If you're feeling the calling to direct choirs . . .

I received a comment on my page on choir directing tips.  An aspiring director named KD said:

Hey, I am in prayer about something and hope that someone get this. I am a director, that hasn’t directed in a while, but I got an opportunity to direct about two months ago and God was on fire, but it was only one time, and now I am feeling like I should be doing it more often. Any advice on which direction, I should go in???????????

The thoughts that came to my mind are these:

1. If you’re a member of a choir, talk to your minister of music and tell them about your interest.  If they agree that you have skills in that direction, they might want to include you as a part of a rotation of directors.
2. Perhaps start a choir from scratch!  Talk with your pastor.  It could be that there is an interest in the church in establishing a youth or children’s choir, a men’s or women’s choir, or something else.
3. If your church doesn’t need anything new in terms of choirs or directors, perhaps there is another church in your area that doesn’t have a choir at all.  You could offer to help them start one.  It might take some serious planning to figure out how to schedule your activities at another church and still keep your commitments to your home church, but if you can make it work it would be a great blessing to them and to you as well.

I would love to hear any other suggestions that anyone has on this question.

Learning how to hear choir parts

This is a question that I get asked from time to time -- "How can I learn to pick out the soprano, alto, and tenor parts to choir songs?"

It takes practice, practice, and practice.  And then practice.  The more time you spend at it the more clear it becomes.

People who have been singing harmonies in choirs for a long time start to develop an understanding of how the harmonies work.  Some altos and tenors can get a feeling for what their part will be as soon as they hear a song.  But that is after lots of time spent singing lots of other songs.

I would suggest that people try listening to recordings repeatedly and trying to sing along with the different parts -- sing the soprano part, then the alto, then the tenor.  You may need to listen to one song over and over and over until you can differentiate and sing all the parts.  Doing this with several songs will help you get better at hearing the parts in other songs as well.

Remember that when the different vocal parts sing together, they are making a chord.  If you're a musician, or if you're friends with a musician, you can look at the chord structure of the song and get some idea of what each of the vocal parts should be doing.  The chords that the voices are making may not always be exactly the same as the chords the instruments are playing, but it's a good start.

If you're really serious about learning this skill, something else that could help a lot is going to rehearsals where a director is teaching who knows choir parts really well.  Listen to them teach lots of songs and sing along with each part when they're teaching each one.  The more you do it, the more you'll develop an instinct for hearing the harmonies in other songs.

Does anyone else have suggestions?  How did you learn how to pick out choir parts?

I love singing with you, but can I still sing without you?

This past Sunday I had the good fortune to attend a free concert by the Master's College Chorale.  It's a college choir, all students, very well trained.

One thing that's so impressive about choirs like these is how every individual member of the choir knows their part for themselves for sure.  No one uses anyone else as a crutch.

The video above is from a performance that the Master's College Chorale did in Israel back in 2009.  You can see how they're standing single-file all around the room.  Not only that, every singer is standing between two other singers who sing a different part from theirs.  The song they're doing in this video starts off with a lot of unison, but they break into full harmony at the 2:00 mark.

When I saw this chorale perform in Long Beach, they were not only spread out across the stage and around the walls, but also down the two center aisles.  Right next to my seat was a soprano, behind her was a bass, behind him an alto, behind her a tenor.  And every one was singing with full confidence.

Those of us who direct choirs at small churches sometimes wish that our choir members were all that solid.  Most of us have that alto who has to be sandwiched between two other altos, or else she'll start sliding up to the soprano part.  Or maybe that tenor who will start singing the melody (but an octave lower) if you don't watch him.  Or the soprano who will have a tendency to sing parts that are even higher than she needs to go (until she notices that the other sopranos aren't with her).

One of the beautiful things about choir is the fellowship of working together.  Like the Hezekiah Walker song -- "I need you . . . you need me . . ."  Together, we help each other and strengthen each other.  But there's nothing wrong with wanting to build up each choir member to the point that they can still go forth even if there's no help around.

It's interesting to think about what kind of practice would be needed to get every member of the choir to the point where they could sing their part with no support.  Having them sing one by one in rehearsals?  That could be frightening to some.  I'm going to do some thinking about this.

If any of you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments.

Cool video: Church of Apostolicity choir

I was at a Regional Fellowship Service last month and one of our own ChoirParts.com newsletter readers, Sis. Angela Whitfield, was featured in the service with the choir she directs from the Church of Apostolicity (The Apostolic Doctrine) in Los Angeles.  I wish I had been thinking faster and pulled out my iPad sooner because I missed the opening section of the medley of spirituals they were doing.

Angela started out a few years ago with no choir directing experience.  She was working with people who were new to choir singing and they didn't have a musician.  The results you see here clearly show the time and effort that they have put into their ministry and how Angela has grown as a director.  They still sing all a cappella, and now they're not sure whether they even want a musician. :-)


(By the way, the preacher who comes up after them is my dad.  He was emceeing the Fellowship Service that night.)

Why it's important to space out rehearsals

Remember in school when you would cram all night for an exam that you had the next day? (If you never did this, someone you know did it.) You studied the materials over and over through the night up until the break of day. You took your test in the morning and you passed it! Hooray!

How much of that material did you remember a week later? Probably very little. Here's the reason why. The folks who do brain research say that the evidence shows that rehearsing information over and over on only one occasion is good for getting the information into your short-term memory, but it won't transfer into your long-term memory. To remember it long-term, you have to rehearse it on different separate occasions. Spacing out the learning helps you learn better.

If you want to look at some of the scientific literature, here are a few links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect – Wikipedia page on the Spacing Effect
• http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/summer2002/willingham.cfm – Article from American Educator about allocating student study time
• http://www.memory-key.com/improving/strategies/advanced/most-effective-way-spacing-your-learning – A summary of a UC San Diego study

So what does that mean for us as choir directors? It means that your teaching of any song will be more effective if it's spread out over time than if it's done all together. Have you ever had the experience of learning a song in a rehearsal, feeling like you've learned it really well while the rehearsal is going on, and then barely being able to recall it the next day?  I have.  But if you practice it over a series of weeks, it will stay in your long-term memory much better.  And you won't need as many repetitions!

For example, if you teach a particular part at three rehearsals, and at each rehearsal the choir goes over the part four times, that's a total of 12 repetitions. But the choir will remember what they learned BETTER from those 12 repetitions spread out over three rehearsals than they would if you had them do 20 repetitions all in one rehearsal!  Check out the American Educator article above to read more about these findings.

This is a reminder of how important it is to get an early start on any music that you teach. Give yourself a few weeks at least before you plan to sing a new song and go over the song at several rehearsals. This is the way to get what you're really after, which is for the singers to make the song a part of them and remember it in the long-term.

Good gospel songs for choir competitions

Someone emailed me this month asking for suggestions of gospel choir songs that would be good to sing in choir competitions.

Many school choirs and other choirs sing arrangements of Negro spirituals in competitions, but here are also some regular songs in the gospel choir repertoire that could be used:

• Anthem of Praise by Richard Smallwood
• Hallelujah, Lord by Sounds of Blackness
• Let Everything That Hath Breath by the Florida A&M University Gospel Choir
• Total Praise by Richard Smallwood
• Matthew 28 by Donald Lawrence
• Jesus Is Alive by Michael Mindingall
• One of the choir pieces from the “Handel's Messiah: A Soulful Celebration” project (such as “Hallelujah!”, “And He Shall Purify”, or “For Unto Us a Child Is Born”)

What other songs might be good for competitions? I'd love to hear any recommendations.

Make sure you're ready to teach!

The most important part of choir directing is the teaching. The congregation sees the director at the end of the process, when the choir sings, but the real work of the director is what happens in rehearsal. Everything the choir sings comes from what they've been taught. When you come before the choir to teach, you want them to feel confident that you're going to share something good and worthwhile with them.

What this means for you is that you need to be fully prepared to teach. The rehearsal is the choir's time for learning and practice. But the director's time for learning and practice is BEFORE the rehearsal.

Spend time alone with the music, getting familiar with the songs you're going to teach. You want to know the words by memory so that you can make eye contact with the choir while you teach. You want to know all of the vocal parts so that you can teach them with confidence.

What's the best way to learn the words and the parts? Practice singing the song! Sing it out loud, over and over and over. Sing the soprano line; sing the alto line; sing the tenor line and the bass line. Singing the song yourself helps you memorize everything. It also helps you recognize which parts of the song are the most challenging so you'll know what parts you might need to spend more time on during rehearsal.

Practice the song over the course of several days. You might work on it one day and feel like you completely know it, but then a couple days later there will be parts that you've forgotten. Your brain does much better at keeping information in long-term memory if you practice at several different times.

When a director is well prepared, the choir members know that the rehearsal is going to be productive and worth their time. If it seems like the teacher is unsure, it can be very discouraging to the choir. No choir member wants to see the director playing the CD during rehearsal trying to figure out how a line is supposed to go!

Now, in some choirs, the choir director is not the one who selects the music. If you have a music director who chooses the songs for the choir to learn, communicate with them about how much advance time you need to prepare songs before you teach them. I work with one choir where a music director picks the music for me. I try to prompt him well in advance about important occasions: “What songs do you have in mind for Easter this year?”; “Did you want to do any special music for Mother's Day?” The sooner I know what we're doing, the better I can be prepared, especially for any difficult music.

The Bible says that studying will make us into a worker that doesn't need to be ashamed. This principle definitely applies to the music ministry. The more we study, the less we'll need to apologize for when we stand up to teach the choir.