How's Your Choir Community? - Part 2

Hello friends!

Last week we started the process of assessing our Choir Community by taking a little audit and observing our community in action. Did you have any insights? This can be an interesting experience to sit back a little, and just notice what is actually happening.

This week, we’ll go through the next steps you can take to ensure that your Choir Community is actually supporting the music you’re making, and the connections you want to build.

Step 2: Ask for more input.

This is where we can start to dig a little deeper. Now that you have your own observations, you could bring them to others in the organization to get their thoughts. This doesn’t have to be anything formal, although it could be! Just simply chatting with folks during breaks, or before/after rehearsals can often elicit great insights. Or small group discussions, or chart paper on the walls with post it notes…whatever feels right for your choir.

1. Check in with your new members: What did they expect to find when they joined, and has it met their expectations? Do they feel welcomed and supported?

2. Check in with your old timers: Have things changed? What used to work? What didn’t work before? What do you miss?

3. Ask everyone: What do you think of the community here? Do you have any ideas for what we could do?

Which leads us to…

Step 3: Take action.

You’ve got all the information, so now: Do something! It can be small, or big, but probably best to start small. Here are some ideas that have worked for me, and some that I haven’t tried yet. They range from very easy to more complicated.

Take a few minutes out of your warmup time to encourage conversation.

• Introduce yourself to the people next to you — even if you think you know their name, double check!

• Pose a guiding question to help them break the ice: “Find out the best thing the person next to you has eaten recently. Find out their favourite song.”

• If the group is smaller, you could do this with the whole choir! At the beginning of our monthly Winnipeg Upper Voices rehearsals, one member would pose a question to us all, and we’d go around the circle, introduce ourselves, and answer the question.

• What’s your favourite candy/food/piece of clothing/etc, etc. We learned some really interesting things through those questions!

If it’s possible, organize snacks for break or after rehearsal once a month.

• Assign one section to bring food each month (Sopranos for September, Altos October, Tenors November, Basses December)

• Encourage everyone to stay for some casual fellowship. (Food is a great connection tool!)

If you want to go bigger, perhaps organize a potluck meal!

• This can take a few forms: just appetizers or just desserts, up to a full-blown feast.

• Check out this spread from a recent potluck I attended! I have been to innumerable choir potlucks in my life, but this was something else!

• This particular meal included choir members performing songs, poems, jokes, and readings as entertainment. Everyone brought their own plate and cutlery to reduce the clean up load. It was joyful!

Do a simple mental health check-in with singers by asking them to show their level of mental health/energy by holding up fingers 1-5 (1 being “feeling not good at all,” 5 being “feeling great”), without judgement or the need to justify.

• While keeping their hands up, encourage everyone to look around to see how the general mood of the choir is that day. If I am a 5, but the people around me are 2s and 3s, perhaps I can be gentler and hold them in my good energy.

• As a conductor, if I see that the spirit of the group is flagging that day, I might adjust my rehearsal.

• Choir should be a place that lifts us when we’re having a challenging day, not presses us down.

If you’ve noticed that folks are on their phones more than connecting to each other, would it be good to go phone-free at break?

• We did this in my first year with Winnipeg Upper Voices to great success!

• If you needed to check your phone, you excused yourself to the side of the room, did your business, then came back to engage with others.

Setting up a way to connect outside of your regular meetings is helpful!

• I’ve used Discord, but there could be other platforms that are similar. Even creating a group chat on a messaging platform can be a great way to connect.

• This is one area that I’m still improving on. As the conductor, I need to lead by example, and engage more with the hope that others will follow my lead.

• This could lead to groups attending concerts together, or board game nights, or picnics – the sky’s the limit!

What other ideas for connection and community building would you add to this list? What ideas do your members come up with? Not every idea will work for every group, but it usually can’t hurt to try something!

Taking the time to intentionally connect with each other is so important. I attended a workshop where the leader was talking about including time for connection in their rehearsals (of their professional ensemble), and someone asked, “How can you spare the time for this?” Her response was, “How could you not?”

The benefits outweigh the costs, and I’ll keep shouting it from the rooftops: Good Community = Good Music = Good Community = Good Music!

How's Your Choir Community? - Part 1

Hello friends! How is your Choir Community these days? Have you thought about it recently? Or ever?

Every choir - big, small, professional, community, church, school - has a unique Community within and around it, and it’s vital to pay attention to it. I think that having a strong sense of community helps choirs thrive and sing better together.

Your Choir’s Community consists of…

• Singers and conductors - of course!

• Pianists and other instrumentalists - of course!

• Administrators and board members - of course!

• Family members of singers - who are the support networks behind our singers?

• Audience members - it’s wonderful to share music with others!

• Other members of the specific community the choir represents - do we want to connect to them?

• Social media followers - do we include them? Should we?

This is a non-exhaustive list, and there may be some you disagree with, or others you’d add. But each of these groups play a different role in the life and vibrancy of your choir’s community, and I think it’s important to consider how far your Choir Community extends.

What happens when we ignore the Choir Community? What happens when our priorities are imbalanced? What if your Choir Community prioritizes audience size, or income, or prestige, over the ties that bind our people?

I think that we lose touch with why we do this at all. We lose the spark that makes the music come alive. I have seen this happen, especially in professional ensembles where the motivation for being in the room or ensemble isn’t purely about connection. And yet, that also means the music-making suffers. The music is better when the community is strong.

Let’s begin!

Step 1: Do a little audit of your Choir Community.

For the moment, we’ll stay pretty singer-focussed, but that’s where we need to start since it’s the foundation for everything else. What can you observe about the community within your rehearsals? See what it’s like over the next couple weeks of rehearsals, without judgement.

Here are some questions to get you started as you think about your choir:

• Do people stick around to chat after rehearsal, or do they pack up and go quickly without much interaction?

• Do you have name tags? Are people still wearing them, even halfway into the season?

• Do you have specific time for connection? Breaks, meals, snack, etc.

• What are people doing during breaks? Talking to each other? On their phones?

• Do you have a way for people to connect with each other outside of rehearsals? Messaging apps, social media, contact lists, etc.

• Have you had any new members since the ‘official start’ of the season? Has anyone checked in with them?

• Do you have a way to connect people with carpooling or rides?

When you start to look at what is actually happening in the rehearsal room, it could be surprising. Even just writing this, I’m realizing there might be some work to do in my own choirs.

Next week, we’ll continue with this topic, and look at some next steps you can take with your Choir Community. For now, this is a good start!

1. Consider who is in your Choir Community.

2. Observe and start to think about what is actually happening in that Community.

There are Infinite Choir Pies!

In May 2022 at Choral Canada’s national conference, Podium, I had breakfast with a wonderful group of conductors from across Canada who conduct women’s choirs.

As we went around the table introducing ourselves and our choirs, I was the first to make the distinction that I don’t conduct a women’s choir. The choir for sopranos and altos that I founded in 2019 is called Winnipeg Upper Voices. It was a very intentional choice to not call this group a ‘women’s choir,’ because it is explicitly not just for women. The choir welcomes all people who sing in the soprano/alto range, regardless of their gender identity.

As I expected, this brought up quite a lot of conversation in the group about the language that we use, and why/why not some choirs are having conversations about their names, their mission, and their members. It was interesting to hear all the different viewpoints, and how each group has approached the subject, or if they had ever considered it.

Sometimes when this kind of conversation comes up, there can be defensiveness: “Women’s choirs are important places for connection and community and sisterhood. How can we just throw that away?”

I believe this kind of thinking is fairly narrowminded. As the title of this post states, there are infinite choir pies available in the world. There is space - and need - for all kinds of choirs.

There is absolutely a place for the kind of community that women’s choirs, or men’s choirs, create and provide. But by their nature, they are exclusive. If someone doesn’t fit the expected gender to join, then they won’t have a choir to sing in.

New ensembles, like my Winnipeg Upper Voices, aren’t trying to do away with women’s or men’s choirs that are thriving and are important communities. Instead, we want to expand the choir world so that we make space for all singers who are looking for the wonderful community that singing together provides.

If starting a women’s choir or a men’s choir is your calling, and what your community needs, then please start that choir! If your community needs a choir that defines itself in other ways, then please make that happen!

We can always have more pie, and we can always have more choir.

Who do you sing for?

We often explore why we sing (in choir, or at all), but not so often do we think about who we sing for. Is it as important as the why?

Perhaps we need to make sure our who aligns with our why.

Do you sing for others? An audience, your family, passersby, the birds?

Do you sing for yourself? Your body, your cells, your lungs?

Do you sing for me?

Do you sing for the universe?

Tell me, who do you sing for?

Why does it matter what words I use?

We started a new piece with my community choir this month, and the edition we’re using has certain entrances labelled “all women” or “all men,” when what is actually intended (and shown by the staves/clefs) is “all sopranos and altos” or “all tenors and basses.”

I took a moment in the first rehearsal to clarify that wherever it says “all women,” I would like all sopranos and altos to sing, and that where it says “all men,” it should be all tenors and basses.

“But Katy,” I hear you say, “they mean the same thing! And isn’t it just faster to say ‘men’ instead of ‘tenors and basses’?”

And to that I reply, “They don’t mean the same thing. And if taking the time to say 5 syllables of ‘tenors and basses’ bothers you, perhaps you need to look at your rehearsal time management...”

But seriously: the language you use in rehearsal, matters. The language we put on our published scores, matters.

What do I mean when I say that they aren’t the same? Your voice on its own is inherently ungendered. A voice is just a voice, and the way it sounds has everything to do with your physiology and the shape of your vocal folds/larynx, and nothing to do with your gender.

Society has placed the signifiers on voices that ties the way they sound to particular genders, but we don’t have to go along with that. In fact, many people don’t. There are people in your choir who may have diverse genders, whose identity doesn’t ‘match’ what our society expects based on the way they look or the way their voice sounds.

And we, as conductors, may never know about them. We may look at our bass section and see “men,” or at our altos and see “women,” when in reality, there could be any number of gender identities present. Gender identity is extraordinarily personal and each person decides for themselves what their gender identity is. By lumping our sections by “men” and “women,” we remove the agency of our singers to decide their own identity.

Using the correct name of the sections you are referencing is just more accurate and precise, no matter how you look at it. There will never be confusion or hurt in asking all sopranos to sing, or all tenors. We strive to use precise and factual language elsewhere in our rehearsals for clarity, and it is no different when using the names of voice parts instead of genders.

It may seem insignificant, but even small things add up - for better or worse. And if we want our choirs to be safe, inclusive places, then we must shift our language to match.

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For a more in-depth (but still approachable) look at the role that language plays in choir, especially as it relates to gender, read this blog post on Chorus Connections: Understanding the Linguistic Nuances of Gender Identity in the Choral Ensemble by Melanie Stapleton.

A short list...

... of what I’ve (re)learned about choir over the past couple years:

1. people first, perfection later (or never)

2. only do music you like (sing, conduct, listen, etc)

3. do music by folks who are alive

4. this is the right path: keep going

5. you are not alone – reach out, reach out, reach out

6. this is important, don’t take it for granted

A thank you card made for me by a choir member - people first, people first, people first.

A Love Letter

Dear Final Chords in Renaissance Polyphonic Choral Music,

I love you. There, I said it.

It is so satisfying to sing through a piece and reach you, Final Chord. All the busyness and complexity of the piece dissolves into stillness, and you settle in perfection.

As an alto, I am often the one who gets to fill in the third of the chord – a powerful and beautiful position! But I can’t do it alone. It only really works when the fifths around me are perfectly tuned and I can fit my note, just-so.

I love that, after years of singing this music, I don’t have to work hard when I get to you, Final Chord. I trust my ears, my instincts, and my voice. I trust the composer and the people around me, and just sing.

Love, Katy

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Here are a couple pieces if you would like to fill your ears with polyphony, and enjoy hearing some Final Chords:

Pigeonholes

Pigeons-in-holes.jpg by en:User:BenFrantzDale; CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’ve been thinking lately about pigeonholing.

Pigeonholes were, originally, exactly what the word implies: nesting spots for pigeons. It also means small compartments in furniture, especially where you sort things (letters, files, etc).

And, as a verb, it means “to assign to a definite place; to put aside for the present, especially with the intention of ignoring or forgetting, often indefinitely” (dictionary.com).**

This is where, I think, we can get stuck in creative lives: we sort ourselves into a pigeonhole, and then never leave it. This is an especially dangerous practice for musicians, artists, and any creative folks.

We make grand proclamations: “I am a conductor!” (pianist, early music singer, jazz saxaphonist, ballroom dancer, watercolour painter, etc), and then we never leave our pigeonhole. We get comfy, make our nest, and believe that’s that.

Sometimes we do a reverse-pigeonholing with our proclamations: “I’m not a composer!” with exactly the same results.

But this isn’t a good way to live as an artist, or as anyone out in the world. To pigeonhole ourselves is to blind ourselves to other possibilities, expanded identities, and new pathways.

What pigeonholes have you created for yourself? Can you (gently) question them and explore something new?

To that end, here is something I composed! I am looking out of my “I’m not a composer” pigeonhole to see what else there might be for me to do and try.

**Incidentally, there is something called the Pigeonhole Principle in mathematics, which has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, but is quite interesting!

Singing Ourselves into Courage

Over the past month or so, Canadians have been dealing with noise: some with the literal, terrible noise of truck horns and protestors yelling, and the rest of us with the noise of the online arguments, the media, the videos and podcasts and vitriol. It is exhausting on top of everything else that is exhausting.

The tactic of using trucks (and their horns) for this protest is smart political theatre. It is hard to ignore such a large presence, and it makes the protestors take up a lot of space and air, even if there aren’t very many actual people. For better or worse, we can’t turn away from it.

I’m not here to get into the whys or why nots of these protests, but I do want to shine the spotlight on another way of doing things, one that is unexpected: singing together.

I’m reading John Green’s book The Anthropocene Reviewed: essays on a human-centered planet. In it, he has an essay about the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein show Carousel. The song has been adopted by fans of the Liverpool football team, and they’ll sing it together in celebration of a win, and in communal grief over a loss.

Green points out that:

These songs are made great by the communities singing them. They are assertions of unity in sorry and unity in triumph…Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage. (12)

This brought to mind the Singing Revolution in Estonia in 1987-1991, where Estonians literally sang their way to independence from Soviet occupation. They gathered in large numbers, joined hands, and sang their traditional folk songs that had been banned for decades by the Soviets. There was nothing the Soviets could do against tens of thousands of people peacefully singing together, and it was a major factor in the Soviets’ retreat from Estonia. Similar peaceful/singing revolutions happened in Lithuania and Latvia.

The Estonians sang songs of freedom, of love for their country, of peace. Singing together brought them courage, and power. If you have never heard of the Singing Revolution, watch this trailer from a documentary about it that gives the smallest taste.

In 1989, an estimated 2,000,000 people from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia joined hands and formed a human chain. The Baltic Way, stretched 675km across all three countries, connecting the capital cities. The people in the chain held their place and sang their songs in direct defiance of the Soviets. How powerful, to hold hands and sing together.

Estonians still gather every five years for the Laulupidu, the national song festival: 30,000 people on stage, with another 80,000 people watching (and singing along, I’m sure). Together, they sing the songs that they know brought their freedom and independence.

I get chills just thinking about it. Trucks are loud. But maybe voices singing together can be louder.

What do we wear?

A question was recently asked on Facebook about how to word choir dress codes to be inclusive of all choir members, regardless of gender. The question-asker indicated that there are some non-binary and/or transgender singers in the ensemble, which has prompted a re-consideration of the policies.

Changing something that is historically very gendered into something more neutral is a great shift towards being actively inclusive. Because even if you aren’t aware of gender-diverse folks in your organization, it’s highly likely that they are there! And so, making these changes will only benefit everyone in your ensemble.

But first, some tough love: This work should only be done if you are truly ready to be accepting of everyone, and have done the self-reflection beforehand.

For example, if someone you assumed to be a man, because they sing in your bass section and have never corrected your assumption, showed up in a more typically feminine outfit, how would you feel? Be honest with yourself here. Would it be a ‘big deal’? Would you be supportive? Would you be concerned about the reaction of your audience? Would you be worried about the ‘image’ of the choir? Would you know how to handle it if someone commented negatively about it to you?

In addition to preparing yourself, you must also prepare the choir. Include language in the dress code that explicitly states its inclusivity, and have a conversation about it to ensure that everyone understands, accepts, and upholds that the choir is a safe place for people of all genders – and gender expressions.

All that being said, here is something you could put in your policy that is explicitly inclusive. Please feel free to copy and paste, if it is helpful for you!

This dress code is not tied to voice parts, and all gender expressions are welcome. I want you to be comfortable in your performance outfit so that you can focus on singing your best.

And then list the guidelines, keeping the focus on the pieces of clothing, rather than the person who might wear it. Again, here is a hypothetical dress code that you can adapt to your situation.

All clothing should be clean, pressed, and semi-formal black. Ensure you can sing, take a full bow, and stand comfortably for the whole concert.

Tops: sleeves at least 3/4 length. Bottoms: floor length pants/dress/skirt, and not leggings. Jackets/blazers: optional, but welcome. Jewellery/ties/bowties: optional, but welcome. Shoes/socks/tights/belt must be black.

This does bring up a whole other argument of whether we need overly prescriptive dress codes for choir. In my example above, I could potentially stop after the first two sentences. But that is for another day.

In the end, just as with other examples of outward inclusivity, the changes should be done without major fanfare and without being overly notable. For many people, the shift in language in your dress code won’t change a thing for them — they will wear what they have always worn.

But for some members, and for new people coming into the choir, it might mean they (finally) feel safe to wear something more comfortable and more aligned with who they are – and that is immeasurably good.