Getting People Out to Choir

[Jenny SmithParticipant]

I love choir! I am not the best singer, but I follow the Psalmist’s advice to “Make a joyful noise”. Here are some ideas I came across on Nauvoo.com

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My favorite ward choir always rehearsed after church…like noon. So, we always had a snack first. You can’t expect anyone to sing when they are starving and want to go home and eat.

We would pass around a sign-up for different members to bring a snack. It was usually small and simple, cheese and crackers or apples or even a loaf of bread, some p-nut butter and honey.

Well, we would have meet in the kitchen for the snack and it wasn’t long before we had a regular party in there. We were visiting and laughing and people in the hall wanted to be in on that. So they would come in and see what was going on. We would invite them to have a snack, the only requirement was to stay and sing. All this only lasted about 15 minutes but the ward choir became the social group to be in. And everyone was welcome.

It was a great choir…

We also had a nursery…very goood thing.

And, we had great parties outside of rehearsals.

On the subject of food…. My Gma’s unit has a choir director that makes awesome homemade bread. They have about 30 men and 12 women in the choir because all the men will do anything to get her yummy bread!

And also food related …. we bring lemon juice on the day of our choir’s Christmas program. It really does help you sing better (maybe even just psychologically), and we all get to laugh at each other gargling the sour stuff! It helps relieve the stress.

We also bring our kids. I love the idea of a family choir, and that’s what we have in our unit. It was so nice to have our kids singing Sally DeFord’s While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks By Night instead of “Jingle Bells, Shotgun Shells….” last Christmas! We got a lot of attendance by inviting kids, and our director even let the kids do a special verse of one song by themselves. They loved it!

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The hour of choir practice should be a spiritual experience. I’m in the choir and have been for 20 years. All four of my children have been in the choir with me. We have had great directors who take the time to talk about the music and what inspried the composer to write it, or the message in the words of the hymns. They stop once in a while and say, “Can you feel the Spirit in this music?” They write quotes from GA’s about music on the blackboard before the practice starts.

When I started, I couldn’t read a lick of music. I had very patient section leaders who would sit by me and answer my questions without sighing heavily every time I asked. I know that when my section leader raises his hand and says, “I’m having a bit of trouble with this part, can we have just our part played a couple of times,” that it isn’t him that is having trouble, it is me.

Don’t ask people like me to be a soloist, but you can ask me to sing in a double quartet when we sing just some hymn out of the hymn book. As long as my section leader is in the quartet with me.

When I was in the bishopric over music, I would meet with the ward Music committee, and they would talk about how to make practice more spiritual, not how to make the choir sound more like the MoTab. Often in those years, I could not come to practice because of conflicting meetings. One of my children or my section leader would record practice, and get my music so I could practice in the car while I was driving to and from work. The director would call me once in a while to see if they could help me with any questions.

Ask your bishopric to work with you to give you a practice hour each Sunday when there are no other meetings to conflict.

You cannot recruit people very effectivly, but your section leaders can. As can other choir memebers. Tell them to notice the people around them in Sacrament meeting. Find those who love to sing, no matter how good they are and invite them to choir. They will get better. (Most of the time.)

I go to choir because I am closer to Heavenly Father for an hour each Sunday. Depending on our meeting schedule, it is a great way to begin or end the Sabbath. I go because I am truly missed when I am not there. I go because I have great friends there. I go because it is a Spiritual experience each and every time.

Even when the squeaky sopranos are there. And they are there in almost every ward choir.

These bolded responses were made to someone who wrote a list of tips:

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Things that might make a difference.

1. Don’t be a snooty know-it-all director. (You are not God.) Yeah, but you have to know what you’re doing. I am a choral teacher for middle school and high school age kids and I’ve served as Ward Choir Director for 32 years.

2. Offer singing lessons and special singing instruction to those who feel inexperienced. (Often those in the choir don’t even know what their range is…) That’s why I audition each new member and test their vocal range, pitch recognition, whether they can sing in the same key consistently, etc.

3. Don’t do pieces that completely toss out a singing part… (like SAB, drives me nuts, all parts should have something worth singing) Sometimes you have to; I directed an 18-voice choir that had three men (none of them were tenors).

4. Include the youth. (You might even call their hometeacher and encourage them that this is a good way to get the family together.) But audition them the same way you do the rest of the choir and do it often, especially if their voices are still changing.

5. Get someone to call everyone in the choir regularly and issue personal invitations. (It doesn’t have to be you.) First thing is to get a choir president, librarian, and either a telephone person or assign section leaders to contact the people in their section. Publish a schedule and keep to it.

6. Allow different people to be soloists. But make sure they can sing well and loud enough to be a soloist.

7. Solicit suggestions from your own choir members and ward members, (perhaps during your calls) then followup to see if you are meeting their needs. (Perhaps members have a favorite song… or some kind of suggestion to make it better…) Good.

8. Don’t fall into the trap of just singing hymns or hymn arrangements. It bores the heck out of talented singers and directors if that is all you do. Try out some anthems or more difficult numbers. Test their sightsinging abilities.

Jenny says: If you do use auditions, use them as a teaching method, NOT to exclude folks from choir. Don’t be so retentive, choir leaders! Ward or Branch choir is about learning to sing and feeling the Spirit, not excluding newbies. I can point to many spiritual experiences I’ve had by singing in choir, and I doubt any of my directors would have let me sing if they had heard me audition first. :) As it was brought out in a later post, sometimes the Spirit comes from the voices of the Choir, sometimes from the music. Just let it come.

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Our choir director (who is a fantastic musician) calls us all the time to make sure we’re coming to rehersal. She’s actually the only reason I sang on Easter Sunday. Due to sickness and scheduling, I hadn’t managed to be at ANY of the rehersals before Easter Sunday. However, when she called me the week before to see if I was coming and I let her know that I was not in the state that day and didn’t know if I should sing in the choir on Easter, she told me that she had every confidence in my abilities and really would like me there on Easter. So, I went to rehersal on Sunday, and got to perform some music that day that I’d seen for the first time an hour or so ago. (Luckily I sight read well, and I’m a soprano, so I have an easy part)

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I’ve found that you need several things to have a successful ward choir:

1) an accompaniest (sp?) that can really play. The single most important thing in all of singing. No question, you need the best player in the ward. Fortunately for me, the bishopric agreed. Which brings me to #2

2) Support of the leadership. I don’t just mean lip service. I mean showing up for rehearsal. Now, I know that the Bishop may have a tough time coming with all his other stresses, but when the Bishopric called me, I asked that at least one member of every auxilury presidency come to choir each week. Then, I know that what happens in choir will also be distributed to the ward. (OK, it’s also a cheap way to get more men to come to choir.)

3) Stake led conducting lessons for ward choir director. I know that this may be hard in some areas, but it’s not in my area of Salt Lake. The quality of choir improves dramatically if the director knows what they are doing. (Even if you only do this once a quarter, I still think that this is valuable. It’s not like ward choir directors have a ton of other assignments during the week.)

4) Have a lot of people come, and feel comfortable coming.

One of the amazing things I’ve learned about ward choir is the amount of people who don’t think they “can sing.” For the most part, it just ain’t true!

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One thing our stake does that is just totally excellent: For the last 8 or ten years, every second Sunday in December, all the ward choirs come together for an “Evening of Christmas Music.” You come and sing one or two of the pieces you are practicing for your Christmas program. In between numbers while the choirs are moving on and off the choir loft, the “congregation” sings one or two verses of the Christmas selections in the hymn book. The choirs sound great, and the “congregation” made up of 9 ward choirs sounds great as well. It is a wonderful thing we look forward to each year and something I would recommend you tell you Stake Music people about. It is very easy to put together and since you are practicing the pieces anyway, you might as well get extra mileage out of them. The only thing the stake people have to do is get the numbers together and make sure that there aren’t any duplicate arrangements of the same pieces. We have 9 wards in our stake and the program lasts between 90 minutes and two hours. But it moves very quickly.

Bonus: It is nice to see how the other choirs are doing, and it has raised the level of our choirs throughout the stake.

Sets a nice tone for Christmas.

We do the same thing — a Stake Night of Music in our stake. Love it. The Spanish Ward puts us all to shame with about 120 people in the ward choir. Seriously. They all dress the same (red shawls for the women and red ties on the men) and actually spill off the stand! They aren’t the most harmonious bunch, but you can’t hear them sing without crying. At the end anyone in the congregation can go up to the stand and the congregation and “choir” sing Handel’s Messiah. It rocks!!! (I just wish they’d print the words to the song on the program tho b/c I don’t know them…)

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Ask every choir memeber to bring one new person with them. Any person.

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Here are some thoughts that came to me as I read this wonderful thread:

-Even if you are a fabulous singer and can sight read at the drop of a hat, skipping choir practices indicates that you look at a choral presentation as more of a sing-along.

-If we don’t have fun at every single choir practice, I’d feel as a choir director that I hadn’t done my job. We work hard, but practices are very positive and cheerful.

-Use members of your choir to take charge of sectionals for part of your regular practice. This means much less wasted time.

-Always tell the choir why you are having them repeat a section when they are practicing.

-Choose music with different levels of difficulty. When your choir is able to meet a challenge, the participants will be thrilled.

-I have teenagers and one Primary boy in my ward choir and I’m happy to have them.

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Music With The Masters.” Each Ward Choir was to present a musical number from a composer who would be featured that year. Soloists (both vocal and instrumental) would also present a piece here and there. Two or three short talks about the composer would be given. There would also be a combined number featuring everyone who was a performer in the “grand finale.” It would need to be planned out pretty far in advance, but it could have worked out, especially if everyone knew it was coming. Since each Ward Choir only had to learn their number and the finale, it wouldn’t be too much to do.

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One of the things our choir director keeps telling us is that none of us have great voices, but together, we SOUND great!

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Every fall I try to think of an enticing and fun way to recruit for our ward choir. Last year’s poster went over particularly well. I took head-shot photos of all the choir members and cut and pasted them around the perimeter of a large poster board. Down the middle of the poster, I listed the following “quotes” from choir members that would encourage new members:

NEW SEASON FOR CHOIR – NEW REASONS TO JOIN

“I was in the choir and got a new house!â€

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