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.

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.

….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.