When can we have choir again?

Snapshot of some comments on a survey to choir members.

“When can we have choir again?”

I am asked this question frequently these days. I find it a stressful one, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Do I want to have everyone back together to sing? Of course I do. But I also can’t be reckless with peoples’ health and safety. There are so many factors and considerations that go far beyond “I miss choir, so let’s get back to it.”

I want to be cautious, but at what point am I being too cautious?

Am I overcorrecting my own impatience?

Am I using the crutch of “let’s wait and see what happens” to justify my own discomfort about trying to balance and mitigate all the various risks and comfort levels of my singers?

If I’m honest, I am scared of making the wrong choice – whether that choice is to start up or to wait.

This pandemic isn’t over, and it isn’t going away anytime soon. But, as it has always done, all it gives us is more questions and no answers.

Rethinking "Blend"

A rarely talked about facet of inclusiveness in choir is: blend.

In the European/British classical choral tradition, conductors work hard to ensure that there is a perfect blend, to smooth out all the voices and make it sound as though they are one. But at what cost? By implying that everyone needs to sound the same, what do we lose?

If we want to be truly inclusive in choir, we should be asking for our singers to sing with their full, true voice.

This is a bit of a radical idea to me, because “of course choir is an inclusive place!” But how can it be if, even after we do all the right things to welcome someone as they are, we still ask them to modify an integral part of themselves - their voice - to fit an outdated aesthetic.

Now, I’m not suggesting that we don’t strive for a unified sound. But I believe there are ways to achieve this and still honour every unique voice.

Voice matching. This is going to have to be a whole entry on its own, but the magic of voice matching within a choir cannot be understated. Sonically, some voices fit well together, and some fight with each other. By taking the time to find the right combination and order of voices in a seating plan, we are making the choir fit the singers instead of the other way around. Voice matching allows us to find a place for every voice, based on each person’s unique sound. Once they are in the right place, they can sing more freely, and the choir sounds better - it hasn’t failed me yet!

Repertoire. Just like voice matching, choose pieces that fit the singers instead of the other way around. Listen to the voices that are in the choir, and make the music work for them.

Vowels. A unified sound is as much about vowel shape (and diction, generally) as it is anything else. There is an important distinction between asking someone to modify their vowel (i.e. articulators and resonance), and asking someone to modify their voice (i.e. “sing with straight tone”). A choir with unified vowels will have a more unified sound.

Listening. One of my favourite phrases about listening in choir is: “Sing into each other’s sound.” In other words, listen to the people beside and around, and hear how your voices can fit together. Importantly, this isn’t about merging. It is about singing with awareness towards a common goal.

Once we banish the word “blend” from rehearsals, and choir members see, feel, and hear that their unique and authentic voice is welcome and encouraged in choir, only then can we say that the choir is truly inclusive.

I am grateful to Knox Sutterfield, a New York City-based conductor and singer with the Inspire: A Choir for Unity organization, for bringing this idea to me and giving me something to think about.

Thoughts from the Greenhouse

Broccoli seedlings, happy in their bigger homes!

This week at the farm, we are transplanting seedlings into bigger pots so they get stronger in the greenhouse before we put them in the ground. It got me thinking about life, and creative life especially.

When we transplant the seedlings, we give them new and better nutrients, their roots have more room to spread, and they thrive very quickly. At first, they look too small in their new home and they flop over because of the shock of the change. But after a day, some water, and some sun, they stand right up, ready to grow!

Think about your life and your creative practices. Do you need ‘transplanting’ so you can stretch your roots and grow? How about some new ‘nutrients’? Are you giving yourself enough ‘water’ and ‘sun’ and taking care of yourself?

The metaphor can only take us so far, I suppose. But it’s worth looking at how you might be limiting yourself, what you wish you had more of in your life, and whether you are looking after yourself in ways that are good for you.

This isn’t about taking a huge leap from a little starter pot into a giant planter. Just the next size up.

Maybe it means that you take the next tiny step towards that dream you’ve always had - or you allow yourself to even consider it at all. Or you unsubscribe from the news on social media and go to bed earlier. Or you stand in the sun and breathe for a minute or two.

For me, the nutrients I want to add in my life are adventure, curiosity, and trust. I’m looking after myself by going outside every day, playing piano, and drinking good tea with milk - simple things that nurture me. These days, I feel like a newly transplanted seedling, ready to grow!

What do you think? Are your roots feeling a little cramped? Or are you in a new and bigger pot, and feeling a bit shocked? What’s one small thing you can do today to help yourself grow?

We Are Designers!

My friend and colleague, Geung Kroeker-Lee, has a passion for urban design. He believes that “our environment can/should inspire us, and shape our behaviour.”

This belief spills over into his musical life. He recently gave a presentation to choral colleagues, where he presented this definition of a healthy community from the Canadian Institute of Planners’ Policy on Healthy Communities Planning:

... a healthy community is defined as “a place where healthy built, social, economic, and natural environments give citizens the opportunity to live to their full potential,” regardless of their socially, culturally, or economically defined circumstances.
A healthy community allows “people to come together to make their community better for themselves, their family, their friends, their neighbours, and others.
A healthy community creates ongoing dialogue, generates leadership opportunities for all, embraces diversity, connects people and resources, fosters a sense of community, and shapes its own future.”

This definition already speaks to me, but he has adapted it for choral communities:

... a healthy choir community is defined as “a group of people where healthy built, social environments give individuals the opportunity to sing to their full potential,” regardless of their musical background, training, or socially/culturally defined circumstances.
A healthy choir community allows “individuals to come together to create beauty, develop empathy and understanding, and through singing make their wider community better for themselves, their family, their friends, their neighbours, and others.
A healthy choir community creates ongoing dialogue, generates leadership opportunities for all, embraces diversity, connects people and resources, fosters a sense of community, and shapes its own future.”

I love this.

For Geung, taking the time to be mindful planners of our choral community is as important as the music we create, and that it isn’t much different than a city planner designing a neighbourhood.

He has admitted to me that he loves thinking about the start of the choral season: How can we set the tone for the whole season from the very beginning? What foundational pieces do we lay to ensure that our communities stay resilient and healthy? How do routines define and shape our community’s behaviour?

These are worthwhile questions to consider – especially as we start to look forward to rehearsing in-person again.

Designing a community might seem daunting, but it is well worth the effort! Don’t forget: Good Community = Good Music.

Here are some of Geung’s suggestions for starting a new choral season from a community design perspective:

1. Consider having a “returning members meeting” (an idea we have both learned from our Edmonton colleague, Katy Luyk) where your returning members can see each other and catch up, reminisce about the previous season, and close the previous chapter together. They can then welcome the new members with open arms, ready for new connections.

2. For the first rehearsal, don’t set up rows of chairs right away. Allow people to greet each other and mingle (as opposed to only meeting the one or two people right next to them, or only their section-mates). Do your warm-up, some ice breakers, and move around the whole available space while encouraging your singers to interact with each other.

3. Invite your choir members to help define what the community will look like for the season. Put up chart paper with some prompts and markers, and ask your singers to add to them anonymously and at their leisure. The prompts could be: what are their personal goals for the season, their goals for the choir, what do they need from each other, and from the artistic staff. Read them out and discuss, or type them up and print it for everyone (perhaps as a word cloud).

As conductors, we wear many hats and do many jobs, but our goal at the heart of it all is to bring people together to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Mindfully designing healthy choir communities is one aspect of that.

We are community designers! Let’s make healthy choir communities!

Take Heart

Today, March 11, marks one year since my last pre-covid choral experience: a dress rehearsal in the church where our concert was to take place a few days later. A normal rehearsal of polishing and details and logistics (stand here, enter this way, exit that way).

I remember a chorister looking at his phone and being surprised to see that the NBA was shutting down – one of the first of the major sports/cultural institutions to do it. I think that was the turning point for me, and for many people, to finally believe that this was bigger than we could imagine.

Everything changed within a few days, and now here we are.

What would I have done differently if I had known it was the last time we’d be together in the way it had always been? I’d have focused less on the minutiae. I’d have ensured we did as much singing as possible. I’d have left there with my heart and spirit full, and braced for the crash.

But we weren’t ready. How could we have been?

What we are still feeling is grief. A year later we are still mourning the things that we never got to do, the things we miss doing, the things we may never do again, the people we haven’t seen.

My friend and colleague, Brian Mummert, shared these thoughts with me:

So much of the music we love was written in exactly this context. Humans spent hundreds of years living with the plague…and so communities developed and strengthened communal rituals in part to process these experiences.
I think we wildly underestimate that, absent any kind of germ theory, coming together in large groups to perform or observe artistic and religious rituals is one of our species' major coping mechanisms for this kind of collective grief.
What might make this situation unique, then, is that greater understanding of germ theory: we've discovered that the mechanisms society has used in the past are exactly the ones that become super-spreader events, and ultimately have neither the biological nor the cultural evolutionary tools to process this past year as a result.
I don’t think there will be much processing happening until we can be together in groups participating in rituals (which can be as simple as wine with friends). They’ll look different, sure, but my guess is that some degree of physical proximity and biological entrainment are necessary for communal processing in particular.

We sometimes feel that we should have figured this all out by now, that we should be okay and fine with everything. I just don’t believe that is a realistic expectation.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel in the vaccines, but they aren’t magic wands that will make it all go back to the way it was before. It is going to take time, and that gives us plenty more chances to feel difficult emotions.

It’s exhausting, right?

Geese returning to Winnipeg on their yearly migration north, March 2021.

Be kind to yourself. Take the time and space and rest you need, and reach out to find the support that will help you. Allow yourself to grieve, and try not to be frustrated if it comes up again and again – “Haven’t I been through this already?!”

Take heart, we will come through this, and we will sing together again. That “last” rehearsal isn’t actually my last ever, no matter how unlikely it feels right now.

Outward Inclusivity

Choir is often seen as a safe place for people to be themselves and explore their identities, especially for high school students or young adults. So how do we, as conductors, guarantee that for them?

Right now there is a wonderful shift in the choral community towards gender inclusivity.

For example, we can be accurate in rehearsal and stop saying “men” or “women” when we really mean “basses” or “sopranos”. We can revamp dress codes to give a range of options/guidelines, without tying it to gender or voice parts. We can talk about policies with boards and choir members. We can wear nametags with our pronouns.

These are all wonderful and necessary changes that every choir and conductor should make. But they are internal, and we can do even better.

We need to make sure that a potential member sees that choir is a safe place and that they will be welcome before they even join.

Some ideas of what this outward inclusivity looks like:

1. Using inclusive/accurate language in the name of the choir: Upper Voices, Lower Voices, Bass Clef Choir, Trebles.

2. Updating forms and information gathering tools to include a spot for people to put their pronouns, so that from their very first interaction with the choir, we respect who they are.

3. Being explicitly inclusive in the description of the choir. For example, one of the first things someone reads about my ensemble Winnipeg Upper Voices is: “We welcome women, men, trans, and non-binary singers.”

4. Using inclusive language at concerts and in programs. This could be by swapping out “ladies and gentlemen” for “everyone” in introductory remarks: “Welcome, everyone, to the big show!” Artist biographies in the program can include pronouns: “Katy Harmer (she/her) is the conductor.”

These changes should be made without fanfare and without it being a big deal. But they will be noticed by the people who need to see them the most.

Being more inclusive benefits everyone, and ensures that our choirs actually are the safe places we strive for them to be.

The Mushroom at the End of the World

It’s amazing what you can find when you’re not looking for it. I was reading Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, minding my own business and learning about matsutake mushrooms when I came across this:

How does a gathering become a ‘happening,’ that is, greater than a sum of its parts? One answer is contamination. We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge. (27)

I couldn’t help myself. I started thinking about music making and choir, even though Lowenhaupt Tsing is very explicitly talking about mushrooms, ecology, and precarious economies of mushroom pickers.

I admit, her use of the word ‘contamination’ is an unfortunate one for this exact moment in history - please wash your hands!! - but the sentiment struck me.

“How does a gathering become a happening?” – or in choir terms, how can we go from being a group of people singing in a room together to a Choir? What happens when we take the time to ‘contaminate’ each other with our ideas and creativity? What new worlds and new directions can we open for ourselves as we transform?

A page later, another one:

Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaboration, we all die. …
We change through our collaborations both within and across species. The important stuff for life on earth happens in those transformations. (28,29)

How can we bring transformational encounters to our musical lives? How do we foster them in our rehearsals and for our audiences? Who can we collaborate with in new and interesting ways?

How can we encourage transformation in more than the traditional one-way street of conductor to singer, or choir to audience? How can rehearsals and concerts become a two-way street? What do we have to gain from taking the time to consider these things? (I think it’s a lot.)

Perhaps this is our route to survival as artists, organizations, and people in a precarious world that doesn’t always see the value of the arts.

Create “transformation through encounter” (28) with our art and contaminate the world, in the best way!

Holding On

Have you ever sung in a choir while holding hands?

I feel the energy running between people.

I breathe differently.

I sing differently.

We become one person, almost literally, but definitely figuratively.

We move together. We breathe together. We sing truly together.

We can trust - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can sing freely - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can smile - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can cry - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can stop singing - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can start again - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can be vulnerable - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

We can lift each other up - I’ve got you and I’m not letting go.

I once had a chorister confide in me that he didn’t think he’d be able to get through a piece without crying. One thing I suggested is that he take the hand of the person next to him until he could sing again. He said that sounded like the right thing to do. I wonder if he did.

Go Out and Play!

How often do you just PLAY? Not just play in the sense of playing a piece of music or an instrument, but in a childlike way, with curiosity and experimentation and unpredictability?

For me, it’s not often enough. In fact, it’s something I’d like to actively do more of in my life. Just throw things out there and edit it later! (…I say as I keep writing sentences and deleting them…)

One of my favourite authors/bloggers/artists is Austin Kleon. In his most recent book, Keep Going*, he writes:

All children learn about the world through play. … Their best play, however, is acted out with a kind of lightness and detachment from their results.

Play is the work of the child, and it is also the work of the artist. … The great artists are able to retain this sense of playfulness throughout their careers.

Art and the artist both suffer most when the artist gets too heavy, too focused on results. … If you’ve lost your playfulness, practice for practice’s sake.

I like that: practice for practice’s sake. Enjoy the process of doing the thing without worrying about perfecting the thing. Play, play play.

Curiosity is one of the other important parts of Play. To be curious about what might happen when we try something, or when we take a chance. To listen to the ‘what ifs’ and trust them and ourselves enough to actually act on them, regardless of what the result may (or may not) be.

After many months of having no[t much] motivation to do creative things, I’ve finally come back around to musical Play. I had the idea to make a recording in a nearby park. So I did it! It’s not for any bigger purpose or project other than making something.

Now that I’ve done something, I’ll do something else, and something else again. And then who knows what I might do!

How can you bring some Play into your days? What can you do just for the sake of doing it and enjoying it and seeing what happens?

*I highly recommend Austin Kleon’s writing - blog and books - for all creative folks (or really, anyone). His books are Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work and Keep Going, and his weekly newsletter always has really good brain candy.

Warming Up

I have few regrets in my life, but one of them is quitting piano lessons/not taking them seriously, and not practicing while I was taking them. Now, as a conductor, I am kicking myself for my lack of piano skills and my anxiety of playing in front of other people. Whenever I try to play anything in front of anyone, my fingers and hands forget everything we practiced and I flop around on the piano as if I’ve never seen one before -- it’s probably not that bad, but it feels like it!

To combat this anxiety, I am undertaking the long-overdue project of learning to accompany all my regular choral warm-ups on the piano in every key so that I can at least start a rehearsal with confidence! 

(A caveat: there are many benefits for warming up a cappella, but there are times that just isn’t the right thing or the choir needs a boost.)

What are your favourite warm-ups that I can add to my repertoire? Anyone else in the same boat as me? Leave a comment below!