Author Archives: Liz Nicholas

About Liz Nicholas

Liz is a passionate community music leader, working primarily with adults in different settings. She believes everyone can sing and make music to a level that gives them pleasure and a way of expressing themselves.

What a weekend! Street Choirs in Sheffield

I’m still buzzing after last weekend’s Street Choirs Festival in Sheffield. Three choirs hosted it together – Carfield, Out Aloud, and the Sheffield Socialist Choir.

Those of us on the committee – that’s nine people, three from each choir – have been meeting once a fortnight since July last year to make it happen (and actually that’s quite a short time to organise such a massive event.) We made checklists and got invaluable advice from people who’d done it before, and dedicated much of our lives to reading Street-Choirs-related emails. At peak time a couple of weeks ago I got 22 in an hour.

As the date approached it started feeling a little unreal, but then on Friday afternoon people I didn’t know started turning up at the Octagon. People from outside Sheffield, who’d come to Street Choirs. We’d made it happen!

We’d changed things up a bit this year, moving the Massed Sing practice to the Friday evening, but I thought that worked really well. We opened with a song from the three host choirs combined, which made it feel welcoming and like a performance, and then raced through all the songs pretty swiftly, and finished the evening with brilliant sets from The Sparkle Sistaz and The Young ‘Uns.

Until last Friday, I’d never conducted more than 40 people at once. On Friday I conducted 130, our Festival Choir of the combined host choirs. We had to rehearse in a room meant for 80, which meant I was about 18 inches from the front row, because the stage hadn’t been built in time – but when we performed it was amazing. Everyone had rehearsed separately and the three choirs came together as one. Hearing them sing a song I’d written (Choir Where I Belong) was incredible. Five minutes later I was leading nearly 1000 people – which I had been extremely nervous about. I thought it would be like steering a very large oil tanker but I found the hall full of singers very responsive. They really had learnt the songs in advance this year and the sound surrounding me was phenomenal.

Saturday morning saw 40 choirs singing in 13 locations around the city centre, converging at the Peace Gardens where 1000 of us sang together at lunchtime. The picture at the top gives you an idea of what that looked like from the Alto end. It’s quite an experience (although it’s always hard to hear the other parts if there are 300+ of yours). There was a fantastic crowd there to watch, and it was really stirring.

In the afternoon and evening, we had concerts where each choir sang to everyone else – 35 of them, at any rate, as we couldn’t fit any more in. I love watching other choirs – it’s fascinating and I often pick up new repertoire at Street Choirs. I’ve got notes in my programme as to which choir directors I’ll be contacting to find out more about their songs. At about 10.45, after Out Aloud’s fantastic closing set, the other two host choirs joined them on stage and we sang a rousing Hail, Smiling Morn to finish. And then people sang in the bar till it closed at 1am.

There’s lots more photos here on the Street Choirs website (live till the end of July 2024) and videos on our videos page.

Running and Singing

I’ve written before about the similarities between running and singing but I was out this morning in the spring sunshine and a very specific thought struck me.

I was trying to stay focused on my body, keeping a rhythm going, controlling my breath – I know, I know, it’s like singing, we’re keeping a rhythm and managing our breathing, but that’s not quite what this post is about. What I was telling myself as I plodded round the park was, “abs, and glutes, and tuck your tail under”. Of course, I turned it into a little song in my head.

I’ve been trying to build up my strength and run in a way that should prevent me from getting injured, so I’ve been doing a lot of exercises using my stomach and bum muscles, instead of putting so much strain on my lower back, hamstrings and knees. I’m definitely getting stronger, but what I find hard is to remember to use all these muscles when I’m actually running. I’ll think about where I’m going, and is my ankle still twinging, am I going to get back in time for that parcel, and was that a robin? and I’m just putting one foot in front of the other in a slightly ramshackle way like I always have. Hence the song and trying to run more consciously, using the right muscles and staying aligned on every step.

THIS is today’s parallel. We do lovely warmups at the beginning of the rehearsal, breathing in deeply, controlling the exhale, and standing in a strong, well-balanced way. Depending on the week, we might practise creating a lovely legato sound, building a precise rhythm or enunciating our words clearly. And then we start singing a real song and we just sing, not really thinking about any of the things we learnt in the warmup.

It takes work. It takes lots of practice, consciously engaging your brain and muscles, to improve the way you run, or sing. It might feel a little mechanical to start with, and you’ll forget after a while, but it really does help. Just take one thing first – try standing tall, with soft knees, a long neck and wide shoulders. If you notice your posture slip (in whatever your idiosyncracies are – rounded shoulders, standing lopsided with one hip out, lifting your chin too high), just fix it on the next in-breath. The more you do this, the more good habits you will build and when this becomes second nature you can move on to another aspect.

New Year 2024

….and I’m late already!

It’s the 19th of January as I’m writing this. It really annoys me when I find out-of-date information on other people’s websites so I should have made it more of a priority, but here we are, with Carfield telling us about a concert that happened on December 2nd last year.

It was great, by the way. There are some videos to give you a flavour of the afternoon, although the sound isn’t great.

2024 is going to be a fun year. The pinnacle of our programme is the weekend of June 7th to 9th when we are joining with Sheffield Socialist Choir and Out Aloud, Sheffield’s LGBT+ choir, to host the Street Choirs Festival 2024. It will be 40 years since the inaugural event, also in Sheffield, that started the Street Choirs movement.

Street Choirs is a huge festival, involving up to 40 choirs. There will be concerts, choirs singing out of doors, a massed sing with hundreds of voices joining together, workshops, friendships new and old. It’s going to be great. But there’s a lot to do to make sure that everyone has the best time. We’re starting to learn songs but the organisation has been under way for months now.

Before that, we’ll be having a Not-very-far-Awayday at Heeley Institute on February 10th, where we can spend a whole day singing together and do something new. Before lockdown we used to have residential weekends away, but this year we decided to stay local, and more affordable, because we want as many people as possible to join in.

Our main aim though, for 2024, is to keep singing every week. To meet together and enjoy the power and thrill of singing with other people. Performing is fun, and it’s the reason some people do music, but it’s not the be-all and end-all for our choir. We’re very happy to welcome singers who like singing in a group but don’t want to perform.

Together (Again!) In Festive Song

Book your tickets now for our uplifting, heartwarming Christmas celebration. Songs familiar and unfamiliar celebrating Christmastime, performed by Carfield Community Choir, the Sheffield Carers’ and Friends Choir, and the Inspire Choir, (Chesterfield’s learning-disability-friendly choir).

Scan the QR code or click this link to buy tickets from Ticketsource.

small park BIG SING

We’ve always supported small park BIG RUN, which is held in our local park every June. It’s an event which raises funds for children’s projects in Gaza and women’s education in Palestine. The park is roughly the size of a refugee camp in Palestine that is home to 21,000 people, and we’re encouraged to reflect on the restrictions on movement that people there have to live with constantly.

Runners and walkers complete laps of the park over the 24 hours from Saturday noon to Sunday noon. People can sign up for whatever they want to commit to – from half an hour to 24 hours, at whatever speed works for you. This year two amazing individuals ran for the whole 24 hours despite a torrential thunderstorm in the darkest hours of the early morning!

Some of our choir members signed up for shorter stints – (four of us were in the park at 10.30pm) and as well as the running & walking we had our first BIG SING. About 200 singers from six local choirs and beyond joined our voices to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. It was incredibly moving, opening with an Arabic translation of the lyrics being spoken over instrumental accompaniment, then the singers joining in, in unison to start with and then splitting into three gorgeous harmony lines.

The technology all worked and we had a live link to the projects in Gaza that we are fundraising for, as we sang together to let people know they are not forgotten, and that we stand with them.

I wasn’t the only one with tears in my eyes by the time we finished.

Helen Lyle was the conductor, and Emer McKay created the arrangement and played keyboard. The bass player was Nuala and the drummer Noah.

The other choirs were:
Sheffield Socialist Choir
Tadhamon
Purple Cats
Sheffield One World Choir
Body of Sound

Christmas is Coming!

We’re doing a concert – here’s everything you need to know.

We’re so looking forward to singing with the Carers & Friends Choir, and the Inspire Choir, on a wintry afternoon in the very beautiful Upper Chapel.

Look at the 360-degree tour here and see for yourself.

We’ll be singing songs old and new, some familiar and some less so, sharing the Christmas values of peace, joy and togetherness. Come along.

Don’t Fear the Theory 4: Repeats

So far we’ve learnt about counting out the pulse, the heartbeat of the music. You know what a bar is and how to count through it. You might be expecting us to start learning to read the notes. I’m going to take a left turn here, though, and jump straight to navigating your way around the music. The next three sections are all about how to follow a song on the page.

When we write the lyrics of a song, usually we write out everything that happens in the order that it happens. Sometimes, if there’s a chorus that comes back using the same words every time, you might just get “Chorus” in the text, or the first couple of words with some dots (e.g. So hoist up the John B’s sails…)

When you have all the music for a song, especially one in four parts, it takes up a lot of space. Much of the music will be repeated. Each verse will have the same tune but different words. There might be a bridge or a refrain that comes back several times. In musical notation we use several systems to send you back to a previous location to recycle some music you have sung before.

The most straightforward is the repeat.

What to look for on the page:

Two dots in the five lines of the stave mark the beginning and the end of the section that is repeated. When you get to this sign you go back to the opening set of dots and sing that section again.

Help! I can’t find the opening dots.

If you get to an end-repeat sign and you can’t find the begin-repeat sign, that means repeat from the beginning.

If there are two or more lines of lyrics underneath the music, sing the second ones the second time through. And the third one the third time through…

The graphic above shows you how to navigate a repeated section in the middle of a piece – this is exactly what happens in “Accentuate the Positive”. Intro, sung once, middle section, sung twice (or more, that’s a performance decision), and finally the outro which just comes once.

Hope that helps.

Don’t Fear the Theory 3: Time signatures

What to look for on the page:

Here are some time signatures.

Four-four is by far the commonest time signature so sometimes the numbers are replaced by a letter C to indicate Common Time.

Scarborough-Fair-clip Download

It’s written once, at the beginning of the piece (look, there are no time signatures on the 2^nd line of music). You will only get another time signature if it changes during the piece, which is unusual.

You say the two numbers one after the other, top then bottom: Two-four, three-four, six-eight.

The top number tells you how many beats in the bar.

Simple Time Signatures  have the number 2, 3 or 4 at the top, and this number tells you how many beats there are in the bar.

(I’ve debated whether to include the next paragraph here, but I decided to put it in for the sake of completeness. Don’t worry if you don’t understand, as we will come back and look at it in detail.)

Compound Time Signatures have the numbers 6, 9 or 12 at the top and you divide that number by 3 to get the number of beats in the bar. 6/8 has 2 beats, 9/8 has 3 beats, and 12/8 has 4 beats. There will be a whole post later about listening to and identifying these time signatures.

With the time signature and the tempo instruction (if there is one!) you have your metre for the song, the underlying template that the notes and rhythms sit on top of.

The pattern a conductor beats usually shows you the time signature and the first beat of every bar is shown by the hand or baton coming straight down.

The first beat of the bar is called the DOWNBEAT. If you get lost you can get back on track by looking or listening for the downbeat.

Vocab of the Week:

Time signature – two numbers written on top of each other at the beginning of a piece to indicate the metre.

Downbeat – the first (strongest) beat in a bar

Common Time – 4/4 time

Don’t Fear the Theory 2: Bars and measures

All non-alcoholic!

Welcome back This week’s theme is Metre.

It’s another of those words that has more than one definition. We know a metre as the metric unit of length. This is a different concept, and yet… measuring out the music is exactly what we are doing.

The regular ongoing pulse of a piece of music is divided into short equal segments of (usually) 2, 3 or 4 beats.

We count out the beats and 1 is stronger, so that you can hear the metre.

1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4

1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3

1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2 1 2

Each group of beats is called a bar. Each bar consists of a certain number of beats, usually 2, 3 or 4. Four is BY FAR the most common.

These are the lego blocks a song is built with. They all join up together and there are no gaps. The bumps are all evenly spaced, but a wall built with six-bump bricks will have a different look and feel from a wall built out of eight-bump bricks.

Try listening to, or singing, these tunes and working out whether they are in 3- or 4-time:

She’ll be coming round the mountain, Baa Baa Black Sheep, Happy Birthday, Verdi’s La donna è mobile, Oh my darling Clementine – anything you like, really.

Because it’s hard to count and sing, use your left hand to tap where you think the strong beat is and the right hand for the other beats.

Being able to feel the beat, and the metre (whether it’s 4, 2 or 3 or 1anda2anda) comes with practice. If you can feel where the strong beat is at the beginning of the bar it helps you to stay with the other musicians and find your way back in when you get lost.

Singers and musicians who don’t read music need to know what a bar is because it is how we measure the music. You don’t say, “Come in when I’ve played this intro for 14.2 seconds”, you say, “Come in after 8 bars”.

NB: If you are American (it’s all right, you can’t help it), you will find the word “measure” used instead of bar, and bar-lines may be referred to as “bars”.

What to look for on the page

This is what a musical bar looks like:

It is the space in between the two lines. These are the bar-lines.

American terms: Measure instead of Bar, and (confusingly) Bar instead of Bar-line.

You will see the bars are like little bricks building the music.

Here’s a set of four bars – a lot of songs and pieces are built out of four-bar sections.

In written music you will sometimes see little numbers written above the stave at the beginning of each line – these are the bar numbers. They can be very useful for knowing where you are (particularly in those songs where you sing the same words a lot and it’s very hard to know which “Put a little love” you’re supposed to start at this time.

One more thing: Each bar has the same number of beats and the tempo keeps going. So every bar lasts the same amount of time. In written music, how long a bar is on the page will depend on how many notes there are in it, and on the lyrics, if it’s a song.

Rockin-Around-the-Christmas-Tree-clip Download

Here’s an example from a real score. Notice the bar number (17) at the beginning of the line. Try singing the line to get a feel for it. Can you tap out the pulse while you do this?

Bar 20 is much smaller than the others, but that’s because it has one word, one long note, filling the whole bar. It lasts for the same four beats as the other bars.

Got it?

I hope this makes sense. Get in touch if you have any questions or comments.

There will be more on time, next time.

Vocab of the week:

Metre

Bar – it’s really important to understand this basic unit of music

Bar-line

Two, three or four beats in a bar

Sidebar for poetry nerds

If you’ve studied poetry you may know metre as the difference between the sound of

“Do you remember an inn, Miranda, Do you remember an inn?” and

“I wandered lonely as a cloud, That floats on high o’er vales and hills” or

“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack”

In musical terms this is a rhythm. The metre is the underlying strong beat – all of these work on a 4-beat pattern, with the second strong beat coming on “Do,” “floats”, and “salt”.

PULSE

Don’t Fear the Theory – 1

Welcome to Don’t Fear the Theory, an introduction to music theory for everyone, particularly people who make music already. Each week’s section will take about five minutes to read, and will have ideas for you to explore further if you want to.

The first aspect of music we’re going to explore is PULSE.

You know what a pulse is, right? It’s a place where you can feel your heartbeat. If we can’t find your pulse, you are in serious trouble.

Your pulse keeps going the whole time. If you’ve just run upstairs you will be able to feel your pulse really strongly. If you’re asleep or eating your tea, you don’t even feel it, but it’s there all the time, keeping you alive.

The pulse in a piece of music is the heartbeat that keeps it going all the time. It’s a regular beat. Sometimes it’s really obvious, in a piece of music with a drumbeat. Sometimes it’s hard to hear when the music has long notes and no drums. But it’s there all the time.

When your foot taps to a piece of music or you feel like clapping along, that’s the pulse that you are feeling. People talk about clapping “to the beat” but I’m going to use the word beat very specifically, for ONE unit of the pulse. The pulse is made of a series of equal beats.

What you need to understand about the pulse is that it’s still going on when you have a long, long note, or a silence. Each note and silence has to be the right length so that the pulse keeps going.

If the pulse stops or is uneven, the music doesn’t feel right. As the graphic at the top of the page shows, a regular heart beat is healthy, and an uneven one is worrying. If you’re playing or singing, you have to keep that pulse going. It’s a bit like a video game where the background scrolls along and you have to keep up with it. You have to feel the pulse in your body, and communicate it to your audience.

The pulse can be any speed. We measure it in beats per minute, like a nurse measures your pulse. The speed of the pulse is called the Tempo. That just means “time” in Italian, the language that is used extensively for instructions in classical music.

Try tapping along to these different pieces of music and feeling the different speeds:

The slow movement of the Ravel piano concerto in G – about 72 bpm*

*You’ll find that different performers of classical pieces will choose slightly different tempi (that’s the plural of tempo).

Ever fallen in love with someone by the Buzzcocks – about 178 bpm

The Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem – about 148 bpm

This is 84 beats per minute

We can use a gizmo called a metronome to give us a steady pulse at a certain tempo – here’s a real-life clockwork one, and two digital apps that do the same job.

Vintage wooden metronome music timer on the white background

I’ve used my phone app to work out the tempo of the tracks above. You tap along and it tells you the speed. It’s very hard to tap consistently. Trying to keep an absolutely regular pulse going is hard and gives you a lot of respect for drummers.

On recording software you get a click-track so that if you are singing and playing you stay in time.

If you sing in a choir or play in a band, the pulse is what your conductor is showing you with their hands. It’s the ESSENTIAL thing. Everybody needs to feel the same pulse for us to make music together.

Something to try:

Turn on the radio to a random music station. Can you tap along regularly to whatever is playing? Use a hand on your thigh – it generally feels less stupid than clapping.

Try a different station in a different style – Kerrang! or Jazz FM.

Try another station – maybe Classic FM or Radio 3.

Are different genres of music easier to tap along to?

I’m keeping comments open on these pages – let me know how you get on!

Vocab of the week:

PULSE – heartbeat of the music, a succession of regular beats.

BEAT – one unit of pulse.

TEMPO – speed of the pulse

METRONOME / CLICK TRACK – device for generating a pulse at a particular tempo

What to look for on the page:

The information about the tempo of the pulse is at the top left of the piece. There may be a metronome mark showing how many beats per minute, or just a descriptive word telling you whether it’s fast, slow, or moderate – or tell you about the mood: lively, melancholy, or jaunty.