The Mashup of Popular Music and Classical Choir

I am a classical choral musician. And…everyone is asleep. I live in this strange period in music history where the music that I make is considered high art but very few people want to attend our concerts. I take this art form very seriously and have dedicated my career to choral music education, yet there is something missing.

A few years ago this reality hit me all at once. Classical musicians, through an often stubborn adherence to tradition, are failing to engage people in the music we create and perform. We are failing at audience engagement. In the past year, I have challenged myself to do choral music differently. The following project was born from these thoughts.

Banjos and fiddles and mandolins…oh my

As a self-taught guitar player I entered the bluegrass arena with knowledge of lead sheet and chord chart notation, but I had no understanding of the style itself. A colleague introduced me to Big City Folk Band, a group of undergraduate students that had formed a bluegrass band. Meeting this band inspired me to arrange several bluegrass tunes for women’s chorus and bluegrass band. I recently had the opportunity to perform one of these pieces at a traditional choral concert.

Preparing this piece for concert looked a lot like every other choral concert preparation that I had experienced. With sheet music in hand, the singers struggled to read the notes and rhythms on the page while a pianist chunked along helping them with their parts. As days and weeks went by the singers got better and better. As the concert approached, the singers worked toward memorization. Then, with two weeks to go, the bluegrass band walked into the room. Everything changed.

I held a rehearsal as if a classical string quartet had walked into the room. “OK…everyone please look at measure 20. Please note the dynamics here. We’re going to take this a little under tempo. And…go.” At this first run the band was spectacular, but the singers crashed and burned. It took a few runs for the singers to overlook the new stimulus in the room.

It took a lot longer for me to realize that this experience could not be a conductor-led dictatorship. I realized that my musical training had taught me to tightly control every element of the performance. A real collaboration was required to do this well. The bluegrass musicians’ musical experience had taught them to collaborate. Their approach was so much more intuitive to this music than mine.

In those two weeks leading to the performance we eventually found our groove. The band was able to realize my score, the singers found their balance, and I continued to let go of my control. It took a great deal of compromise to make this happen. I abandoned my rehearsal plan and the bluegrass band abandoned some their improvisatory instinct. By performance day, we were ready.

The performance

This particular concert featured the entire choral department. Five choirs made their way on and off the stage with various vocal soloists performing between sets. The singing was beautiful, sensitive, and inspiring. Until the bluegrass band took the stage, though, the concert was fairly typical. When the band took the stage it felt different. There was a unique blend of timbres that the audience wasn’t used to. The singers were, overall, more engaged than they had been in previous concerts. And the audience loved it.

What I learned

Our performance was not perfect. And that is ok. Most of the things that I’d like to fix, however, involved me giving up control and letting the performance happen. As more time passes I find that this performance was transformative. I find that my perception of choral performance can never be the same.

Here are the things that I learned through this process.

• Popular musicians do not wait to be taught a piece of music but go out and learn it on their own. When they receive instruction in their music courses it is often more like a coaching. Imagine what classical ensembles would look like if they came to class with their music learned and the conductor was more of a facilitator!
• Collaboration can allow me to be a part of something much bigger than myself. The more I give up control and trust my collaborators the greater the outcomes.
• Though I am comfortable reading lead sheet notation, I had no clue how to write a quality chart. I had to sit down with a popular music colleague to remedy my deficiencies in this area.
• Less is more. When writing for a band, give them only as much information as they need to understand how the song will go. They know the their style better than I do and they will bring that knowledge to the performance.

Where do I go from here?

I do not claim to be an expert in popular music styles or pedagogy but I am thirsty to learn more. While we classical musicians have closed our eyes and clenched our fists around our traditions our popular music brethren have figured a lot of stuff out. While we have sought to find the perfect tone popular musicians have expanded the palate of tone and timbre far beyond our comfort zone. While we have struggled to teach audiences not to clap between movements, popular musicians have learned how to keep audiences on the edge of their seats…or abandoned seats altogether. We choral musicians can learn so much.

My personal quest for heightened singer and audience engagement will continue.     I will seek new collaboration and practice being a better collaborator. Closely observing all creators of music will allow me to learn from their successes. I do not advocate throwing away hundreds of years of tradition but I believe we need to constantly reexamine those traditions.