New Arrangement: Shine

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 10th March 2010

Shine was Take That's 10th number one single, appearing in 2007, and it won Single of the Year at the 2008 Brit awards. It features an infectious beat right from the get-go and builds into an extravagant, gospel-inspired finale. This arrangement splits into five parts to capture the richness of the call-and-response texture.

The National Youth Choir’s Young Leaders

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 9th March 2010
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Mike Brewer in action with NYC leadersMike Brewer in action with NYC leadersI spent last weekend in North London at the National Youth Choir’s training event for Young Leaders. In anticipation of the courses they will be running around the country this Easter, the weekend’s purpose was to support those making the transition from choir members to staff. There was a real sense of continuum between the more senior staff members providing the training (most of whom had themselves come through the choir to their current responsibilities), through staff members with some experience and those just starting out, to current choir members exploring the possibility of joining the staff in the future.

Soap Box: Whose Music?

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 6th March 2010
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Some months ago I attended a short workshop for choral leaders which started with a warm-up using the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. It was an efficient and musically interesting warm-up and gave me ideas for workshop activities of my own (which I am sure was the point). But one thing bothered me at the time, and I have continued to mull over it since: the lyric was secularised to remove the reference to Jesus. (Actually, this was nicely done too – after teaching the replacement words, simply a parenthetical comment of, ‘We’re leaving Jesus out of this; he’s got enough troubles of his own.’)

Now, I get the reluctance to promote a dominant religion in a general community context where there may be people from a bunch of different religions present. Religious differences get all muddled up with cultural politics and race and all those other messy by-products of populations with different origins and histories learning to live together. So maybe it’s a good idea not to have Jesus showing up as a potential point of contention.

But I’m bothered by the bowdlerisation.

Mixing Music-readers and Ear-singers

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 3rd March 2010
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One of the constant challenges the director of an amateur choir is likely to encounter is how to work with a group that includes both people who read music and people who don’t. The two constituencies can have quite different learning styles and preferences, and you want to find learning strategies that work for both.

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