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In the last couple of articles on this site, we've had some fascinating perspectives on choir leadership and participation, but I thought we'd get squarely back to the business of choir management this week. I want to share with you some of the systems that we use to run our choirs successfully.

One of the first lessons that Christine and I learned when we started collaborating was that we needed to find ways of centralising the information that we gather from our choir members, and that we impar…

A few articles ago, I wrote about whether it's possible to make a living out of running choirs.  My business partner, Christine Mulgrew, and I have found a business model that works for us: we run two choirs, provide workshops for our choir members and various team-building and singing programmes for corporate clients. In this article, Christine tells us how she goes about planning and executing a workshop.

At Total Voice, we have run several successful workshops focusing on solo performance skil…

This is the final instalment of a three-part series of articles about rehearsing a new piece with your choir. In the first part, we looked at introducing a piece to a choir for the first time. In the second, we covered the middle phase of rehearsals. In this final part, we'll look at polishing a piece for performance.

The final phase before your choir performs a piece takes some delicate balancing. Too little rehearsal and the performance could be panicky and riddled with mistakes; too much and t…

This is the second of a three-part series of articles about rehearsing a new piece with your choir. In the first part, we looked at introducing a piece to a choir for the first time. In this article, we'll look at the phase of rehearsals where you're putting in the bulk of the work on interpretation before polishing the piece for performance.

The middle phase of work on a piece can be tricky. The initial novelty of the new music has worn off and the adrenaline of imminent performance won't kick i…

When I'm chatting to other choral conductors, on and offline, one of the concerns that's often raised is how to do the hard work of teaching, rehearsing and polishing a piece of music for performance while making sure that your choir is still having a good time and not feeling like choral singing is a big old chore.  It's a delicate balance and one that I'm sure I don't always get right.  However, these conversations inspired me to create a three-part series of articles looking at how to take yo…

In my line of work, I spend a fair bit of time chatting to conductors, choir leaders and singers, both on and offline. One of the things I'm most often asked is how I managed to get myself in a position where I could ditch my "day job" as a lawyer and spend my time doing what I love: conducting and leading singers. So I thought I'd tell you the story of how I made the transition from respectable legal professional to full-time choir leader!

Part of what's led me to where I am now has been sheer l…

Our choirs, contemporary and chamber, performed their spring concert last Saturday.  After weeks of work and rehearsal, it was a great success and everyone had a fabulous time.  There were congratulations and thanks flying back and forth in emails for a couple of days, then it was time to return to rehearsals.  And that can feel a little, well, flat.

After a big show, we don't necessarily want to launch straight into the next tranche of work, so how can we, as choir leaders, handle that in-betwee…

I've been leading choirs for a while now and I've learned a thing or two, often the hard way.  When I began conducting, I was already an experienced choral singer, which I hope has helped me to see things from my singers' perspective.  In the day-to-dayness of leading a choir, however, it's easy to get a bit lost.  Here are a few of the detours I've taken.

1. Forgetting why people sing in choirs

I've been a singer all my life.  My little sister and I were singing in harmony into a reel-to-reel tap…

Like much of the population of the Northern hemisphere, I have been labouring under a horrid virus over the festive season (hence my tardy return to the blogosphere - I've been feeling a bit sorry for myself).  When my chamber choir's first rehearsal of the new year came around, I was on the mend, but still had a shocking cough and sore throat (my husband refers to me as Mutley during this phase - my laugh sounds exactly like the erstwhile Wacky Races dog).  I could barely speak without launchin…

Our chamber choir accompanist is wonderful. She is capable, well-rehearsed, flexible in attitude and apparently completely unflappable. Because she is all those things, it is far too easy for me, with a dozen other things on my mind, to overlook her experience as part of our group. To redress that balance, I quizzed another extremely capable accompanist (Simon Gregory from the Association of British Choral Directors to whom I am grateful) about what choir leaders can do to make their accompanist…