Playing with choir formations

When we rehearse choirs week in, week out, it's easy to get stuck in a routine. Everyone sits in the same place and gets used to hearing the same voices in their ears. Some will come to depend on having those voices near to them.

Even if you have no intention of performing in any different formation than the one you currently use, moving the choir around a bit can be a refreshing change and can give everyone a new perspective.

At our last chamber choir rehearsal, we had the luxury of not needing to work particularly hard on our repertoire (we'd done one concert the previous week and were repeating it the following day, so the whole set was performance-ready), so I decided to devote the evening to playing around with different formations.

Leave baggage at the door

I mean this literally, not figuratively! One of the things I notice about my (and other) choirs is that when people get used to being in a particular spot, they 'make camp'. They have coats, bags, briefcases, water bottles (some look like they've packed for a week!) and they park all these belongings on and under their chairs. That's not a problem until I want to mix everyone up, which results in five minutes of faffing about while all these items are transferred to a new chair.

One of the things I've adopted at workshops, and which I did at this choir rehearsal, was to arrange a space at the edge of the room where I asked everyone to leave all their stuff so that we could be more flexible about moving around. In fact, on this occasion, I only put chairs around the edge of the room, just in case anyone needed a breather, and we stood for most of the evening.

Warm-ups to get in the mindset

My choir's been working hard on its current performance repertoire since the new year. Because we were a bit tight on rehearsal time, we were wholly focused on learning and stayed in our usual SATB positions for the most part. To kick off this rehearsal, I wanted to get everyone out of the mindset that they needed to be in a particular position in the room, so I used some easy rounds to warm-up and asked the choir to sing them while they walked around, weaving in and out so that they heard other singers as they passed.

The different formations we tried out

Our usual rehearsal and performance formation is (from the conductor's perspective) STBA. Like most provincial choirs, we have more Ss and As than Ts and Bs, so it often works best to have the male voices in the centre.

The first variation we tried was to mix up the men and the women, but keep the men central. We had sops and altos on each side and a mixture of tenors and basses in between. This helped to smooth out the tone while keeping the balance between high and low voices.

We then tried a 'buddy' formation, where pairs of each vocal part stand together, but the overall formation is mixed. This had the advantage of creating a beautifully blended sound while maintaining a bit of support for each singer, who had someone from their own vocal part next to them.

Finally, we used a 'quartet' formation. This is where you form SATB quartets, then arrange the quartets across the 'stage', so each singer is near to someone of all the other parts. In our case, because we have more women than men, we ended up with SSATB groups and one SSAATB group. This formation was, in my opinion, the most successful. It seemed to instil confidence in the choir, despite most of the singers not standing next to someone from their own part.

Feedback from the choir

I suppose it shows how my choir has developed in confidence in the last year or so, but the resounding response from the choir was that they favoured the 'quartet' formation. When we've used mixed formations in the past, many are in favour, but there are always a few grumbles from those who feel like they're being asked to sing without a safety net. This time, when I asked for feedback, most preferred the third formation and no one hated it.

The most frequent comment was that the singers enjoyed hearing the other vocal parts near to them. They also reported that they felt it was easier to maintain good intonation and ensemble with this formation.

The other comment I heard a few times was that everyone really enjoyed the rehearsal. It was something different that gave them a new perspective and a bit of inspiration.

A lesson learned

Because we had a period of intense learning in my choir, I think I neglected the advantages of moving everyone around. I'm going to tweak my rehearsal plans for the coming weeks so that we have more opportunity to change formations during rehearsals and we can continue to enjoy the benefits.