The beginning of the new school year is the perfect time to think about starting – or reinvigorating – a school choir. But how do you attract singers, choose the right repertoire and keep young people coming back? And how can a choir accommodate different levels of musical experience, including those who can’t read music?
Soprano, composer and music educator Hannah King works extensively with young singers across the UK and is ideally placed to answer these questions. She directs two choirs at Finchley Children’s Music Group and is a Co-Director of Highbury Youth Choirs. She is also Creative Lead for Tenebrae Schools, which works with KS2 pupils, and works with Gabrieli Roar, which links up with diverse British choirs to offer side-by-side performing opportunities with professional musicians. Hannah also arranged Cat Burns’ live more & love more for the BBC Get Singing song collection.
Here, she shares practical advice on making school choirs welcoming, inclusive – and, above all, enjoyable.
Q 1. At this time of year, many teachers will be thinking of starting a choir. What’s the best plan: drum up interest first, or go ahead and get some people together?
A. It’s obviously fine to create the interest as you’re going along, but one of the best things you can do to get people interested is to just get them singing. So, if you’ve got the time at the start of the term, do a singing assembly and get everybody singing – just something really simple, like a round or a song in three simple parts. Something that’s easy to pick up and teach quickly, but that also has feel-good appeal. Then you can say: if you liked that, come along on Thursday lunchtime, or whenever.
Q 2. So, once you’ve got your people interested, how do you keep them coming back?
A. The key is to meet the singers where they’re at. So, try and gauge what their musical abilities are. If you instantly throw them something that’s too hard or too easy, you’re not going to keep them engaged.
Try to find material that fits the level they’re at, but also pushes them a little. Talk to your singers, ask them if there’s anything that they particularly like to sing: don’t make the choices about repertoire all yours. And remember that people don’t go to choir just for the singing, they go for social benefits too. Make sure you’re factoring in that element.
For instance, in a youth choir I run, we found we had a really big drop-off in attendance once the singers moved up to the senior choir. That was because we placed that move at the same juncture as the move to secondary school. Now we have the switch into senior choir before the move to secondary school, so the students have a chance to develop those friendships and social bonds in the senior choir, ahead of going through that big period of change at school.
Q 3. How do you go about choosing repertoire?
A. There’s a lot of music out there that’s specifically written for certain age-groups. For 11- to 14-year-olds there’s the BBC Get Singing resources, but there are also resources like Britten Pears Arts’s Friday Afternoons website, which is a brilliant set of free songs aimed at KS2 and KS3.
But also, ask the singers in your choir if there’s anything that they would like to sing. There might even be some budding arrangers there. You don’t have to be able to read music in order to put a song arrangement together. There might be some budding a cappella singers who really fancy singing whatever is No. 1 in the charts right now. You could even figure out the arrangement as a shared activity with the choir. Let’s say they really want to sing an Ed Sheeran song. You could have a small group sing the tune and then figure out some harmonies to put underneath, and build your own arrangement. You don’t necessarily need a keyboard and music software. You can do it in the room and get the young people engaged in the activity of arranging it themselves.
Q 4. Is it more difficult to attract boys rather than girls, and what can you do about that?
A. Yes, it can be. It’s partly because of the change that their voices go through as they reach puberty. Essentially, they are learning to sing with a completely new instrument, and that can be daunting.
The aim is to create an atmosphere where they are allowed to experiment with that new voice and to find repertoire that doesn’t have a huge range – because often, when the voice first changes, adolescent boys might only have a range of about five notes. Look for music with a “cambiata” part for changing voices to suit those singers going through vocal change. At the same time, you’re attracting them while they’re younger: if singing is something they love already, then they’re more likely to stick with it. And again, it’s about that social side of things as well, so make it creative and about leadership and about building things together.
Q 5. What tips do you have on taking rehearsals?
A. I would say your warm-up is one of the most crucial things that you can do, yet it so often gets missed out in a school setting, because you don’t necessarily have much time and you want to use that time to work on the repertoire. But a warm-up is about so much more than just warming up the voice. A warm-up also allows you to read the room and see how everybody’s feeling that day, gauge the atmosphere. It’s also a real opportunity to build in some musicianship skills. So, if you’re tackling a particularly difficult corner, say with really hard intervals or rhythmic challenges, you can build in some exercises that deal with those challenges.
The warm-up can also provide opportunities for leadership. If you get to a point where you have run through a number of different warm-up activities throughout the first term, in the second term you can start opening up the floor to the singers to take the lead.
Q 6. How do you approach a choir with a range of abilities – since not everyone might read music?
A. If you can only have one choir, it’s about meeting people where they are, but giving them the opportunity to challenge themselves and push themselves. So, you could give out scores, but be prepared to teach by ear and also to help your singers upskill. You can talk about what’s on the page or you might teach it by ear, but you can get your young singers to follow along and start figuring out some of those patterns. Learning by ear is a skill in itself and is worth practising with singers who can read music too.
Q 7. How do you suggest choral leaders use the resources available the BBC Get Singing website?
A. The BBC Get Singing resources are amazing because you get not only the repertoire but also the sheet music. You’ve also got performance videos of the pieces as well as videos with ideas for exercises. You can use those videos either to play to the choirs or to watch yourself and then lead. And that structure is also helpful for teaching other pieces. You can look at how the exercises have been designed for the BBC Get Singing pieces, and then think about how you can apply that to other music.
Q 8. Are you optimistic about the state of choral singing for young people in the UK?
A. We still have a really good reputation for choral singing in this country, and there’s a lot of amazing singing going on. But because many schools and music hubs have lost their funding, not every school has a choir – not every music hub has a choir. If we want to safeguard the future of choral singing, we need to make sure the opportunities to access singing are available through multiple pathways, whether that’s state or private school, churches, music hubs or community choirs.
Q 9. In the course of your work with choirs around the country, what kind of impact do you see from school music-making?
A. Singing brings joy. That’s a simplistic way of looking at it, but there’s something very powerful about a group of people doing something altogether. Singing is probably the most accessible art form that we have. You don’t need anything to do it – you just need your voice. It doesn’t matter what you’re singing. It could be hymn-singing – it could be singing along to a pop song – but singing in a group together builds a community. More work has been done in recent years on the mental-health benefits of singing, and I think the effects are very clear to see.
Interview conducted and edited by Edward Bhesania
