I was sent a survey by email today, about music and how the score of wildlife documentaries affect the viewer’s perception of the creatures they are watching.  I almost shouted “Yes!” out loud.  Almost all the wildlife and nature programmes we watch have a human-created soundtrack on top of them and it really affects how we think about the pictures we are seeing.

The survey used out-of-copyright pieces of classical music, which was distracting because they are familiar, unlike the scores we usually hear in these programmes.  However, it certainly highlighted the fact that if you see a shark swimming elegantly along with menacing low strings playing, you think, “Killing machine”, whereas if it had ripply harp arpeggios, you might just enjoy its sinuous beauty.  We are so used to having background music, though, that we don’t always notice it – or that our responses are being affected by it.

I have particularly enjoyed a segment that’s been introduced in Springwatch and Autumnwatch during lockdown – the Mindful Moment.  These are 90-second-long pieces, all exquisitely filmed, but I think they are especially meditative because they only use the sounds of nature rather than imposing a human soundtrack.  The audio is, of course, collected and edited by a human and I’m sure the fish we see jumping may not always be the fish we hear, but the intention is for us to value the sounds that belong to the natural world.  

At the beginning of lockdown, last March, there was an audible reduction in human-made noise.  The natural sounds of birdsong, woodpeckers drumming, and water running were easier to hear and carried further, even in the heart of town.  The qualitative difference in background noise was something to savour on every walk around the park.  I think it’s encouraged me to listen more closely to natural sounds, so that I hear them better even now the background is noisier again.  When you first hear hidden noises, you start to listen out for them, and then they become more obvious.

Much as I love music – and I do – there are times when I do not want to listen to it. If I am outside I like to hear what I am seeing. I like the wind in the trees, the rain on leaves, whether the stream is rushing along full or trickling quietly.  If you look at apps or recordings for relaxation, most of them involve natural sounds.  The sounds themselves are soothing, but if we listen to them while looking and paying attention to whatever makes them the effect is amplified.  Our eyes and ears work together creating sensations that connect us to the natural world;  it takes us out of ourselves and away from our own concerns.

Listening to nature, we have to create a silence and be comfortable in it – no chatting, no rushing, no music. This is not always easy, but it always helps to find a little calm and mental space.

There is a big decision to make at the beginning of any group musical activity.  Are you going to audition, or are you going to welcome everyone who feels like coming along?

I’m going to talk about choirs specifically here, though the same values hold for instrumentalists, whether violinists or drummers.

If you audition, you can choose the people who already know what they are doing to some extent.  You get a chance to hear them singing on their own and make a judgment about their voice.  You might want to choose people who can read music, which might open up more complex repertoire.  You can choose people who have sung in a choir before, so they are used to following a conductor, and singing a part that is different from the group two feet away. You run the risk of not attracting enough people who meet your standards, but sometimes people like the challenge of an audition, and the feeling of achievement if they are one of the chosen ones.

However, if you welcome everybody, you will get more people coming along, and you are automatically going to get a more diverse bunch of people.  You are sending the message that singing is for everyone – anyone can do it – and it brings us together. 

There is a risk that by emphasising that there is no audition, and no need to read music, that you will put off people with musical experience.  Some people worry that this means you are not serious about the music, that if a choir allows people with less experience to take part, the quality of what is achieved must be low.

This is simply not true – an audition only tells you what people can do now, and not what they are capable of doing. A choir learning a song together develops every member’s singing.

The skills of being able to remember and sing back a melody, and hold a tune while other people sing a harmony, are learnt by doing. You learn them by being in a choir.  The quality of each person’s voice is unique, and the blend of different voices produces the choral texture we enjoy.  In an “everyone welcome” choir, songs are learnt partly or wholly by ear, although we also use printed music as part of our learning. Interestingly, most auditioned choral societies and chamber choirs offer sound files as well as sheet music these days. These are just means to an end, steps on the journey to making music.

I know for a fact that our choir, with our all-inclusive policy, sings beautifully, with good tone, expression and musicality.  A friend who has only ever sung in auditioned choral societies literally couldn’t believe how good we sounded when she heard our performance at the City Hall in May 2018.  Those results do not come from people being able to read music, or sing a solo. They come from singing, over and over again, listening, refining, and thinking.  It takes time and dedication, and the more each individual sings, the better we sound.

The wonderful Frankie Armstrong said it best, when talking about choirs that welcome everybody,

Last week I mentioned the radio programme Singing Together, and in the BBC Archive I discovered a feature Jarvis Cocker made about it.  With apologies to Jarvis, much of this post is stolen directly from his broadcast. 

Singing Together started in 1939.  It was put together as the evacuation of schoolchildren started on the 1^st of September and the first programme aired on the 25^th of September. I found the wartime accounts very touching.

Here’s a quote from Brenda Jenkins, a young teacher from Ilford who was sent to teach evacuees in Mansfield.  

“Some of them, I’m afraid, were very sad. They had contagious diseases, I would have to take them to the doctors, and they were very little to be away from their parents…  Singing Always Helps… It didn’t matter if you sang well or not, nobody cared, nobody noticed, because you were singing together.  Boys could sing as loudly as they liked.”

The selection of songs followed simple rules: each programme should have a song with a beautiful melody, a song with a rousing chorus, and a nonsense song.  I love this precise definition of songs that are fun to sing.

The first presenter was Herbert Wiseman, a Scot. 

“From 1939-1946 I was privileged to teach new songs, not just to children but to mothers. Mothers, I’m afraid, deserted their Monday morning washtubs to join us. I’m still touched to meet, from Caithness to the Isle of Wight, from Newcastle to Ballymena, some of these mothers who remember singing with us.”

The war disrupted social groups and families.  Schools would suddenly have people missing, or new people arriving. You can feel alone in a group, but even when you don’t know the other people, singing together creates a team spirit. Ask any football crowd.

The programmes were very popular but the BBC top brass were snooty about them:

“A very jolly social occasion but can hardly be considered musical training”.  They were even described as “an obstacle to more extensive musical training”.

The aims of the programme were not to learn formal musical terminology (which is often what people mean by musical education) but to encourage children to sing together and increase their repertory of songs.  Musical instructions were very simple (try not to shout). 

Teachers noted that “children developed rapidly in the art of picking up a tune.”  What is that if it’s not musical education?  The more you listen and sing along, the better you get at remembering the shape of a tune, and the faster you will learn new tunes.  Generations of children learned songs they remembered for the rest of their lives.

Singing together is a powerful shared experience and we are missing it greatly at the moment.  We are all isolated in our own houses. We are fortunate to have access to a huge variety of recorded music on our different devices.  It’s very easy to sing along to music as an individual in 2021, but it’s nothing like singing with other people.

Projects like our own Indoorus Chorus and Opera North’s Couch to Chorus offer the nearest thing we can to singing together.  It’s a live event. We are all singing the same songs at the same time, joining in with recorded voices.  Perhaps it’s not that different from those little evacuees sitting in a school hall far away from home, with dozens of strangers. Or their mothers, back in the city, neglecting their Monday wash to sing along with their faraway child.

Singing Always Helps.

We’ve been singing “The Sloop John B” this term.  This is a song I first learnt at school, from one of those wonderful Singing Together collections, published by the BBC and linked to a radio programme, though at our school we never listened to the radio.  I don’t know if it was just the booklets that we had in stock, but I remember there being an awful lot of seafaring songs – The Mermaid, Shenandoah, and this one for a start.  

It’s one of those songs in which the music seems to flatly contradict the content of the lyrics. It’s jolly and rollicking and upbeat. It’s in a cheerful major key and swings along merrily. Meanwhile, we are hearing in the lyrics how “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”  

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading The Worst Journey in the World.  This is the story of Scott’s Antarctic expedition of 1910-13, written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest people in the crew.  The conditions they endured are almost unimaginable, with temperatures down to -77°F, chasm-like crevasses, howling winds that sound like an express train going through a tunnel for days on end.  Their food is a mixture of pemmican, biscuit and cocoa, although at the point I’ve reached they are having to kill their ponies and are eating the meat.  In 1911 they knew that lime juice prevented scurvy, but they did not know about vitamins or that you had to take them daily – they thought scurvy was some kind of bacterial infection, made worse by too little sleep. Why am I enjoying this book?

Telling tales of the trips you’ve been on is both enjoyable and entertaining.  How it rained every day, and how terrible the food was at that particular pub, and how rude the landlord at the B&B, are the really memorable bits. We survived!  Now that you are telling it in a nice warm space, with friends and a drink, it enhances all the things you might take for granted – like a roof, a warm bed, and enough to eat.  It gives you a warm glow to look back and see how you got through situations that were physically and mentally exhausting.

That’s where the major key comes in. That’s why it doesn’t seem inappropriate to have a cheerful, upbeat tune when you’re singing about awful times. The music adds a layer of depth to the lyrics. It reminds you that your horrible experience is now something you can put in a box and confine to the past, with relief and gratitude.  

If you would like to try getting better at singing in the privacy of your own home, here are a few tips to get you started.

Warming up

Singing involves using a wider range and a more intense vibration than talking, so it is always a good idea to warm up your vocal cords before singing.  This doesn’t need to take long.  Literally 30 seconds of stretching and a minute of vocal noises will make a big difference.  Stretch your neck, shoulders, ribcage, and face.   Start to hum low down in your voice and slide upwards. Do a lip-trill – this is a highly effective warming-up device.  This is the motorcycle/ outboard motor/ tired horse sound, which makes you increase your airflow and loosen your lips.  These exercises protect your vocal folds (vocal cords) because you have your mouth shut.

Pitch

Pitch, in its musical sense, means which notes we sing, the shape of the melody. 

You could imagine pitch as a pitched roof – a continuous slope going up or down / \. This is like the slidey noises we practise in our warmups.  When we move on to singing melodies, we choose specific steps on the slope, which are the doh-re-mi or numbers 1-8 in the scales we sing.  We can label them with letter-names, too – C, D, E flat and so forth.

When you sing exactly what I sing, you are in tune. You need to be able to hear the note and reproduce it with your own voice, and this takes time and practice.  The two essential elements are listening and singing – one without the other won’t do. If you just listen and don’t open your mouth, you won’t learn how your voice feels singing different notes.  If you sing without listening, your confidence may grow but you won’t know if you are matching what you hear.

Sometimes you can be in tune with yourself but not with the other people in the room, because you have just started on a different note.  This is the most frequent performing disaster we have in choir!  Sometimes people can’t hear the starting notes correctly because it’s noisy, or they are nervous and not concentrating. 

One of the most helpful things you can do is listen to your own voice without wincing.  Listen to the first line of a song on a recording. Then sing along with it. Switch off the recording and sing it on your own. Rather than dramatically saying, “Oh I’m terrible!” try to detach the emotion and say specifically what you would like to change.  Is it wobbly? Try pushing more air through. You might need to take an extra breath but do you like the sound better? Can you hear that your notes are not the same as what you are hearing?  Go back to the first note. Listen. Sing. Go lower or higher until you feel you are matching it.  

(Sometimes it’s just too high or low for your voice and you should try a different song.)

Without feedback, it’s hard to know if you are getting it right or not, and I really feel for you here.  It is difficult for me not being able to hear you and know how you are getting on.  Please be honest in online rehearsals if you haven’t got it and want to do a section again.  If we were singing in real life we would go over it until I felt it was really secure.

One of the reasons people like singing in a choir is that they don’t hear their voice on its own.  Many singers like to be reassured that I will never ask them to sing a solo.  

The sound of a choir is always greater than the sum of its parts.  This is part of the special sensual experience we are missing so much at the moment.  

One of the challenges of singing over a video link is that we are all singing on our own.  Each singer can only hear themselves and the sound file, and sometimes me as well.  This can be unnerving, like hearing your own voice on an answerphone message, and some people find they are too self-conscious to enjoy it at all.

This week I’ll talk in general terms getting more comfortable with the sound of your own voice.  Next week I’ll move on to some specific tips to help you get a sound you like.

Be Brave

If you don’t like your voice, you are likely to sing timidly.  But if you sing with fear, your voice will not sound its best. Poor airflow will make it wobbly. Apologetic body language – hunched shoulders, for instance, – will inhibit your singing.  So stand tall, relax your shoulders, and take a breath right into your centre. Call for your dog as though it is across the park. (You can use any dog: alive, departed or purely imaginary.)  Capture this quality of sound, its loudness and strength, and sing the two words, “Hey, Jude”.  How was that? Pretty good, I bet.  Try it on another song.

Selection Box

We can all do different voices.  Teachers will be aware that they have a teacher voice that they rarely use with their partner.  Do you use a special voice when you talk to the dog?  We can choose to sing in different ways, too. People will sing Happy Birthday in a different voice from “Come on you Blades”.  If you are brave enough to try a few voices, you will realise you can choose the one you like best.

Imagine you are on Stars in Their Eyes. Tonight you are… someone whose singing you really like. 

When I sing a line for you to copy, take a breath and sing it in your chosen singer’s voice.  How does that feel?  

Your voice

Your voice is uniquely yours – but it can and will change. You are not stuck with it like the colour of your eyes. It is affected by the size and shape of parts of your body – your larynx, your tongue, and your teeth, for a start.  You don’t have any control over these.  It’s also affected by things you can control – like hydration and lack of sleep. Beyond that, you can always improve your singing by listening and singing – and the two have to go hand in hand.

Remember, your voice is worthwhile. You have a right to sing, and a right to be heard.