Chorus America - SRO: When Choruses and the Media "Clash"

Standing Room Only

When Choruses and the Media "Clash"

The recent media buzz isn't all good news for choruses

by Heidi Waleson
During the week before Christmas, Clash of the Choirs, a four-night reality television series broadcast on NBC, evoked both excitement and consternation in the choral world. How would a mass media program represent choruses and choral music? Could it serve as an entry point for those unfamiliar with choruses?

The series concept, which was adapted from a Scandinavian television format by the producers of Dancing with the Stars, combined celebrity, community, charity, and a popularity contest. Five pop singers—Patti LaBelle, Nick Lachey, Kelly Rowland, Michael Bolton, and Blake Shelton—went to their hometowns (Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Houston, New Haven, and Oklahoma City respectively) to audition and form 20- voice choirs from pools of amateurs who answered an open call.

The celebrity choirmasters had three weeks to prepare their ensembles, which then came to New York to perform and compete on live television on four successive nights. Throughout the competition the television audience was invited to vote by phone and email; each night the choir with the fewest votes was eliminated. Missing from the basic American Idol-style set-up was the panel of judges offering scathing criticism. Instead, the judges consisted of the other choir directors, all of whom were unstinting in their praise after each performance. The prize of $250,000 was earmarked for a hometown charity of the winning director’s choice.

Not surprisingly, the series was heavy on flash and sentimentality rather than musical value. (A central element was that each choir included at least one member with a hard-luck story and a chance for uplift.) All the same, choral singers and conductors who watched the program were a bit mystified by some of its characteristics. For example, most of the celebrity directors announced at the outset that they had absolutely no experience with choruses. During one taped background sequence, Blake Shelton asked a young woman who auditioned with Schubert’s “Ave Maria” to sing something in English. He then commented, “I’m not looking for people who can blend; I’m looking for lead singers.”

Reality TV is Anything But

Many of the performances reflected that viewpoint. Pop songs with choreography predominated. Each group wore color-coordinated costumes, and many of the arrangements featured the choir as back-up singers to a soloist, sometimes with the celebrity leader at the mic. Shawn Crouch, a New York-based conductor, composer, and high school music teacher, says, “It was basically American Idol for a group of soloists singing together.” Patricia Smith of the Chicago-area ensemble Acappellago, says, “I felt like I was watching grown-ups do high school show choir things. We spend 10 to 11 weeks preparing for a 90-minute concert; if we tried to get up there and dance, we’d die. They call it reality TV, but it is the farthest thing from reality that it could possibly be.”

Peter Robb, who heads the Pacific International Children's Choir Festival in Eugene, Oregon, found some value in the Clash repertoire. “The gospel tradition of choral music is a very viable and valued part of the American choral experience, and I think Patti LaBelle’s group pulled off a good representation of that kind of gospel music.”

However, he was dismayed by the idea that competition was at the root of the series—indeed, the choirs were referred to on the show as “Team LaBelle” and “Team Lachey.” “It’s bothersome to me to see choral music framed as a sport with winners and losers, with the objective of prevailing instead of making something beautiful,” says Robb.

“I take a strong stand about competition. It’s the opposite of what the choral experience should be, which is to bring people together. I’m horrified that people who don’t have any other experience of choral music might watch this and think,‘Let’s start a choir so we can win!’”

Despite some fairly scathing reviews in the music press—one complaint was that its feel-good ethos belied the conflict-heavy reality show promise inherent in the title Clash—the series attracted a sizeable viewing audience, drawing 8.3 million viewers on its biggest night according to the Nielsen ratings, and beat out Duel, a new game show that ran against it on ABC. Could it work as a crossover event that might interest people with no choral experience?

Opinion is divided. Patricia Smith worries about the misrepresentation of choirs: “My concern is that someone who saw the show will go to a concert of Acappellago or Bella Voce in Chicago and be disappointed because it is not what they thought it would be.” Mark Shapiro, who heads the choral conducting program at the Mannes College of Music and directs Cantori New York, points out that crossover events of this kind rarely build audiences for more traditional classical music events. “We get excited about the pop side of things, thinking it will change the world, but I’m skeptical,” he says. “Orchestras do pops programs and play music from video games, but it doesn’t create much crossover in the other direction. Performers like Andrea Bocelli and André Rieu have their own niche, but has Andrea Bocelli really created a new audience for opera?”

Media Exposure a Boon?

Some suggest that other kinds of chorus appearances in the mass media may do a better job of inspiring interest. Peter Robb cites a Honda commercial that used a 60- voice chorus to perform an elaborate composition by Steve Sidwell that mimicked the sounds of the car with uncanny accuracy. The commercial’s visuals cut between shots of the car on the road and footage of the choir performing in a garage. “That was amazing,” says Robb. “Here’s an incredibly skilled choir giving a choral performance. It’s not melody, not harmony, and you can appreciate the obvious skill of the singers and the flexibility and wonder of the human voice, all accomplished in a very refreshing expression of the choral art.” Clearly, people have found it interesting: The commercial, as well as a video about how it was made, is a popular destination on YouTube. It has also sparked a number of parodies, which are also to be found on YouTube.

The Internet presence of Clash of the Choirs turned out to be a nice promotion for St. Mary’s College. Before the show ran, the Clash producers ran a “Holiday Challenge,” inviting choruses to submit videos of themselves performing; clips of the “winning” videos were shown on the program. Nancy Menk, professor of music and choir director at St. Mary’s, noted that her madrigal choir was already performing two of the Christmas songs on the list of acceptable submission material. “I thought it would be fun for the girls, so we made a tape with a student’s little mini video camera and sent it off. Then I realized that our women’s choir had a nice arrangement of “Amazing Grace,” so we shot that too. Then I got a notice from NBC that both choirs were semi-finalists.”

As it turned out, only a few seconds of the winning choirs’ singing were actually shown on the Clash broadcast. “It was a little embarrassing. The college did a lot of promotion, and I had television and radio interviews, but when I saw the show I was disappointed that the choruses weren’t actually singing choral music.” There was one benefit, however: “They put our videos up on the Clash website and 2,500 people viewed them,” she noted. “They watched the whole piece, not just the snippets that were broadcast, and some made comments. Alums wrote in. It was good publicity for the college and good for alumni relations.”

Clash as a Learning Tool

Linda Richter, who teaches elementary school in Texas, found that there was a lot of excitement about the show in her school. “The kids were really excited about it, and they asked me if I was watching it and what I thought.” Richter found herself treading a fine line: “It was the day after Patti LaBelle’s choir did ‘Over the Rainbow,’ and I told them that for that glorified gospel style, it was absolutely fantastic, but I didn’t feel it did justice to the song. To me, it’s an introspective song, not what Patti did. The kids understood that.” Whatever her reservations, Richter was pleased that several fourth and fifth grade boys, who don’t normally participate in the school’s choir, expressed interest. Of the 12 new students who actually signed up for choir after the holidays, five had watched the show and one boy said that he got interested in choir because of it.

Richter used the show to talk about concepts. For example, students noticed that some choirs used soloists and others were more about singing together. She was able to discuss the process of auditioning and learning music, portrayed in the back-story parts of the show. Teachers from her school were also watching, and told her that they used to sing in choirs. Richter urged them to go back to it and talked to them about the different kinds of musical arrangements that were on the show. And she was delighted that Nick Lachey’s choir, which did a lively arrangement of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” ended up winning the event. “Their arrangements were more choral, rather than soloists with back-up singers,” she says.

In the end, Peter Robb felt that Clash of the Choirs, even with its heavily pop orientation, can help make connections. “When we do outreach and go to schools that have no choirs, we establish the difference between group singing and choral singing,” says Robb. “We use the acronym ABOPS, which stands for ‘a bunch of people singing.’ Rather than take a judgmental tone, we point out that ABOPS is a wonderful thing that lets your voice be heard. But choral music draws on a very different concept: It’s many people creating one voice. There were enough red flags for me that I wouldn’t recommend Clash to anyone. But if someone inspired by the show asked what I thought, I’d say, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it and if you think that’s cool, come hear our Messiah performance.’ I’d take advantage of the fact that an expression of choral music is in the spotlight.”

Shawn Crouch came to a similar conclusion. “The first night that the show was on, I had a number of messages from my friends who are not musicians, asking, ‘What is a choir? What do you do? As a composer, do you write that style of music?’ It opens up the concept of what music is,” says Crouch. “I’m big on getting conversations started. I have lots of friends in the business world who have no idea what music is about, except pop. But they’re open to choral music, and they want to learn.”

Author credit:
Heidi Waleson is opera critic for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the Voice and many other arts and cultural publications.

This article is reprinted from The Voice of Chorus America, Spring 2008. Past issues of the Voice can be ordered from Chorus America by going to the Publications page of our website: http://www.chorusamerica.org/publications.cfm

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Standing Room Only
When Choruses and the Media "Clash"
The recent media buzz isn't all good news for choruses by Heidi Waleson During the week before Christmas, Clash of the Choirs, a four-night reality television series broadcast on NBC, evoked both excitement and consternation in the choral world. How would a mass media program represent choruses and choral music? Could it serve as an entry point for those unfamiliar with choruses? The series concept, which was adapted from a Scandinavian television format by the producers of Dancing with the Stars, combined celebrity, community, charity, and a popularity contest. Five pop singers—Patti LaBelle, Nick Lachey, Kelly Rowland, Michael Bolton, and Blake Shelton—went to their hometowns (Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Houston, New Haven, and Oklahoma City respectively) to audition and form 20- voice choirs from pools of amateurs who answered an open call. The celebrity choirmasters had three weeks to prepare their ensembles, which then came to New York to perform and compete on live television on four successive nights. Throughout the competition the television audience was invited to vote by phone and email; each night the choir with the fewest votes was eliminated. Missing from the basic American Idol-style set-up was the panel of judges offering scathing criticism. Instead, the judges consisted of the other choir directors, all of whom were unstinting in their praise after each performance. The prize of $250,000 was earmarked for a hometown charity of the winning director’s choice. Not surprisingly, the series was heavy on flash and sentimentality rather than musical value. (A central element was that each choir included at least one member with a hard-luck story and a chance for uplift.) All the same, choral singers and conductors who watched the program were a bit mystified by some of its characteristics. For example, most of the celebrity directors announced at the outset that they had absolutely no experience with choruses. During one taped background sequence, Blake Shelton asked a young woman who auditioned with Schubert’s “Ave Maria” to sing something in English. He then commented, “I’m not looking for people who can blend; I’m looking for lead singers.” Reality TV is Anything But Many of the performances reflected that viewpoint. Pop songs with choreography predominated. Each group wore color-coordinated costumes, and many of the arrangements featured the choir as back-up singers to a soloist, sometimes with the celebrity leader at the mic. Shawn Crouch, a New York-based conductor, composer, and high school music teacher, says, “It was basically American Idol for a group of soloists singing together.” Patricia Smith of the Chicago-area ensemble Acappellago, says, “I felt like I was watching grown-ups do high school show choir things. We spend 10 to 11 weeks preparing for a 90-minute concert; if we tried to get up there and dance, we’d die. They call it reality TV, but it is the farthest thing from reality that it could possibly be.” Peter Robb, who heads the Pacific International Children's Choir Festival in Eugene, Oregon, found some value in the Clash repertoire. “The gospel tradition of choral music is a very viable and valued part of the American choral experience, and I think Patti LaBelle’s group pulled off a good representation of that kind of gospel music.” However, he was dismayed by the idea that competition was at the root of the series—indeed, the choirs were referred to on the show as “Team LaBelle” and “Team Lachey.” “It’s bothersome to me to see choral music framed as a sport with winners and losers, with the objective of prevailing instead of making something beautiful,” says Robb. “I take a strong stand about competition. It’s the opposite of what the choral experience should be, which is to bring people together. I’m horrified that people who don’t have any other experience of choral music might watch this and think,‘Let’s start a choir so we can win!’” Despite some fairly scathing reviews in the music press—one complaint was that its feel-good ethos belied the conflict-heavy reality show promise inherent in the title Clash—the series attracted a sizeable viewing audience, drawing 8.3 million viewers on its biggest night according to the Nielsen ratings, and beat out Duel, a new game show that ran against it on ABC. Could it work as a crossover event that might interest people with no choral experience? Opinion is divided. Patricia Smith worries about the misrepresentation of choirs: “My concern is that someone who saw the show will go to a concert of Acappellago or Bella Voce in Chicago and be disappointed because it is not what they thought it would be.” Mark Shapiro, who heads the choral conducting program at the Mannes College of Music and directs Cantori New York, points out that crossover events of this kind rarely build audiences for more traditional classical music events. “We get excited about the pop side of things, thinking it will change the world, but I’m skeptical,” he says. “Orchestras do pops programs and play music from video games, but it doesn’t create much crossover in the other direction. Performers like Andrea Bocelli and André Rieu have their own niche, but has Andrea Bocelli really created a new audience for opera?” Media Exposure a Boon? Some suggest that other kinds of chorus appearances in the mass media may do a better job of inspiring interest. Peter Robb cites a Honda commercial that used a 60- voice chorus to perform an elaborate composition by Steve Sidwell that mimicked the sounds of the car with uncanny accuracy. The commercial’s visuals cut between shots of the car on the road and footage of the choir performing in a garage. “That was amazing,” says Robb. “Here’s an incredibly skilled choir giving a choral performance. It’s not melody, not harmony, and you can appreciate the obvious skill of the singers and the flexibility and wonder of the human voice, all accomplished in a very refreshing expression of the choral art.” Clearly, people have found it interesting: The commercial, as well as a video about how it was made, is a popular destination on YouTube. It has also sparked a number of parodies, which are also to be found on YouTube. The Internet presence of Clash of the Choirs turned out to be a nice promotion for St. Mary’s College. Before the show ran, the Clash producers ran a “Holiday Challenge,” inviting choruses to submit videos of themselves performing; clips of the “winning” videos were shown on the program. Nancy Menk, professor of music and choir director at St. Mary’s, noted that her madrigal choir was already performing two of the Christmas songs on the list of acceptable submission material. “I thought it would be fun for the girls, so we made a tape with a student’s little mini video camera and sent it off. Then I realized that our women’s choir had a nice arrangement of “Amazing Grace,” so we shot that too. Then I got a notice from NBC that both choirs were semi-finalists.” As it turned out, only a few seconds of the winning choirs’ singing were actually shown on the Clash broadcast. “It was a little embarrassing. The college did a lot of promotion, and I had television and radio interviews, but when I saw the show I was disappointed that the choruses weren’t actually singing choral music.” There was one benefit, however: “They put our videos up on the Clash website and 2,500 people viewed them,” she noted. “They watched the whole piece, not just the snippets that were broadcast, and some made comments. Alums wrote in. It was good publicity for the college and good for alumni relations.” Clash as a Learning Tool Linda Richter, who teaches elementary school in Texas, found that there was a lot of excitement about the show in her school. “The kids were really excited about it, and they asked me if I was watching it and what I thought.” Richter found herself treading a fine line: “It was the day after Patti LaBelle’s choir did ‘Over the Rainbow,’ and I told them that for that glorified gospel style, it was absolutely fantastic, but I didn’t feel it did justice to the song. To me, it’s an introspective song, not what Patti did. The kids understood that.” Whatever her reservations, Richter was pleased that several fourth and fifth grade boys, who don’t normally participate in the school’s choir, expressed interest. Of the 12 new students who actually signed up for choir after the holidays, five had watched the show and one boy said that he got interested in choir because of it. Richter used the show to talk about concepts. For example, students noticed that some choirs used soloists and others were more about singing together. She was able to discuss the process of auditioning and learning music, portrayed in the back-story parts of the show. Teachers from her school were also watching, and told her that they used to sing in choirs. Richter urged them to go back to it and talked to them about the different kinds of musical arrangements that were on the show. And she was delighted that Nick Lachey’s choir, which did a lively arrangement of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” ended up winning the event. “Their arrangements were more choral, rather than soloists with back-up singers,” she says. In the end, Peter Robb felt that Clash of the Choirs, even with its heavily pop orientation, can help make connections. “When we do outreach and go to schools that have no choirs, we establish the difference between group singing and choral singing,” says Robb. “We use the acronym ABOPS, which stands for ‘a bunch of people singing.’ Rather than take a judgmental tone, we point out that ABOPS is a wonderful thing that lets your voice be heard. But choral music draws on a very different concept: It’s many people creating one voice. There were enough red flags for me that I wouldn’t recommend Clash to anyone. But if someone inspired by the show asked what I thought, I’d say, ‘I’m glad you enjoyed it and if you think that’s cool, come hear our Messiah performance.’ I’d take advantage of the fact that an expression of choral music is in the spotlight.” Shawn Crouch came to a similar conclusion. “The first night that the show was on, I had a number of messages from my friends who are not musicians, asking, ‘What is a choir? What do you do? As a composer, do you write that style of music?’ It opens up the concept of what music is,” says Crouch. “I’m big on getting conversations started. I have lots of friends in the business world who have no idea what music is about, except pop. But they’re open to choral music, and they want to learn.” Author credit: Heidi Waleson is opera critic for The Wall Street Journal and a frequent contributor to the Voice and many other arts and cultural publications. This article is reprinted from The Voice of Chorus America, Spring 2008. Past issues of the Voice can be ordered from Chorus America by going to the Publications page of our website: http://www.chorusamerica.org/publications.cfm