel that they need to catch up and buy all the parts CDs and try to learn everything!

Men singing (or not!)
I’m still wondering where all the male singers are and trying to get more men to sing by running an annual men-only harmony singing workshop. Knowing how quickly people get booked up, and also how often work intervenes in men’s leisure activities, I sent out a round robin email earlier in the year to let people know the date and place of my men’s workshop. I’ve recently sent out the final details and have had quite a few replies letting me know that they’re still interested, but unfortunately are busy on the day! I do find that women in general tend to prioritise their leisure and social activities more. I just hope I get enough blokes to make it worthwhile this year! It’s always fun and we end up making a great sound, so please spread the word to any guys who you think might be interested: Men's harmony singing workshop on June 23rd in Leicester .

Trust in me!
Been having some interesting conversations in Minor Chords recently about where we might go next, and how we might up our game a little. This has brought up the issue of trust again. A consensus seems to be that people want me to be stricter and not let them get away with so much! Well, that’s just not my style. I figure that we’re all adults now and it’s up to choir members to find their own motivation, self-discipline, professional attitude, etc. Part of me trusting choir members is that I believe it brings out the best in people, but the other side of it is that I don’t see it as my job to discipline people or to keep on their case. We’re not at school any more, so singers have to take their own responsibility. My job is as an enabler and facilitator. However, as Tony points out in his comment, being patient 99% of the time means that when I do let rip, people know that I really mean it!!

Standing up for yourself
Got quite a few comments about my Get in line post. Seems that lots of people enjoyed it and could really relate to it! This Saturday (9th June) I’ll be taking three choirs to the Royal Festival Hall’s ‘Overture’ weekend to make one big choir of 100 singers. We'll be doing a half hour set on the stage outside the Hayward Gallery at 3pm. Although I will have rehearsed two choirs personally, and the third knows the same songs, we will not have had a chance to rehearse together. Since I trust that everyone knows what they’re doing (see above), the singing should be fine. I’m most worried about how to get 100 people on stage into the correct places and not look like a right mess! It turns out though that we won’t have a chance to actually try out on the stage, but will just have to busk it. Wish us luck!

I had a great time actually
So maybe I didn’t have a great time at our Woven Chords concert in March. But I had an even worse time at our Minor Chords concert in April as part of Stamford’s Festival of Performing Arts. Our rehearsal was fantastic, but the actual performance was not a patch on it. Mind you, as always, I doubt if the audience noticed anything awry (except when we had to start a song again because it was so badly out of tune!). Apart from the fact that it wasn’t really our usual sort of audience, there wasn’t really any excuse. For once, I don’t think any of us really enjoyed it! Yet a few weeks later in a small village hall on a tiny stage, we performed a whole evening’s worth of songs and all enjoyed every minute of it. It’s such a subtle and uncontrollable thing that you just have to go into it with wide-eyed enthusiasm each time, and hope for the best. Let’s hope Saturday at the Royal Festival Hall is a good one!!

I’m going to stop there and cover my April and May posts in the final look back next week.

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Playing catch up PART ONE

I thought I would take this opportunity (it being our half term break and all) to look back over my posts to this blog and discuss any developments or comments that have arisen. In this post I’ll cover December and January, then continue in the next post rather than make it too long!

We have a big and exciting gig coming up on Saturday 9^th June at 3pm. We (that is Woven Chords, WorldSong and Global Harmony) have been invited to perform at the Royal Festival Hall’s re-opening Overture weekend. We will be doing a half hour set of songs that all three choirs know, but have not performed together before. We won’t get a chance to rehearse together, and maybe very little time to even work out how to stand on stage as a 100-piece choir! We will be performing outdoors on a stage outside the Hayward Gallery.

Singing outdoors
Looking back at my post How audiences affect us, reminds me that I really really don’t like performing outdoors. Not only are the acoustics often lousy so the singers can’t hear each other properly (hence we go out of tune and out of time easily), and maybe it might rain, but the audience are free to stay and listen or wander off as they please. Unlike the audience who have come especially to hear the choir, have paid for a ticket and will be seated throughout the performance. Maybe it’s just me, but my heart does sink when I see even one audience member look bored and walk away! It is, of course, the acid test to see if you can keep an audience interested, but we are not primarily performing choirs so haven’t really spent enough time on developing our performance skills, since that is not our main focus.

Then, of course, there will be the problem of getting 100 people to stand in the right places and not fall off the stage (Get in line!)!

Standing to sing
This is the third term now since I’ve dispensed with chairs during our weekly sessions (Fighting habit and complacency). The vast majority of people have now got used to this and are actually enjoying it! They have discovered the benefits to their voices and overall energy levels, and also the flexibility of being able to move around the space and sing their parts to other people. Any change takes a while to bed in, but I think this has generally been a change for the good.

Minor Chords
Minor Chords recently had their annual “at home” concert in Stamford. We had been noticing that often the our rehearsals went really well, but the standard dropped in performance (the opposite of Bad rehearsal=good concert?). We discussed the various reasons why this might be, and the result was a greatly improved performance and a well-received concert which we all enjoyed. We are going to take stock at our next session and decide where we go next. We have been together for six years now, so maybe it’s time to shake things up a little and approach things in a different way!

Performance skills
One of the difficulties in improving the performance standards of any of the groups that I lead is that we are not primarily performing groups. When you join any of these open access singing groups, you basically sign up for regular sessions to learn harmony songs and to have fun. The performance opportunities are purely voluntary (although in practice, pretty much everyone wants to perform when the opportunity arises!). This means that we always seem to be performing by the seat of our pants. We do rehearse a fair amount, but I try not to disrupt our weekly sessions too much, and try very hard to keep the emphasis on fun. This may result in people feeling under-rehearsed.

The only solution to this that I can think of is that our weekly sessions effectively become rehearsals for our end of term concerts. We would not learn any new material, but go over and over the songs we will be performing. We would focus on performance skills, how to stand and present ourselves, staying on pitch, etc. etc. But to my mind, this would radically change the nature of the group and we would lose a lot of the fun element. There are many groups who function like this, who maybe perform a dozen or more times each year with pretty much the same repertoire. However, I feel that our groups have a somewhat different flavour. The challenge then is how to develop performance skills and stretch ourselves as a group whilst keeping the basic nature of our weekly sessions, and only performing a few times a year?

Learning words
For the last two terms I have continued to experiment with putting words on large sheets of paper rather than handing out lyrics (The writing’s on the wall). This has worked fantastically well with relatively simple songs, but the jury’s still out on the slightly more complex or very foreign-seeming lyrics. Also, I’m not sure yet how long and complex lyrics can be and still be learnt by this method. I’ve bottled out on a few songs (those with more than two verses, and songs like the Welsh national anthem – in Welsh, of course!). When I first introduced this method, people did pay attention and focused on the words on the wall, but increasingly people are beginning to write the words down as soon as they go up, which kind of defeats the object!

Not using words in concerts
I still haven’t figured out a method of getting people to learn their words and not have pieces of paper in concerts (Words are flowing out like endless rain … ). WorldSong have a big concert in July to celebrate their 10^th anniversary. It will be in a 650-seat theatre and we’re going to try and make it something really special. So I have given plenty of notice that I really, really don’t want people to use words. They now have loads of time to put the work in and learn them. But some people are already coming up to me and saying they are finding some songs just impossible. So what do you do? I don’t want to put the fear of God into people (as some choir leaders do), but I can’t think of any sanctions to use either (“if you don’t learn the words you can’t sing in the concert”). I really can’t think of any other approaches, but would gratefully hear of any suggestions!

Beyond verse one
I have tried with several new songs to teach a musical phrase, then to practice it with words from all the verses of the song and not just the first. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the other verses get remembered equally well, but it does mean that people get familiar with the other words, and tend not to stumble over the foreign ones quite as much.

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How many conductors does it take to lead a choir?

It dawned on me recently that my job as musical director of the women’s ensemble Minor Chords is to make myself redundant! I research, arrange and teach a variety of songs to the group, but there are only 11 singers, so when it comes to performance, in theory, they shouldn’t need a conductor. My reasoning is that with a group of this size it would encourage the singers to really pay attention to each other and work as a team rather than focusing on me. Also, on a very practical level, since the group is so small, I feel very conspicuous standing in front of them and believe that I often block them from the audience’s view.

However, the group as a whole seem reluctant to let me go! I wonder if this is just because they are used to me conducting and haven’t yet developed the necessary skills to “lead” themselves, or does size matter? Is there a minimum size of singing group below which a conductor is simply not needed (at least not one who stands out the front and waves their arms)? Or to ask a slightly different question: how big can a group get without having someone lead them out front?

I have seen several examples recently which have made me think. Although I didn’t see them personally, the Russian Ensemble Hermitage have recently toured. The ensemble consists of six men, all very accomplished with years of opera and conservatory training behind them, and yet one of them acts as conductor. On the other hand, I recently saw Northern Harmony on tour with 14 singers and they had no conductor out front. One individual is usually responsible for giving a starting note, but different individuals “lead” from where they happen to be standing. It might simply be to count in, or they may subtly move their hand to keep the song in time.

Another group I saw last year, The Shout, had about a dozen singers on stage. Their musical director Orlando Gough often sings with them, but when he’s not, he simply sits in the auditorium watching rather than conducting. The trio that I used to sing with had no conductor. I used to give the starting notes, but we used to watch and listen to each other very closely to keep time and tune.

At the other extreme, I know of two large community choirs (the Manchester Community Choir and the Gasworks Choir) who have had two conductors/ leaders. The two leaders also run the rehearsals jointly.

So maybe with a group of just 11 it is possible to go either way: with or without a conductor. But is one way better? Does a conductor mean a better, tighter performance? Or does not having a conductor lead to a more accomplished, together group who are really listening to and paying attention to each other?

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Complex songs and learning by ear: musical maps

The choirs and workshops that I lead are run on the principle that music should be accessible to all. One of the outcomes of this is that I don’t use written music to teach since I can’t assume that everyone can read music. This also chimes in with the kind of material that I use which often comes from cultures and traditions where songs are passed down from generation to generation through the oral/ aural tradition. Many such songs are quite short and fairly repetitive without many words, so lend themselves to being taught by ear. This kind of material is particularly suitable for short workshops as the songs are quite easy to learn and I can offer a range of different styles in a relatively short period of time.

However, in a choir which meets regularly, singing such “easy” short songs soon becomes unsatisfying and we like to add something more challenging to our singing diet. One obvious development is to use songs which have several verses which we can then build up in performance by adding harmonies as the song progresses, thus adding interest for an audience. We can also tackle longer pieces that are basically several shorter songs tacked together, different “movements” if you like. Many South African songs fit into this category (e.g. Nkosi sikelel'i Afrika, Ladysmith Black Mambazo's version of Amazing Grace, Akanamandla). We can learn a new part each term and gradually extend the song as time goes by. We’ve also tackled longer church songs from Eastern Europe. In these, the melody lines go through a few subtle changes as the song progresses, but the individual units of melody are quite easy to learn and the overall effect is to add interest and texture to a song.

But then we come to more complex (usually modern) arrangements of songs, or songs which are fairly intricate and yet each part is frustratingly similar so very hard to learn. Recently I tried to teach Samuel Barber’s vocal version of his famous Adagio for Strings (Agnus Dei), but had to give up because there were so many long sustained notes and no easy way of knowing how long they should each be held. Then with a big choir I wanted to teach Ysaye Barnwell’s Lawd it’s midnight. I had originally been taught this using the written score, but the timing is complicated and I am convinced it will be much easier to teach the timing by ear and by allowing the rhythm into the body. The trouble is, the melody and parts are too complex to do this way!

Currently I am teaching a four-part arrangement of the Mexican song La Bamba. It is a fairly straightforward arrangement in that it follows the well-known tune and there are no weird chords, but there are lots of backing parts with short riffs that are repeated, then a short filler phrase, then the riff repeated again but with minor variations. It is very easy to lose track of how many times you’ve sung a particular riff, and exactly when you have to put the little filler parts in. We are progressing, but very slowly. The question in my mind now, is do I persist teaching it by ear or is there another (better?) way? Can I find a more effective way of teaching it by ear, or do I need something visual to help the singers know where they are?

One way to tackle complex songs would be to record all the parts on a CD and give it out to the singers to learn at home. But this removes the fun and community spirit of learning together in our weekly sessions. Also, some complex songs would still be hard to learn like this by just listening, even if singers can hear the other parts at the same time. I don’t want to end up in concert with singers counting on their fingers to know how many times to sing a particular riff!

In many cases it seems it would help to have some kind of map to help the singers learn the overall structure of the song. “Why not simply give them the music?”, you ask. Well, I suppose I could. Even if people can’t read music very well, they could at least use the scores to see where their part changed and how many times bits repeated. I’m reluctant to do this for several reasons. One is that it’s a slippery slope and there may be a demand to have the music for all the songs we sing (I know some individuals would be much more comfortable if this were the case!). This somehow goes against the spirit of the choir and the fun learning experience we have each session. But perhaps more worryingly, having given out the music which represents a complex song, how can I persuade people to put it down when it comes to performance? It’s hard enough getting people to learn the words to songs!

The other weekend I did a workshop with Northern Harmony. For some of the Georgian and Corsican songs in their repertoire, rather than produce a complete written score, they used a schematic technique to show a map of the melody lines of each part:

This was fairly easy to follow once a line had been sung to us a few times. (Strangely enough this is exactly the kind of notation that many bass partsin my choirs invent independently. It's usually the bass part because they don't often have an easily recognisable tune. When I point out that this is a music notation, they usually deny it, somehow believing that written music must be something far more difficult and clever!) This method is very effective for mapping out melody lines, especially when they vary just slightly throughout a piece, but not very useful when we're dealing with the overall structure of a complex song.

At the moment I am experimenting with a variety of visual maps that might help the singers navigate their way through a complex structure and help them to learn their part. I'm not quite sure what their final form will be, but at the moment I'm thinking of different shapes (boxes, ovals, etc.) and colours. My first experiment with this method will be to put them up on the wall in rehearsal rather than hand them out to individuals. I hope this will mean they won’t need pieces of paper in the concert! I’ll keep you posted on my progress. In the meantime, if anyone else has any ideas …!

My question to you is: what is the limit in complexity that can be taught by ear? Can we teach anything by ear given enough time? If we need to resort to some kind of map or written score, how do we then get it out of people’s hands for performances?

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Children and special interest groups first?

Following last week’s post, somebody reminded me that the name of the BBC Radio programme which taught traditional songs from different cultures was Singing Together. It dates back to the 1950s at least, and was still on the radio until recently (2004).

There still is an abundance of music activities available to children, and in particular there is a big movement on at the moment to revive singing in schools. In January the Dept. for Education and Skills announced a £10 million package to boost music and singing for young people and appointed composer Howard Goodall as the new singing ambassador. The initiative is part of the government’s response to Music Manifesto’s report: Making Every Child’s Music Matter.

I am, however, very sceptical. It seems to me that this is another case of pendulum swinging: there was once vibrant music provision in schools which has since been cut back, and now the government want to re-instate it. But how will this affect the place of music in people’s lives as they get older? It’s all very well pumping money and effort into kids’ 12 or so years at school, but what then? Why do people not keep up singing through their 20s and 30s in general?

There are so many initiatives these days for particular, well-defined groups like the young, the disadvantaged and the old. But what about the people in the middle? All that money and effort goes into introducing young people to music, then they’re left to their own devices when they leave school. Choirs are often seen as a little fuddy duddy and formal, and evening classes are for grown ups (besides, who wants to go back to studying so soon?!). There are youth orchestras, youth bands, youth choirs, young people’s workshops, song writing initiatives for young people, studios for kids, etc. etc. But then what?

Apparently the dark ages of music and singing in schools is over. No more: “stand at the back and mime”, or “you’re not good enough to be in the choir”. But us Natural Voice Practitioners still get people coming to us who were thoroughly put off by their experience of music teaching in schools.

It could be argued that singing in a group is just not cool enough for young people once they’ve left school. But what about all the role models in pop music of boy and girl bands singing in close harmony? And how come that when people do eventually come back to singing, they say how much they’ve missed it?

Answers please, on a postcard to …

As always I value your comments, but I know that some people don’t really know how to post a comment here, so I’ll outline the process here.

Depending on how you’ve landed at my blog, at the end of each weekly post you may see a line that looks something like:

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(or possibly an underlined link that says Post a Comment)

Simply click on the word “comment” and you will be taken to a page where you can post a comment. Type your response in the box. When you have finished, you can choose one of three identities: 1. Google/ Blogger (if you have a Google or Blogger account, you can login and use your username), 2. Other (if you want to sign your post you can optionally put a name here and possibly your website address – it’s always nice to know who’s saying what!), 3. Anonymous (just post the comment and nobody need know who you are!). When you’ve selected your option, you can Preview your comment to see what it will look like, then Publish your comment so it will appear on my blog website. That’s all there is to it!

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When and why do we stop singing?

The average age of people who attend the choirs and workshops that I run must be in the mid-40s. I would say that about a third of any group is of retirement age, and the majority of the rest are in their late 30s/ early 40s. Most of these people sang at school.

There were always plenty of opportunities (certainly in my early school days in the 1950s): morning assembly, “music & movement” on the radio, the school choir (especially at Christmas), cubs and scouts, local church choir. I sang in all of these regularly. I even persuaded my Mum to go to my primary school and complain when I didn’t get into the school choir! They relented (my Mum is a force to reckon with) and I joined.

When I was about 15 or 16 I started a band with my mates and we sang lots of Beatles songs. I distinctly remember sitting in the garden on the swing singing along with “I wanna hold your hand” on the radio when it first came out. I loved singing and used to harmonise automatically with all the pop songs on TV (“Juke Box Jury”, “6-5 Special”) and radio. So it’s not as if there weren’t any role models for adolescents.

Then it all stopped and I didn’t really come back to singing until I was working in theatre in the early 1990s. They say it’s often because boys’ voices break and during that embarrassing transition they find something else to do. But I have heard similar stories from many women who join choirs or come to my singing workshops. Only this weekend at an open workshop a woman came up to thank me and said it’s the first time she’d sung for 50 years!

These people obviously love singing, but have let it lie dormant for such a long period. There is clearly a strong desire to re-connect with their singing voice as it’s quite a brave thing to walk into an open workshop when you’ve not sung for such a long time. I often wonder what has compelled that person to come back to singing at that specific moment. After 50 years, why now? Why this particular weekend?

Many people who come back to singing were put off in some way when they were kids: “stand at the back and mime”, “will you stop that awful racket!”, “you can’t be in the choir, you’re not good enough”. We have such a personal relationship with our voices that this can cause a huge set-back and put people off singing for a long time. But the desire must still be there to express ourselves through our voices otherwise people wouldn’t come back to singing in their later life.

One approach is to “catch ‘em young”. The theory being that if we turn kids onto singing and music, then it’s a lifelong bug that will stay with them. But clearly it’s not as simple as that. Next week I’ll talk a bit about the government’s new school singing initiative and why I feel that it’s misguided (Children and special interest groups first).

In the meantime, if you came back to singing later in life, perhaps you’d like to let us know your story. Why did you stop singing from when you were a kid?

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Vive la différence!

I currently run three singing groups: Minor Chords (12 women); WorldSong (around 60 singers, of whom about a dozen are men); and Woven Chords (over 80 singers with only around nine basses!). I therefore have to think quite carefully when choosing which songs to do with which group. It’s great to be able to do big, lush arrangements with the 80-piece choir, but it’s just as wonderful to be able to do more subtle, quieter material with just 12 voices or less.

This is made very difficult however when I run a one-day singing workshop as I usually have no idea how many people will turn up, nor what the male/ female mix will be. I usually assume that we won’t have many blokes, so always adapt the “tenor” line so women can sing it. However, at one workshop a couple of years ago about half the group (20 or so) turned out to be men! I had some quick re-arranging to do.

What I have found really surprising though is the difference in “flavour” of the community choirs I have run. When I used to lead Global Harmony in Melton Mowbray, I then had three mixed community choirs of roughly the same size and composition. They were all founded on the same principles (i.e. that anyone can join regardless of experience), covered the same sort of repertoire, and met for the same amount of time each week. And yet each choir had its own distinct “personality” and dynamics. Some songs would work really well with one choir, but not with another. One choir might be able to cope with a tricky rhythm or harmony, yet another choir (which perhaps had been going for longer) would find it just too difficult. Over time I started to realise which songs would appeal to which choir. So when I am sourcing material, it is usually quite obvious which choir I will teach a particular song to – regardless of mix of voices or size, just because that choir will appreciate it and enjoy it more. Some songs which have just not worked with one choir, will come alive with another.

Why is this? How come two groups of adults formed in exactly the same way can end up having such a different group personality? The only difference being the geographical location! The gender and age mix of each choir is very similar; the tastes of the singers is similar (i.e. they’re all attracted to the kind of repertoire that I offer); everyone enjoys the way that I teach and is now very much used to it; there is the same mix of members who have been with the choir for some time together with people who have joined this term. So why the difference?

Can the demographic of a town account for such a different group dynamic? Or is it that a very small group of individuals can have a big effect on a large group?

I remember once doing a theatre show which was very funny (all audiences so far had laughed a lot each time we’d performed the show), yet one night we got hardly a titter. There must have been about 40 people in the (capacity) audience (it was a very small venue!), yet hardly any audible laughs. When we talked to some friends about it afterwards, they said that although they had found it very funny, they had felt that the atmosphere in the room somehow meant that they couldn’t laugh out loud. Similarly, when we played to around 120 people at our Stamford Christmas concert last year, we walked on stage to complete silence! Not a single person clapped. It was as if they had all discussed it beforehand and come to an agreement.

I find group dynamics endlessly fascinating. It may be that when I tried to blame it on the weather in last week’s post, it was simply the group dynamic having a strong effect on one particular evening. I wonder how many individuals it takes to affect a large group? Can one person influence a whole choir or does it need a small group?

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Blame it on the weather

Sometimes we’re just out of tune. All of us. Whether it’s six, or sixteen or sixty singers, sometimes everyone is out of tune. They’re out of tune with each other, the harmonies just aren’t working, the pitch is dropping dreadfully – it just isn’t working.

Now if this were just one or two people then OK, perhaps they’re having an off day or are tired or had a difficult day at work. But the whole group??!! What’s going on here? A few out of tune voices might have a slight knock-on effect to those around them, but how come the whole team is off key? This doesn’t happen often, but it’s happened enough times for me to realise that it’s a recognisable phenomenon. There is nothing one can do about it (I’ve tried!). So I just blame it on the weather. It’s not the singers’ fault, it’s something outside them that’s affecting the whole room. Maybe it’s the full moon, or we’re in a high pressure area, or the humidity’s low – whatever it is, it’s nothing to do with us.

This is very different from those rehearsals where things seem to be going wrong, but it’s just a case of a bit of a pep talk, a heightening of focus and attention, or simply running the song again and everything's back on track. This we can fix. In those cases we get back in tune OK. But not on bad weather days.

It’s happened enough times now for me to just point it out and try to get everyone to accept the situation. “It’s just one of those nights! Next week will be fine” At first it really spooked me. We had such a good session the previous week and now it’s all going pear-shaped. It must be my fault, I’m not teaching very well or maybe I should be doing something different. Then I remembered my days as a runner.

I used to be a long-distance runner, culminating in a half-marathon before I had to give it all up (don’t ask!). Most nights I would go out jogging for a good few miles come rain or shine. Many times I’d get back home on a real runner’s high. No matter how wretched or tired I felt when I set off, I’d come back glowing and full of energy. The next night I’d set off perhaps feeling a bit low but knowing that at the end of it I’d feel great. Only sometimes I didn’t! I began to realise that how I felt at the end of my run was kind of random. Many times I’d feel good, but sometimes I’d feel lousy. If I tried to hang onto the memories and feelings of the last good run and expect to come back feeling wonderful, I’d only get doubly disappointed. So I learnt to have no expectations. What happened would happen, despite me.

I think this is what Zen calls beginner’s mind. The idea that each time you do something, no matter how many times you’ve done it before, you approach it as if it were the first time. This also connects with my time as an actor. I used to do a lot of improvisation and at first would try to repeat the things that went well the last time. But of course it’s never as good or as spontaneous the second time round. So I learnt to approach each improvisation as if it were the first time (which of course it was!).

This can be applied not only to “bad weather” sessions, but also to warm-ups and performances. I try to vary the warm-ups and vocal training each week, but inevitably (and usefully) we often repeat the same exercises. There are two ways of dealing with this: either you can just go through the motions because you’ve done it loads of times before and you just want to get through it to get onto the singing (the fun part!), or you can have a beginner’s mind and approach the exercise as if you have never done it before. You may then discover new things about how your body and voice work, you will stay engaged and fascinated, and you will benefit from the warm-up much more.

Similarly, when a concert comes along, you can try to re-create the wonderful performance that you had the last time, or you can behave as if you have never done this before, be totally in the moment, and move into the unknown, learning, wondering and developing as you go.

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Singing from the same hymn sheet

I’m not a religious man myself, but I happened to spend Passover with a Jewish family last week. I also ran a workshop entitled Sacred Songs to Soothe the Soul (and they say the devil has all the best tunes!). And this weekend it’s Easter, a time (along with Christmas) when many non-churchgoers go to church. What unites these seemingly disparate events is song. An important part of the Passover Seder (the ritual feast which takes place on the eve of Passover) are the traditional songs. Every Jewish family will have learnt these as part of growing up. Similarly, most people brought up as Christians, even though they don’t attend church regularly, will know many of the familiar hymns. So, as well as being religious events, Easter and Passover are two examples of several cultural occasions where people come together to sing songs that they have in common.

What was interesting at my first Passover Seder was that when the rituals had ended there was a desire to continue singing. However, once the few Hebrew and Yiddish songs that everyone knew had been exhausted, it became increasingly difficult to find songs that everybody knew. Gradually the songs moved back into childhood: simple rounds, clapping games, playground songs, and finally theme tunes from children’s TV programmes, until eventually the whole enterprise fizzled out.

I’m sure it would have been the same after church on Easter Sunday. Even if people wanted to continue to sing, they would find it difficult (after they’d all sung Robbie Williams’ Angels and then perhaps Roll out the barrel) to find songs in common. The desire is there, the willingness to join in and let the voice loose. The feeling of community and shared endeavour carries over from the hymn singing, but doesn’t last because we simply have so few songs in common other than those in a religious context. I suppose the nearest equivalent in our increasingly secular society are the sing-alongs during rock and pop concerts and festivals where everyone there knows the lyrics and tune.

Many people look back to the good old days when we all used to gather round a piano and just sing for hours, or all join in a good sing-song down the local pub. I do think this might be a bit of romantic wishful thinking though. I have a book called “Daily Express” community song book which came out of the Daily Express’s Community Singing Movement launched at the Royal Albert Hall in November 1926. This movement seems to have been an attempt to get people singing together again. The News Chronicle Song Book was a similar venture published around the same time. At the very least it shows that even then there was a desire for people to learn the same songs in order to sing them together in community settings. The implication being that the singing of songs together had started to die out.

It was this joy of singing together that prompted me to start my first choir back in 1997. I would often try to start a sing-along whenever a group of like-minded people gathered, but inevitably we would have no songs in common or would only know the words for the first few lines. So I thought I would start a group and teach some songs so at least we’d have a bunch to call on whenever we were down the pub or fancied a good sing. It did take some while however before the first time we just burst into song in a pub without the need for lyric sheets or starting notes! Things are getting a lot better now, and there is even a short list of songs known by an increasing number of community choirs across the country. So wherever we go in the UK and come across another choir, there’s a very good chance we’ll have at least one song in common that doesn’t need an associated religious ceremony!

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Quiet at the back please!

I find it hard to believe, but I started my choir WorldSong way back in October 1997, so this is our tenth year of operation! We are planning several events this year to celebrate our 10^th anniversary.

photo by Foxtongue

One of these involves a song commissioned especially for the choir.

We thought it would be great to try something really different, so we have commissioned Klaus Santas, a well-known choral composer based in London, to write us an extended choral piece that is possible to learn without written music. Santas studied with John Cage in Frankfurt in the 1980s, and has composed several operas which are regularly performed in his native Paraguay.

We are very excited by this new piece written in German and Spanish which we have recently started working on. The main difference for us is that we will be singing mainly without using our voices. This presents particular challenges to a community choir who usually express themselves vocally. Another added difficulty is maintaining a strict tempo whilst remaining completely silent. I have spent quite a lot of time developing particular warm-up exercises to help people keep time with each other by counting in their heads. At first it was almost impossible, but I’ve found that by engaging the body the choir are becoming tighter and more accurate by the week.

The new piece, entitled RUHE, is in three “movements”, each in a different key and each at a very different tempo. All three sections are in four part harmony, so there is quite a lot of new material to learn! Given that there is no actual noise coming out of the singers mouths, it is proving to be very difficult to pitch the harmonies accurately, even though they are fairly traditional major keys.

One final challenge for us is the length of the piece: 4 hours and 33 minutes. We are hoping to premiere it at our grand summer concert in Coventry, but are slightly worried that we won’t be able to fit enough other songs in to make for a varied evening of entertainment.

If you are interested in receiving a score of this piece so you can sing it with your own community choir, one will be available after our concert in July. In the meantime, listen out for sound clips on our website.

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

How was it for you?

Our annual “at home” spring concert was a week ago at Stamford Arts Centre in a beautiful Georgian (that’s King George to you, not Republic of .. or the southern states!) ballroom which has featured in many a filmed costume drama. Beautiful surroundings complete with chandeliers and a wonderful acoustic. However, we have become victims of our own success and our almost 80-voice choir (of whom at least 60 turn up for any given concert) doesn’t fit on the stage any more! So we decided to do the concert sideways on along the long side of the very long and thin ballroom. This meant that we could stand in three rows, but the audience were only about four deep and very wide. The other unfortunate side effect was that there were no stage lights so we had to have the house lights on which meant that the choir could see the whites of the audience’s eyes! A scary prospect indeed. But we pulled it off and everyone had a great time.

Except me.

Well, that’s not strictly true, I did have a really good time, but not a great time. Of course, in the end, it doesn’t matter whether I have a good time or not. As long as the choir enjoy themselves and the audience has a good evening out and our standards remain high, it is of no consequence what I am feeling. It is strange though how unpredictable my experience is. I have had absolutely amazing, fantastic gigs where we’ve all been firing on all cylinders, the audience have been fantastic and everyone has had a great time. It is unpredictable though.

Which reminds me of my days as a performer on the stranger fringes of the theatre world. I could be totally prepared and really looking forward to a show, only to have a really bad time and end up feeling that the show had been rubbish that night. Yet afterwards in the bar audience members would tell me how fantastic it was, other cast members would say they thought it was one of our best shows. Then the other way round: I could feel that I was really flying, had never performed better, the connection between the performers would be electric, we’d never done the show so well, it was a triumph!! Only to come off stage to find a relatively empty bar, a lukewarm audience reception and fellow cast members drowning their sorrows in their beer and vowing to give up acting immediately.

It’s not so simple then. Even performers in exactly the same show can have completely different experiences. So I came to the conclusion that it is actually irrelevant how you feel about a performance. All you can do is be prepared and do your best, then it is simply up to the audience to take it or leave it.

As far as singing concerts go, there are several other factors involved. We always rehearse on the afternoon of the concert, so maybe I’m just too tired to enjoy the evening as fully as I might. Sometimes we have a cracking rehearsal, everyone’s relaxed, we have a bit of a laugh and the singing is wonderful. But come the evening and the nerves kick in (and they can see the audience in all their glory!) and perhaps the songs are not quite as good as they had been that afternoon. That just goes to show that we shouldn’t have expectations: be in the moment, the show will be what the show will be.

Then there’s the audience. As a performer (and now a conductor) I am badly affected by an audience’s response. We all want to be loved by the audience, we want to please them, we want them to think we’re the best thing they’ve ever heard, we want to see happy smiling faces lapping up every moment. And oftentimes that is what happens, but there will always be the few audience members who are looking a bit tired or bored or both (even though they may be having the time of their life) and they are the only audience members I see and I start to think “They’re not enjoying it. They don’t like me. I’m not doing very well. I should give up and buy a shop”. Then I start to doubt myself and perhaps the next song is a bit wobbly because I’ve taken my eye off the ball, which then spooks me a bit, which then means I might make a bigger mistake in the next song and so on. And all because perhaps a single audience member is not smiling enough! How shallow can you get??!!

After the concert last week lots of the choir mentioned how smiley the audience had been. I was beginning to wonder whether we had been playing to the same audience when I realised that the choir see a different audience to the one that I do. Why hadn’t I realised this before! When we are singing and the audience is smiling and enjoying themselves, I have my back to them and simply don’t see. Then when I turn round to announce the next song (or engage them with some so-called witty banter) they become serious because they’re concentrating and listening intently to what I’m telling them about some obscure Eastern European song about a red fez or handkerchief in a puddle. So I’ve decided to commission a pair of wing mirrors like the ones the moods used to have on their scooters. I’ll put one on each shoulder, then whilst I’m conducting I can glance in the mirror to see the rapturous, smiling faces of the audience have the best time of their life!

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