Community Choirs

You’d be surprised at how many people come to my community choirs (and from what I’ve heard from other choir leaders – their community choirs, too) with absolutely no self-confidence in their ability to be able to sing.

Or maybe you wouldn’t.  Because maybe your story is very similar to their story.  I’ve heard it a few hundred times at least:

An adult makes enquiries about joining one of my choirs.  I am thrilled and say that we’d love to have them, and outline details of what we sing, when we meet and so forth.  They look a bit sad and say something like, “Don’t expect much.  I can’t sing, you know.”  I look concerned (privately I completely doubt what they are saying – they have a very nice speaking voice, and I’m sure that there is a lovely singer just waiting to surface), and probe a little deeper as why they think they can’t sing.  They generally tell me that when they were a child, a parent or a teacher told them to be quiet.  Told them that they couldn’t sing.  Sometimes they are told to just “mime whilst the others sing”.  Sometimes they are asked to sit down whilst everyone else sings.  Sometimes a parent or an older sibling tells them to shut up, and says that they can’t sing, so don’t try.

I’ll be honest here, I struggle with this story.  I don’t struggle to believe it, but I struggle with the white-hot rage it inspires inside me.  The people telling me this are usually older adults – often retirees – who have spent their entire lives thinking that they can’t sing.  They’ve lost out on the decades of joy and companionship that singing brings.  And WITHOUT EXCEPTION every single one has turned out to have a lovely voice, and after a few weeks of worry and concern, they have managed to join in with the rest of the choir in raising those lovely voices joyfully.

Now, full disclosure – as well as teaching choirs, I also teach music to primary aged children (4-11).  I’m a patient person, and I enjoy listening to those unfettered voices being raised in song.  It’s a wonderful thing.  I don’t shout.  I don’t victimise and I don’t get cross except for one thing.  One single thing is guaranteed to make me incandescently angry.  Never, ever, ever say to a child, “You can’t sing”.  Not if you are an adult, and not if you are another child.  No-one gets to judge anyone else’s music making in my class!  I’ve stopped whole classes to have the discussion about everyone’s voice having worth, and everyone’s voice sounding different.  We may all be born with the same voice apparatus, but we all use it differently.  Some people take a little longer to sing the note that they can hear in their heads, whilst some can do it immediately (but might really struggle with some other aspect).  That does not mean that some people can sing and others cannot.

This is a soapbox of mine, I’ll admit.  Far too few adults understand the impact that a single negative comment can have on a child or young person.  Don’t do it.  Understand that this one single comment could be the thing that they carry with them for the rest of their lives, replaying it in their head when their child asks for a lullaby (I can’t sing), or the rest of the football stadium erupts in song (I can’t sing), or everyone sings ‘Happy Birthday’ to a beloved relative (I can’t sing), or singing a hymn at their own wedding (I can’t sing), or a party where someone gets out a guitar and starts playing old Beatles’ songs for people to sing along with (I can’t sing), or even at their parent’s funeral (I can’t sing).  That single comment haunts them.

Do not be the person that stops them singing to their baby, or singing “Hey Jude” with their best friend as the sun sinks below the horizon and another bottle of wine is opened.  Don’t do it.  Try this instead:

“Be quiet” = “I love to hear you sing!  It sounds best when we’re all singing at the same time, so try to join in with everyone else – that would sound great.”

“You can’t sing” = “You’ve got a great voice!  I love the fact that it sounds a little different – there are some fabulous musicians with voices a bit like yours – let’s have a talk about finding some of them for you to listen to…”

“You can’t sing this song” = “This song isn’t the best for you.  How do you feel about it?  Shall we find something that lets you shine a bit instead?”

“Just mime with the others” = “I want to hear everyone.  If you are comfortable singing, I’d like to hear it.  Everyone’s voice has value, and adds to the overall performance.”

You get the idea, huh?  Try to remember that every thing you say has an effect and can stay with a child for life.  What’s the worst that can happen?  Someone grows up enjoying music, and slowly getting better as they practice?

As optimistic people say, “I love getting old – it beats the alternative!”.  Dealing with an ageing voice is something that hopefully we will all be dealing with at some point.  Mind you, the definition of “an aging voice” is probably going to be a bit shocking for you.  Medically speaking, we are growing, filling out and extending our bodies until we reach the ripe old age of… approximately 35.  After that, the studies tell us, it’s all a bit downhill.  Personally speaking, I peaked a good few years back, according to that!

However, the medical concept of “an ageing voice” is not what you think.  It’s not that croaky, shaky little-old-person’s voice that probably worries every singer.  The concept is that we continue to stretch and add muscle tone until we reach 35 and after that, what we have is pretty much set.  If you want to be an operatic soprano, you really ought to start before being 35, is what they are saying.

The nice, flexible cartilage in your throat that makes singing so easy when you are in your twenties will start to ossify (read: turn to bone!) the older you get – this process starts when you are a toddler and finishes when you are in your early sixties.  Reading this, a casual singer over the age of sixty is likely to think, “It’s all over!  I’ll never sing again!!!”  I can counter this is one easy, easy video.  Check out this link:

Aretha Franklin sings a tribute to Carole King

If you are a woman, past menopause and worried about your singing voice – I refer you back to this video again.  Listen to her voice.  See her *own* that stage.  She oozes sex appeal.  This lady is almost 74.  Seventy-FOUR!   She’s reduced the President of the United States to tears with the power and expressiveness of her voice.

There are a whole lot of things that you can do, regardless of age and gender, to make sure that your voice stays supple and in great shape until you are well into your nineties, at least.

• Accept that if you are a woman you are going to lose several notes from the top of your range.  If you are a man, you are likely to lose a couple of notes from the bottom of your range.  This is to do with the downward journey of the laryngeal structure as you age, and hormones.  Those on hormone replacement therapy (including vocalists who are trans.) will probably notice less of a difference, as they will be dealing with the age related laryngeal drop, but not the hormone alterations.
• Pay a lot of attention to your posture.  This is great advice anyway, as no-one wants to end up with a posture like a fairytale grandmother…  Stand up straight and position your head over your body, not leaning forwards or backwards (forwards is the most common).  Make sure your shoulders are back and relaxed, and your feet are located under them.  Clasp your hands in front of you and raise them over your head.  Try singing with your hands in the air and see how different it feels!
• Concentrate on breathing from your middle.  Keep your chest and upper body as still as possible.  Sing gently, and as you use up your air, pull your tummy in.
• Don’t let your natural vibrato slow down.  When it does, you will instantly sound at least ten years older than you really are.  Keep your singing voice as smooth as possible and when you want to use vibrato, do so with control, and do it fast!
• Practice moving your throat and mouth by doing the “Wicked Witch vs. Sloane Ranger” exercise (“Heheheheheh” “OK, Yaaaaaaaaaah”).
• Pay very careful attention to what you sound like.  Record yourself and listen to it.
• Lots and lots of audiation (we’ll cover this in more depth later).  The more, the better!  (Think of it as singing along in your head…)

We’ll look at this in more detail as time goes on, but remember that the watchword is to just get your voice moving and then worry about the right notes later…

I’m writing this from home today as I am not feeling very well.  I have a cold, but one that doesn’t seem to have lingered around my nose and sinuses as they often do, but one which seems to have skipped straight to my throat and lungs, leaving me with a high temperature whilst trying to fight it off.

It strikes me that I am probably not the only person to be dealing with this at the moment, as colds and coughs are very prevalent in late winter and early spring.

So, how do I deal with a cold, and particularly the kind of cough that steals your voice?  I’ve had a LOT of practice over the years.  I often claim that I could stub my toe and get a cough, and it’s true.  Eventually, everything settles to my lungs and I feel dreadful, and my voice suffers hugely as well.

First up, I think it is really important to understand what is happening when you cough all the time.  When you talk or sing, your vocal folds move gently in different configurations to allow the sound to be formed and projected in the way that you want.  When you cough (in this case to expel foreign matter such as phlegm from your throat and lungs), your folds are suddenly forced wide open and air expels from your lungs at over 100mph.  If you do this often (personally, I tend to have coughing spasms, wherein I cough repeatedly for up to three or four minutes with increasing strength, until I choke or sometimes gag) then the delicate muscles of your vocal folds are being forced, time and time again, into an uncomfortably open position, and shaken by the force of air moving past them.  They dry out very quickly, which then makes them more unwilling to move.  Another cough after this point will inevitably bruise the folds, making them more tender and even more unable to move.  You will end up with a croaky, airy voice, because your folds can’t move in the normal manner, and the only thing you can do is allow them to rest.  Here is my personal list of things to do:

1. Try to limit your coughing.  Medicate regularly and effectively.  Learn what cough medicine works for you.  For me, it is non-branded Pholcodeine Linctus.  It’s available over the counter and is the only thing that breaks that dry, tizzicky cough that causes so much damage.
2. Sooth your throat.  Pastilles and lozenges are good, and will make your throat moister, limiting the damage of the air inherent in coughing.  I recommend Vocalzone pastilles.  They taste like a mixture of earwax and liquorice, but do the job very effectively.  I can only force myself to use them in extreme conditions.  A nice Strepsil works more palatably for me.
3. Eat chocolate.  Really – it’s very good for stopping coughing.  It has been medically proven and everything!  It has the pleasant side effect of BEING CHOCOLATE as well.  What’s not to like?
4. Drink pineapple juice.  There isn’t much in the way of medical science to support it (unlike the chocolate thing above), but it’s a long held belief by many singers that it soothes the throat, helps to disperse mucous, and helps with restoring a voice to health.  I’ve personally found it very helpful, but can’t prove it!  Don’t drink too much, though – there’s an enzyme in it which attacks the collagen in your cheeks and tongue and will hurt if you drink a whole carton in one go!
5. Don’t whisper.  You use more air, and dry out your folds really effectively.  Don’t do it.
6. Keep your voice moving.  If you keep absolutely silent when you have a cold, the likelihood is that phlegm will settle on your folds and not be shaken free. This will actually make your voice worse, as those little muscles are now trying to work whilst bruised from coughing and with a horrible lump of dried up gunk layered over them.  Yuk!  Keep talking gently and trying occasional very quiet “siren” exercises to keep them clear and functioning.
7. Neti Pot!  I always forget to recommend this one, but if you are bunged up, and particularly at that stage of a cold I like to call, “My Head is a Glue Factory”, try a Neti Pot.  You fill them with lukewarm saline solution, tilt your head sideways and forwards and stick the nozzle into your nostril and pour the water in.  Keep your throat closed and do it over a sink.  The water will swoosh around your sinuses, feel very strange, but clear out all of that gunk when it streams out of the other nostril.  The first nose-blow after a Neti Pot treatment is one of the more joyful experiences of life.  They aren’t that common in the UK, but you can buy them online.  I love mine with a burning passion, and haven’t accidentally waterboarded myself yet!
8. Drink water.  Lots of water.  Colds and coughs dry you out.  Decongestants dry you out even more.  Drink as much water as you can bear, it will moisturise all of the mucous membranes in your body, make you feel better, and enable your body to fight the infection more effectively.  It will also make your skin look better!

So – have you got any cold/cough fighting tips?  Do chip in!  I’m going to have some more tea and hope that I’m well enough to lead choir tonight – although maybe from a distance so I don’t cough over anyone!.

You’ve heard the phrases, “chest voice” and “head voice”.  They get thrown around in singing lessons and choirs quite a lot.  But if we are not careful, they can be overused terms which are never properly explained.  So, what do they mean?

Chest voice is that full, low sound that you belt out when you sing rock songs in the shower.  It is not quiet or polite.  It is a loud, bombastic sound that, when used properly, makes your chest reverberate.  It’s the bit of your voice that you use when you sing the bit of McCartney’s “The Frog Chorus” that goes “Bom, bom, bom” (incidentally, the Head Voice is the bit that you go, “Aye-i-aye” with at the end of the “Bom, bom, bom” bit…).  It is powerful, low and often easier to control.  If you are a bloke, then a huge amount of what you sing will be in chest voice.  It is also known as your “heavy register”, which I think is very descriptive – the voice does, indeed, sound and feel much heavier.  When you sing like this, your vocal folds (the muscles that control the sound you make – pictured in the animation in this post) are quite relaxed and thick – the whole of the vocal muscle is involved in this register.

Head voice is lighter and higher, and often referred to as “falsetto”.  If you are unused to singing in this voice it will feel odd, and possibly as though you are pretending to sing opera, rather than singing in your “natural voice”.  It is important to understand that it is your natural voice as well – I often use the trick of getting an entire choir to “put on a silly operatic voice” and then asking them to sing.  The result is *always* excellent.  Once a singer is over the idea of “the real voice” and “the fake voice”, it opens up possibilities of using both, even dramatically swooping between the two (listen to Dolores O’Riordan for an excellent example of this).  When you sing in your falsetto voice, your vocal folds are stretched thinner and tighter, and only the edges of them vibrate.  This makes a higher/lighter sound (the tighter the folds, the higher the note), but is generally quieter, with less volume variation than the heavy register.

In normal repertoire, female singers are expected to use both chest and head voices, whilst men are routinely expected to only use their lower, heavy, chest register.  There is no reason why men should not use their higher register, and indeed Counter-Tenors use it to great effect.

To hear the difference between your registers, try singing a note which should appear in both – something around middle C will work for many people.  Try belting it out in your lower voice, and then add a little breath and try it in your “fake opera” voice, smoothing out any vibrato/wobble as best you can.

Pay attention to how it feels, and how it sounds.  Does it sound different to your ear?

Now try singing a song which extends above the range that you normally feel comfortable in.  When you feel you’ve run out of voice and can’t go any higher, try swapping to the “fake opera” voice, smoothing out the worst of the wobble and see what happens.  Any extra notes there that you hadn’t suspected?

So, we have discussed the fact that not being able to accurately sing in tune is not an unchangeable accident of birth, but rather a lack of proper ear training.  There are very, very few people for whom singing in tune is absolutely impossible – the figure hovers somewhere under 1% of the population.

Everyone else – almost certainly including you – can learn to sing in tune.

The first, and most important thing, is to relax.  If you get stressed, your muscles will tighten up, your adrenalin levels will soar and your voice will automatically rise, even if you try to keep it lower.  High levels of stress and adrenalin can also result in a very wobbly voice, or one that drops much lower than the pitch one is aiming at.  The secret is to keep trying.  The wobbly voice issue is a matter of confidence and muscle control.  The more you sing, the more toned the muscles will become, and the easier it will be to control them.

The second thing is about being able to actually *hear* the note that you are trying to sing.  Sometimes one’s brain just can’t tell if you are sharp or flat, and however you try to alter your tone, it feels like it is in the wrong direction.  Rest assured that this can happen to anyone, depending on how you are feeling, what you are thinking about and 101 other things.  In this case, it is usually easier to give up trying to hear where you are going wrong yourself, and use a little bit of technical back up.  I recommend installing a tuner app on your phone.  I use an iPhone and use Tuner Lite for both ear training and instrument tuning.  It’s a great little app, and free if you don’t mind a few adverts on your page.  Similar things are available for Android phones as well.  If you don’t use a smartphone, then I recommend buying a tuner from a music shop – it is a small device – often about the size of a large box of matches and will do the job equally well.    To use either a standalone tuner or a smartphone tuner to help with ear training, try the following:

• hit a note on your keyboard (if you don’t have one, you can get one for your phone or your computer).
• Try to sing that note back.  If you can’t hit the note, or aren’t sure if you’ve hit the note, turn on your tuner and try again.  The tuner will then tell you which note you’ve hit, and you can move up or down until you hit the note that you are intending.
• Try again, listening carefully to the note on the keyboard and moving your voice up and down until you feel that you are in the right area.

An hour or so of this once a week (or even better, spaced out over the course of a week) will help your ear training hugely.  You will also find that after doing this exercise for a while, you will find it easier to find the right notes.  However, don’t be discouraged if you lose the ability to replicate notes between one session and the next.  The ability will last longer between sessions, the more often you practice.

The main reason that most people get singing lessons is often because they struggle to pitch notes correctly.  They are then told by people around them who don’t know any better that this means they can’t sing.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS WRONG.

Being able to hit the right note 100% of the time is a learned skill.  Some people are better at teaching themselves this skill than others.  Very often they have grown up with music constantly around them and have learned to differentiate and copy notes at a very early age.  However, make no mistake – it has been learned, it is NOT an innate skill.  If in any doubt, listen to small toddlers singing and the range of noises that they make.  Very, very few of them make anything like a true copy of the notes that are being sung to them.  Go back to the same group of children in 10 years time and you will see that 80% or more have learned to more accurately reproduce a note or series of notes sung to them in the intervening years.  Now go back in another 6 years as the same children leave school after going through the normal teenage phases of listening to music, taking weekly music lessons, singing hymns in assembly and so forth.  I’d be surprised if you found any more than 5% who had real problems holding a tune.  Interestingly, another ten years after leaving school and getting into the workplace, the situation will change again, and those who could sing accurately will have lost the ability, or find it considerably harder.  Why?  Because they simply aren’t doing it regularly anymore and their skill has diminished with practice.

Having seen this pattern repeatedly over many years as a teacher of Early Years & Primary students, a parent of teenagers and a choir leader for adults, I can say with certainty that the key is practice and habit.  The more you listen to music, the easier you will find it to hit the correct pitch.  The more you sing out loud, the easier you will find it to hit the correct pitch.  The more you listen to yourself, the easier it will become (but listening to yourself is hard, I know).

There are a number of very real reasons why you may find it hard to sing in tune:

• Tension & fear: If you’ve become nervous about singing out of tune, your system floods with adrenalin and the ‘flight or fight’ syndrome kicks in.  You will have less control of your muscles, particularly your vocal muscles.
• Hearing problems: Much more common than you’d think.  Some people have real problems hearing certain pitches and this makes it much harder to replicate a sound.  Technology can often get around this.
• Lack of breath support.  Without the air with which to control your throat muscles, you are fighting a losing battle.
• Untoned vocal muscles.  Like any other muscle, your throat needs to build up to be stronger so that you can control it with enough accuracy to hit the notes you desire.
• Ear training.  As mentioned above, some people never get the very early training in terms of hearing music, and need to start from scratch when they are older.  Don’t be put off – contrary to popular myth, adults learning *much* faster than most children!

The most important thing is to be easy on yourself.  Understand that the way you are going to learn music is completely different to most people, because everyone is different.  You will learn at a different rate, and need different exercises and aids along the way.  Just because you find something hard now is no reason why you should continue to find it hard in a year’s time.

We’ll look at things like ear-training and exercises in more detail in the upcoming weeks!

I don’t come from a musical family, really.  Well, my Dad was Welsh, and loved to sing hymns with me – I was given a welsh pronounciation guide and there were a set of words to the hymns on my Dad’s favourite Cymanfa Ganu LP, lovingly typed up on onionskin paper by some member of the family I didn’t know about.  But it wasn’t something that happened often.  He’d sing one of two songs to me when it was his turn to keep me company whilst I had my evening bath on a Sunday – I’d either get “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean” (which I heard as “My Bunny…” which made me very sad about the loss of someone’s rabbit…) or “Oh My Darling Clementine”, which he always sang as “Oh My Darling Turpentine”.  To this day, those songs make me think of the feel of warm towelling nappies and winceyette pyjamas, lovingly put to warm on the bathroom radiator because he knew I felt the cold…

But that was about it.  No-one played a musical instrument in any branch of my family, no-one knew how to read music and certainly no-one sang with a choir.

So how did I get here (running 3 community choirs, playing guitar, harp, bouzouki and flute, teaching singing and musical performance and theory) from there?

I put it down to three things:

1. The people you surround yourself with.

2. The enthusiasm with which you approach it.

3. The work you are prepared to put in.

If you get all three right, then you are putting yourself in the best possible place to succeed.

1. The people you surround yourself with: If you surround yourself with friends who love music, who play music and who love to share it, then you’ll find yourself with a group of people who encourage you, build you up and can offer pointers in regards to teaching and learning techniques.  If you normalise music as something that happens in thought and action every single day, then you will start to look for it when your practice falls short.

2. The enthusiasm with which you approach it: Stick with it.  Enjoy it.  Do every part of it with enthusiasm.  The enthusiasm will carry you over the times when you are tired, bored and just want to watch TV.  If you find that part of your studies are boring, try and find out why.  Foster the parts that you love and let your enthusiasm direct you.

3. The work you are prepared to put in: I firmly believe that “natural talent” is a myth.  Anything can be learned, and the best results are generally from those who put in the hours.  The phrase “natural talent” implies a lack of discipline and practice, a lack of hard work and a sense of entitlement.  Don’t listen.  No-one ever became great because they didn’t bother to work.

If you get those three things right, then you’ll be setting yourself up for success.  It is most definitely the path that I followed.  My husband is a musician, and his friends were musicians.  Slowly, but surely, they normalised my vision that what one did was … music.  I sang.  I sang all the time.  I sang in the bathroom, in the car, in the kitchen.  I practiced my instruments when I wasn’t singing.  I taught myself fragments of music theory.  I went to events where singing was encouraged.  One day I woke up and realised that the vast majority of my friends were also musicians.  It became my “normal”.

The enthusiasm and work came hand in hand for me – I let my enthusiasm guide me in the direction I wanted (which is why my main instrument is harp!) and put in the hard work once I’d figured out what I loved most.

If you’ve always said, “I want to be a singer!” then the ONLY way to become a singer is… shockingly… to sing.  Don’t wait for the right time.  Don’t wait for a teacher to land in your lap.  Join a non-audition community choir, and have FUN!

I have been lucky enough to  be asked to take part in a mentoring scheme for new singing leaders in my area.  This involves going out, meeting the leaders, watching them teach and chatting with their singers to find out how they are doing and whether there are any areas that can be improved or worked upon.

That all sounds very posh and important and as though I am standing there with a clipboard, marking them all out of ten.  In reality, what I got to do on Tuesday night was to go and meet a lot of delightful young singers, learn some new songs and chat about leading singing – one of my favourite things to do ever.

The young people in question were lucky to be presented with a wide variety of  different material to learn – they had rounds, campfire songs, action songs and modern material.  As with the vast majority of younger people, it is pretty difficult for them to hide what they thought about the various songs that they sang, and I found that really interesting.

They responded really well to very simple call and response songs – usually in thirds (if you sing the notes of a scale – do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do – singing a third would be like singing “mi-so”).  The 20th century music educator, Zoltan Kodaly, had a LOT to say about the importance of singing in simple thirds with young people.  He was of the opinion that the third is the first musical interval we hear, because it is how our mothers call us in that sing song way tht all mothers seem to default to – “Geo-orge!” (usually with the voice falling to the “mi” note on the second half of the name).  We are hardwired to sing it to our children (most nursery rhymes use it – “Seesaw, Margery Daw…” and to respond to it as children ourselves.

I watched a roomful of 7-10 year olds loving working with that most comforting of note ranges and making a glorious sound whilst they did it.  Kodaly hit that one right on the head, I think.

But even more than the simplest of intervals, they responded to modern pop songs.

I know that a lot of choir leaders bristle at modern pop songs – the bubblegum of music (no nutritional value, gets stuck to everything and mostly appeals to children who don’t know better…), but I kind of like them.  Depending on the songs that you choose, they can be just as challenging and enjoyable as older, more classical repertoire, and for some people, vastly more so.  The key is singing what they want to, a choir – any choir at all – should be a democracy, not a tyranny.  When people enjoy what they sing, their voices blend better, their oxytocinon levels rise, leading to feelings of happiness, wellbeing and friendship.  Of course, singing something that you are not immediately sure about can be a challenge and the ability to divorce your immediate feeling of dislike from the material and look at it dispassionately is most definitely a skill worth developing.

But don’t be afraid to sing the old favourites.  Don’t be snobbish about music – if people enjoy singing something, then it is a good song, regardless of everything else.