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Lancaster Chorale: In Pursuit of the Perfect Blend
When Robert Trocchia began his tenure as music director in 1986, the Lancaster Chorale (OH) was one year old—and searching for an identity. The Chorale's board, determined that even a community of 40,000 people could have a top-flight choral group, knew Trocchia was their man when he told them, "In 10 years I don't want people to mention 10 top choirs in this country without mentioning us."
In Trocchia's first year, the Chorale held auditions for the first time. By year three, the board had rustled up enough financial backing to enable the group to pay all of its 32 singers.
The switch from a volunteer to a paid chorus troubled a few of the original singers, but the board urged Trocchia to stick to his guns and involve people in other ways in the organization. Now every season he chooses the best 32 singers who audition. "I think everyone knew it was serious when my wife was replaced," Trocchia says with a laugh.
The organizational changes were all in service of a strong artistic vision—or perhaps more accurately, a sound—that Trocchia had in his head. "I listen for voices free of any vocal problems or idiosyncrasies that would prevent them from blending," he says. "We try to find timbres that match so we know they will blend. In two minutes, I know if a singer can or cannot produce that sound."
Early on, Trocchia says he doubted himself. "I called Dale Warland and said, 'I have this woman who has a better voice than anyone in the chorus, but she has no flexibility to sing without vibrato.' Warland said, 'Well, do you know what it is you want?' I said, 'Yes.' He said, 'Then why are you calling me?'"
"That is the only time I have doubted and he set me straight instantly," Trocchia says.
To hone and perfect the blend and balance he's after, Trocchia employs a number of techniques. "It's like a big puzzle," he says, "and I am neurotic about it. I spend hours and hours placing and re-placing voices so they complement each other, so that you can stand in front of the chorus and hear a block of matched sound."
At every rehearsal, the group spends some time singing "in the round," mixing themselves up so they can hear different voices and key into visual cues. After a piece is prepared, Trocchia often has the group sing in darkness. "The focus that brings is startling," he says. "It becomes internal, with nothing else to focus on but the sound."
Achieving and maintaining a beautiful sound is not something reserved for professional choruses, Trocchia insists. When visitors come to his tiny home office, he often puts on a recording. "They'll say, 'Well, that is stunning, but it's a professional choir. Of course, it's good.' Then I tell them, 'No, that's a high school choir.'"
"My point is that the same principles can produce that sound if you are religious about it and stick with it."
Key Lessons
- Strong board support
- Clear, focused artistic vision
- Solid techniques for achieving the vision
The Civic Chorale: Setting the Bar Higher
When David Hendricksen became music director of the Civic Chorale in 1998, he set some modest goals in keeping with the culture of the group and its location in East Central Tennessee.
He knew, for example, that he would not be able to change the group's audition policy—those who audition and get in are in for as long as they want to be. There is not a large enough pool of skilled singers in the region to sustain a group that requires re-auditioning. So Hendricksen set the bar higher, requiring new choir members to be not just as good as those already in the group, but better. He also emphasized sightreading in the audition.
"My theory was that once they were in the group, I could work with them to make the sound we needed," he says. "But we couldn't spend all the rehearsal time learning notes."
Hendricksen also increased the size of the group—from 28 to a pool of 55 singers, of which 45 will sing any given concert—so that the group could perform a broader range of the repertoire.
With these basics in place, he identified several specific issues related to vocal production and chose repertoire that would help address them. "They tended to sing at one dynamic—loud all the time," Hendricksen says. "We needed to develop the ability to sing softly and well. We also had the age-old problem that when they got softer, they got slower. We needed to develop the ability to sing rhythmically and accurately."
Hendricksen wanted the group to eventually be able to sing Arvo Pärt's "Magnificat"—which requires clean and sustained singing across the line. To work up to that, he deliberately programmed pieces that would build the singers' skills at long line and sustained, soft singing: among them Eric Whitacre's "Lux Aurumque" and John Rutter's eight-part a cappella anthem "Musica Dei Donum."
By 2007, the group was ready to sing the Pärt "Magnificat," and did so beautifully for its Christmas concert. In the same way, the group worked its way up to doing Bach motets by first doing simpler double choir repertoire, such as Randall Thompson's "Peaceable Kingdom" and G.G. Wagner's arrangement of Bach's "Blessing, Glory, Wisdom, and Thanks."
For the most part, the singers have been enthusiastic about the changes. "They're excited because they have heard the group get better," Hendricksen says. "I have always found that people like to be part of something good. The trick is to get good in small enough steps so that you don't give up before you get there."
Hendricksen does not subscribe to focusing first on the technical aspects of the music before the musicality and expression. "In a community organization it has to come the other way around," he says. "You have to capture the musical imagination of the singers so that they are then desirous of getting all the notes, the rhythms, and the technical stuff correct."
In the end, getting good is all about serving the music, a point he makes often in rehearsals. "I remind them what a remarkable thing it is for a community of people to come together with different theological, political, economic, and ethnic backgrounds to do this thing that is bigger than any of us, but that requires all of us to achieve," he says. "To have that larger spiritual, artistic, aesthetic vision—not just on my part, but as part of the ethos of the group—is so important."
Key Lessons
- Be realistic about what your community can support
- Choose repertoire that supports the musical issues you want to address
- Teach the technical and musical aspects simultaneously
- Serve the music—"it is bigger than any of us"
The Boston Choral Ensemble: Harnessing the Power of a Mission
Among the venerable and moneyed organizations in choral-rich Boston, The Boston Choral Ensemble knew that it had to do more than just perform well to set itself apart. A decade after its founding, it had become a landing spot for young grad students and those just out of undergrad who were seeking a highly challenging choral setting not affiliated with a church or university.
"The repertoire was challenging, but the polish wasn't there," says Miguel Felipe, music director. "It became clear that the group could always reach a B+ performance, and we had difficulty hacking through that threshold."
What turned things around was a new mission, which the board and the artistic staff thrashed out over a couple of years: The Boston Choral Ensemble is an innovative chamber choir that encourages the creative expansion of the choral art by exploring the essential qualities that unite diverse traditions.
A Boston Choral Ensemble concert explores the full breadth of the choral tradition from the ancient to the contemporary, drawing connections and highlighting the contrasts. "We don't 'fetishize' or put undo focus on new music," Felipe says. "It is just part of what we do in every concert, part of the tradition."
Having a mission that focuses on innovative performance concepts has clarified the audition process. Whereas the group once accepted practically anyone who came, it now accepts 20 percent of auditioning singers.
"The reason why auditions have become so competitive is that we worked hard to create a consistent artistic image," Felipe says. "Singers know that they are not signing up for a choir that occasionally does an interesting piece. Having that clear sense of programming and drive makes membership valuable. It allows me to be more demanding in terms of artistic requirements."
One hotly contested change was to require group members to re-audition every other year—"not to clean house, but to put action behind the idea that individual improvement and maintenance was expected," Felipe says.
Rehearsals now emphasize the music far more than the social aspects of singing in a choir. "We do highly detailed warm-ups based on the repertoire," Felipe says. "The whole ethos has become focused on performing really, really well. There's a growing feeling in the ensemble that we are really doing important singing. We'll party after rehearsal."
The Ensemble also schedules regular retreats—not to be confused with extra rehearsals—where musical experts, of which there are plenty in the Boston area, talk with singers about various aspects of musicianship.
The new emphasis has meant letting go of some things. The group does less educational outreach than it once did, and recently spent thousands of dollars to buy scores of Thomas Jennefelt's Villarosa Sequences, a seven-movement symphony for voices, for its season-opening concert.
"We had to decide what we were rallying around," Felipe says. "What could we put our voices behind? This is our mission, so we decided we would spend money on the scores. Our group has an artistic mission as well as a programmatic mission that has attracted audience and singers. And in the end, the better singers you have, the better you will sound."
Key Lessons
- A clear mission drives artistic improvement
- Emphasize the music more than the social aspects
- Support artistic improvement with well-structured rehearsals and retreats
Seattle Pro Musica: Upping the Ante to Improve Artistic Quality
Can a critically acclaimed choral ensemble get even better? The 70-singer Seattle Pro Musica has throughout its 38-year history valued artistically excellent performances. During a recent strategic planning process, the board and staff decided to make their number one priority "to achieve the highest possible artistic quality."
To achieve that goal, the organization created a process and tools for helping individual choir members improve their musical skills.
Each choir member had an individual private meeting with music director Karen Thomas to discuss and set personal music goals. Each member sang some prepared choral excerpts and sightread some choral passages. Thomas made recommendations regarding what the singer could focus on for the coming year to improve skills and artistry.
At the same time, Seattle Pro Musica hired four professional section leaders to assist singers with artistic growth. These section leaders offer classes, lead sectional rehearsals, provide rehearsal notes for their sections, and assist singers in developing their choral skill and artistry. The classes, held prior to rehearsals, focus on vocal production and musicianship skills.
At the beginning of the next season, Thomas followed up with all singers individually and gave each one an assessment of specific areas he or she should continue to focus on during the season. Individual feedback continues on a quarterly basis throughout the season, with singers encouraged to self-monitor their progress.
Thomas also has small groups of singers occasionally sing in quartets or octets during rehearsal to build ensemble skills. Thomas says she can already hear a difference in the quality of their sound.
"Every year there has been an upward trajectory," she says. "That is part of the nature of the group. But in the last year, that trajectory has picked up quite a bit. People are aware of the importance of continuing that improvement, and everyone is looking a little more at themselves individually to discern what else they can be doing."
The last piece in the artistic improvement plan is to re-audition the entire choir. Singers will be asked to demonstrate basic good choral ensemble skills (music preparation, intonation, balance, part independence, responsiveness, and ability to modify vocal color, vibrato, articulation, and dynamics). Thomas anticipates that a handful of singers will not be asked to remain with the group and she expects to deal with any fallout individually with those singers.
Throughout the process, there has been very little push-back from singers. Thomas attributes the nearly uniform buy-in to clear and transparent communication about the steps in the artistic improvement process.
"We have done a good job over the years to be in a constant feedback loop with the choir members," she says. "We also do an annual choir survey where the responses are anonymous. From the last survey, we learned that for most singers, artistic quality was the primary reason they sang here and not somewhere else. That made it easy in the strategic planning process, to know that everyone was behind it."
Key Lessons
- Make artistic improvement part of your organization's strategic plan
- Map out the process, step by step
- Be completely transparent with singers about the process
Mystic River Chorale: Setting Small Goals Yields Big Improvements
The 40 members of Connecticut's Mystic River Chorale are a diverse bunch, from professional musicians to singers whose only choral experience is their church choir. Having such a range of background and skills presented a challenge to Frank Martignetti, now in his second year as artistic director.
"It's difficult to try to create nuance in the third read-through when there are people still struggling to get the notes," he says, "or when one singer is asking, 'Do you want the final t on the first or the second eighth note?' while somebody else is a half-step flat and totally oblivious."
Martignetti's background in teaching—he conducts two university ensembles, a high school chorus, and a church choir—has given him the tools to work with people at a variety of levels without losing patience. So he set out to "raise the floor," explaining to the singers, "We have a lot of extraordinary talent in this room and the way to get better is to help the people who struggle the most to improve their skills."
He began with the most obvious strugglers: the basses. "They required parts to be repeated a lot more often and they were flat and late," Martignetti says. "After a year and a half of fighting that, we decided to build in more sectional time early on." The group's accompanist, Michelle Beaton, also a good vocal coach, has used the time before regular rehearsals to work with the basses on technique and music literacy as well as note learning. The Chorale also began to provide rehearsal recordings—simple midi files—for all singers to use at home for learning notes.
With consistent coaching, the bass section sound has gradually improved. "Sometimes we professional musicians forget that when people are chronically singing flat or late, they are not aware that they are doing it," Martignetti says. "They have no idea what you are talking about at first and think you are being overly picky. You have to help them experience it in a way that shows them what they are doing. Once they hear it and understand it, then they want to fix it."
Martignetti also targeted another chronic choral problem—blend. He worked directly with individual chorus members, asking some to sing out more and others to sing out less and blend into the sound. And he programmed repertoire that required great balance and blend, specifically Morten Lauridsen's "Lux Aeterna." "They heard a couple of good recordings of it and I said this is what it is supposed to sound like," Martignetti says, "and they started to make that happen."
Martignetti was careful not to program pieces that would undo the gains the group has made. He chose not to augment a performance of Bernstein's Mass with opera choruses, for example. "That would undo all the work we have done on blend in the last year," he says.
To gauge the impact of the improvement effort, the chorus sent out a singer survey, the first in years. "Some people are really happy that I am trying to push the envelope," Martignetti says. "There are those who would like me to re-audition the whole Chorale. And there are those who don't want pressure and are trying to fade into the woodwork right now."
Martignetti hopes that singers will make the decision on their own to either get on board or leave the group. The previously unauditioned chorus set a new policy 10 years ago to audition new members; older members were grandfathered in. When he became artistic director, Martignetti auditioned everyone, not as a means for dropping people from the group, but to get a feel for the skill level of the group. Though the board has given him the power to re-audition singers, he is choosing not to exercise it.
"It's really a balancing act," he says. "The board and I are trying to chart a course where we are very inclusive and still have standards. That is a hard mission to articulate, but we are trying."
Key Lessons
- Work on a couple of issues at a time
- Help singers "understand and hear" the issues they need to work on
- Use repertoire as a vehicle for teaching musical skills
Providence Singers: Changing the Artistic Product Transformed the Whole Organization
What does it take for a nice community chorus to become a flagship artistic organization with a regional and national reputation? Energy, leadership, and a certain fearlessness, says Andrew Clark, artistic director of the Providence Singers.
When Clark arrived on the scene in 2002 as associate resident conductor, the group was already in the midst of a sea change. The group's music director, Julian Wachner, had taken the board's charge to reshape the organization around a new, overarching priority: artistic excellence.
That meant significantly changing the artistic product, says Clark, who assumed the role of artistic director in 2006 and has carried forward the momentum and built on it. The main driver of the change was performing challenging, contemporary music. "The most important vehicle for artistic enhancement for us, without question, is repertoire," Clark says. "It's more important than the venue, the acoustic that you sing in, or the technical talent of the conductor and the singers."
The challenge of performing difficult music well precipitated a culture change with the group. "We now have a clear expectation that singers will do a great deal of work on their own and to do as much preparation as they possibly can between rehearsals," Clark says, "which is different than the kind of self-enrichment club attitude where you show up on Tuesday and sing the music and then leave it in the back seat of your car till the next rehearsal."
To help singers meet the challenge, the group set up new structures and provided new tools. Section leaders took on a bigger role, listening carefully to what was happening musically with individual singers and working with the conductor and staff to help struggling singers improve. The chorus instituted "quality quartets"—a mechanism to check whether singers who have missed rehearsals or are struggling are ready for the performance. The organization also began to bring in outside teachers and consultants for workshops on vocal technique and musicianship.
In rehearsals, the conductor began to speak the language of music—"as if it was a chorus of professional musicians or a conservatory choir," Clark says. "It was not speaking to the choir in a lowest common denominator kind of way, but moving quickly to keep people on their toes, to be demanding in the best possible way without being unreasonable."
As expectations changed, the group began to attract a different caliber of singer—professional musicians, music educators, young high school and middle school teachers fresh out of college—while the staff worked to enhance the skills of the singers who had been with the group for many years.
They also instituted regular re-auditions—"not as a fear tactic," Clark says, "but as a way for our conducting staff to get a good read on the strengths and weaknesses of the group as well as holding the singers accountable in their preparation and their development and maintenance as choral singing artists."
Some singers who were struggling under the new demands voluntarily chose to move on to other kinds of choruses. With others there were difficult conversations, which Clark concedes were not always handled as well as they could have been. He recalls one summer when he and Wachner decided too quickly not to renew the membership of three long-time singers. "We completely botched it," Clark says. "We made the decision exclusively about the ensemble rather than about the humanity and what is the right process. No one argued with the decision artistically. The process was the problem."
Today, the process is to give struggling singers two to three years notice so they can address the problems and improve, or move on. "We had to realize that this is not just a professional artistic organization that can hire and fire at its whim," Clark says. "It is a community organization whose members deserve that kind of respect and process."
The improvement of the artistic product was the catalyst for other dynamic change within the organization, administratively and in terms of governance. The board changed its structure and its bylaws to reflect this new mission, and the organization hired professional administrative staff to handle the new demands that go along with being a sought-after artistic ensemble (Providence Singers is now the exclusive chorus of the Rhode Island Philharmonic). "New music and adventuresome programming has been a real spark plug for fundraising too," says Clark.
"We are in a healthy place if the artistic product is the catalyst for organizational evolution," Clark says. "We really have unanimity that the artistic quality has to be the driver."
Key Lessons
- Repertoire is more important than anything else in improving artistic quality
- Speak the language of music—don't talk down
- Set up mechanisms to help singers improve
- Make artistic excellence the driver of organizational changes
Young Voices of Colorado: Making Education the Foundation
Jena Dickey created Young Voices of Colorado as a place where her own children and their friends could get a good vocal music education. The focus on education has propelled the organization's artistic development ever since.
"We're not in the business of just getting together and singing some songs and having a good time," Dickey says. "We're interested in building their skills and building our programs."
Children auditioning for Young Voices enter a friendly environment structured more like a lesson than a scary "try out." By the end of the audition, Dickey and her staff are able to place each child in one of the group's six choirs based on their age and musical development.
"We take the kids where they are," says Margie Camp, education director for Young Voices. "We put them in the right developmental level and then it is our job to allow them to advance, through careful scaffolding of instruction and sequencing of introduction of new material. They all rise to the top, pretty much."
The Young Voices curriculum is designed to meet state and local standards for music education, so that all of the choirs are moving children up to be proficient or advanced, based on their age. "Even at a beginning level, the children are working toward a standard that they are going to achieve when in Signature, which is our top group," says Camp. "Those skills are constantly built upon. We use correct terminology all the time and expect high performance all the time."
Dickey and her staff also made a decision a few years ago to create a separate choir for boys when they reach fourth grade. The boys work with a male conductor.
"Boys are motivated differently," says Camp. "They are more competitive and get self conscious. Without the distraction of girls, they can be themselves, and it allows the director to treat them differently. You can ignore some behavior that you wouldn't be able to with the girls there."
In developing artistic excellence, choosing high quality repertoire is key, Dickey says. "We choose the repertoire carefully—classical works, pieces based on folk songs from other countries, and new compositions by respected composers writing specifically for children's choirs," Dickey says. "The children get hooked on it because it fits their voices correctly. It encourages beautiful singing."
Young Voices also chooses extraordinary venues to sing in because "great acoustics encourage fine singing," says Dickey. "We could perform in a gym or amphitheater or a school auditorium for less money, but we would rather pay more and have the kids in a truly fabulous acoustic because it is going to be an extraordinary experience for them."
Key Lessons
- Make music education the focus, not just getting together to have fun
- Place children at the appropriate skill level and work from there
- Have high expectations and provide the tools to reach them
- Choose quality repertoire that's challenging but not overwhelming
- Hold out for high-quality performance venues
Berkshire Choral Festival: Implementing a Decade-Long Plan to Improve Quality
Nine years ago, the staff and board of the Berkshire Choral Festival set out on a journey that they hoped would lead to much improved performances at the end of the Festival's week-long singing experiences.
"It was daunting," Trudy Weaver Miller, BCF's recently retired president and CEO, says, "because our singers are together for just one week. They pay to come, and they are basically on vacation. It's not like working with a community chorus where you see the same people week to week."
Miller and the board knew that they might lose some regular BCF attendees, but it was a risk they were willing to take. In fact, improving artistically seemed to be a matter of organizational survival. "We were attracting a new level of conductor with expectations that the chorus would be at a better artistic level than we had been achieving," says Miller.
"We had never set a baseline, so we decided to set one. It was a big event, a strategic decision—and then it had to be communicated well to all of the singers."
The Festival adopted a new set of expectations for singers and then offered tools to help reach them. Singers were told they needed to arrive for their week with the music learned and received rehearsal recordings and other aids from BCF to help them accomplish that. Singers also were told that they could be evaluated during the week if their level of preparation did not seem adequate.
"That scared everybody," Miller says. "But it made a difference. Not that anyone would get thrown out, unless it was really serious. We would work with them to get to performance level. We were trying to set the expectation in a kinder, gentler way and saying that there is a consequence."
To help singers improve their skills, BCF began offering classes during Festival weeks focused on such topics as music theory, sightsinging, ear training, IPA, etc. They also added more sectional rehearsals outside of the rehearsal time with the conductor.
Because the majority of BCF participants are in their 60s or above, the Festival created Singing for a Lifetime—a class that gives practical tips on how to keep aging voices fresh and flexible. For a time, the Festival made the class mandatory for singers over age 70, which ruffled a few feathers.
Requiring that class was one of several areas where the Festival staff really drew a line in the sand. "The board had to be 100 percent behind this," Miller says. "That meant that board members over 70 who also sang with the Festival had to take that class too."
The quality of the performances has improved dramatically, Miller says. "We have conductors who haven't been here for a while, and when they get to the first rehearsal and the chorus reads through the first movement and knows the notes, they're like, 'Oh wow, this is great.' The starting point is light years ahead of what it was 10 years ago."
Another strategic goal of BCF was to diversify the repertoire it performed. Having singers with improved skills has made this goal reachable. The Festival for the first time offered a week for which singers had to audition—a performance of Rachmaninoff's vocally challenging Vespers.
"It took years to get the board to agree to that," Miller says. "They were afraid it would poach the good singers from our other weeks, that it would alienate people, that it would set a two-tier structure, and most of all, that they would not get in! But they realized that we could not ask the best conductors to come here without giving them the best possible chorus."
The strategy paid off. Of the 200 singers who auditioned for the special week, 100 were accepted. Sixty percent of those who didn't get in attended other BCF singing weeks. Virtually all of those who sang the Rachmaninoff said, "Please do this again." BCF has begun to add an auditioned week to its summer schedule for the performance of a cappella and other challenging works.
Though a choral festival has unique challenges, Miller believes that BCF's improvement plan can be replicated with community choruses. "You have to appeal to everyone's innate desire for self-improvement, to be the best they can be," Miller says. "If singers just want to come for the social aspects and sing some fun stuff, that's fine and there should be a vehicle for them. But if that is not what you want your organization to be, you have to communicate that. You have a choice."
Key Lessons
- Get 100 percent support from the board
- Set high expectations and stick to them
- Communicate the improvement plan to singers early and often
- Provide the tools singers need to improve their skills
- Be kind, compassionate, and professional
This article is adapted from The Voice, Summer 2010.
