There’s been a lot of media interest recently in a national revival in singing. How has this affected me? When you look at where this revival is taking place, it’s mostly in the unauditioned sector, and though this isn’t where I usually operate, it may have an impact on choirs such as the South West Festival Chorus or on ‘come and sing’ day events, which I do sometimes join. I’d like to think also that if more people are trying out their voices, that more basses and tenors might be discovered. They’re out there; I once heard a College director of music say that he could hear that some of the men who read lessons in his chapel would have excellent voices, if only they thought of trying singing.
Rather surprising in the light of this is that competition for singers in Bath has apparently got hotter in recent years, with some choirs having difficulty getting members to be sufficiently committed to them. One is planning to wind up in 2010.
Is it that there are more choirs competing for the same singers? (as for example happened in Bristol a few years ago, causing the demise of the Brandon Hill Singers.) The only newcomers on the scene are Chorus Angelorum and A Handful of Singers, both of which only perform occasionally (neither to my knowledge gave a concert this last autumn).
I suspect that the shortage of singers may be in the lower voices as sopranos are almost invariably the strongest section (I used to be in one choir in Bath where this was the case, and left realising that my own contribution didn’t count for very much).
I wonder also whether choirs are requiring more commitment, and perhaps people are just busier, and so individual singers who might once have sung in two are now confining themselves to one, thereby reducing the pool available. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, having seen the effects of a large overlap between choirs in the previous place I lived in (it effectively excluded too many competent singers from singing in a small choir at all).
Perhaps it is the demise of the parish choir that has led to the creation of “community choirs”. But alas, as the parish choir has become rare, so has exposure of singing in the daily lives of those once involved in it. In my diocese in the states, the smaller Episcopal parishes have largely lost their choirs to God forbid, “praise music” or more commonly nothing at all, while the cathedral choir has gotten more professionalized (yet still seeking singers with that “perfect” sound). I don’t know if this is a good thing or not, but the dying of local singing is surely hurting culture in our small towns.
Probably the lack of overlap between church and concert choirs ought to be another blog topic – in fact I touched on it in a post a few years ago. Certainly I know of places where your reputation as a singer goes down if you are known to sing in a parish church choir. Another trend here – also perhaps one for another topic – is that some Cathedrals are setting up mixed adult choirs to sing (say) one service a week or month, presumably to catch some of the many men and women trained in church music who have no suitable outlet in their local parish.