Latest from the chorus
Community & Support 5 min read

The Economics of Keeping a Community Chorus Alive

It is easy to enjoy a concert without ever wondering what it cost to put on. The music feels free, the way a public park feels free, and the singers are giving their time without pay. But behind every community chorus is a small, stubborn set of numbers, and keeping a volunteer ensemble alive year after year is as much an act of budgeting as it is an act of art. Understanding where the money comes from, and where it goes, explains a great deal about why these groups are at once so resilient and so fragile.

Continue reading
Performance & Broadcast 5 min read

From the Concert Hall to the Live Stream

For most of its history, the chorus measured its reach by how many seats it could fill. A concert happened once, in one room, and the audience was whoever managed to be there. That is still the heart of what we do, and nothing on a screen replaces the feeling of sitting in a live hall while forty voices lock into a chord. But the room is no longer the edge of the audience. The same instinct that once put a microphone in front of a choir for the radio now puts a camera there for a live stream, and the path from the concert hall to the screen turns out to be shorter, and more interesting, than it first appears.

Continue reading
Choral Repertoire 4 min read

Programming a Season: Choosing Choral Repertoire

An audience sees the finished concert: an hour or so of music in a sensible order, with a printed program and a few words from the podium. What it rarely sees is the long stretch of deciding that came first. Choosing a season’s repertoire is one of the most important things a chorus does, and it is far more involved than picking pieces everyone likes. Done well, it shapes how the audience feels on the night, how much the singers grow, and whether the books still balance at the end of the year.

Continue reading
Vocal Craft 5 min read

Inside the Rehearsal: How a Chorus Finds Its Blend

Walk into a chorus rehearsal expecting polished music and you may be surprised. A rehearsal is a workshop, not a performance, and most of what happens there is the slow, unglamorous business of turning a roomful of separate voices into something that sounds like one instrument. That quality, the sense that the sound is coming from a single source rather than from forty different throats, is what singers mean by blend. It does not happen by accident, and it is worth understanding how a chorus actually goes about finding it.

Continue reading
Music History 4 min read

A Brief History of Community Choral Singing

People have gathered to sing together for as long as there have been communities to do the gathering. Long before anyone wrote the notes down, a group of voices moving as one was a way of marking the things that mattered: a harvest, a death, a holy day, a victory, a season turning over. The community chorus you might hear in a church hall on a Friday night is a recent shape given to a very old habit, and it helps to know something of where that habit came from.

Continue reading