Looking for a choir to join?

Maybe you've just moved into the Oxford area, or perhaps you sang in your youth, stopped, and now you're thinking about singing again.  The big question is how do you find your dream choir? The first step is probably to clearly identify what you're looking for before you start trying to identify potential choirs to join.

• What sort of repertoire do you want to sing - 'mainstream' large choral works, smaller scale chamber works, contemporary music, gospel or church music, a capella, barbershop or other 'niche' music?
• What size of choir would you be comfortable singing in, and would you prefer a mixed voice choir or a single gender choir? 
• Do you want to be involved in serious concert performances or are you just after a chance to sing along with a few mates for your own pleasure (i.e. a social organisation as much as a musical one)?
• What is your level of musical ability (probably somewhere between 'can hold a tune, but can't read music' to 'excellent sight reader and trained musician')?
• What level of musicianship would you expect from your fellow choir members and other performers involved in concerts?
• Is the location for rehearsals and concerts important or are you able to travel across a wide area?
• What level of commitment are you willing to put in in terms of time, effort and money?

That's probably enough to be thinking about at this stage. So when you've got all of your answers to the above questions sorted out in your head what comes next?

Well the good news is that there are dozens of choirs in the Oxford area and lots of information about them easily available on the internet and elsewhere. The bad news is that it can be difficult trying to narrow it down to the right choir for you personally.

Let's start with a few examples where your requirements would automatically narrow down the choice considerably :

• If you're connected to a particular educational establishment such as Oxford University or Brookes University and want to stick to an in house choir you can easily find a number of options from their Music Department. If they don't suit you then you can widen your search to look outside.
• Likewise choirs connected to specific churches can easily be identified by contacting them direct.
• Specialist choirs are also usually relatively easy to track down by a simple Google search leading to a limited number of options (for example searching for 'Oxford Welsh Male Voice Choir' or 'Oxford Gospel Choir' will lead directly to choirs with exactly those names).
• If a specific location is the prime concern then a Google search for the 'place name' & 'choir' should tell you what's available. Further information might also be available fom Parish websites and magazines. These may be the only methods of tracking down small local choirs with a high social content to their activities who put on less formal concerts, or community choirs who only perform locally.

If the above examples don't cover what you're looking for it probably means that you're after a more 'serious' choir performing mainstream classical choral works in central Oxford venues. These organisations can usually be classified either as a smaller chamber choir (50 or less singers, often performing a capella or with a small number of musicians, and requiring a high level of musicianship) or a large scale choral society (often 100 or more singers performing large scale choral works with orchestral accompaniment). These two types of choirs often have their own websites, but can most easily be tracked down through other websites that include 'choir finder' facilities such as 'Gerontius' or 'Making Music'. There is a strong crossover between the choirs listed on both these websites but they list them in different ways. Gerontius allows selection by type of choir and size as well as location whereas Making Music lists choirs solely in terms of their proximity to a location.

So now you've got a list of 'serious mainstream mixed voice choirs' sitting in front of you, which ones are worth a look at in more detail by going onto the choir's own websites? If it's a chamber choir you're after I would point you towards choirs like Commotio or Jubilate for a mixture of everything from early to contemporary music. As for the larger choirs it has to be the two longest established organisations, namely the Oxford Bach Choir and Oxford Harmonic Society. Both perform a wide range of large scale works, from the well known (Handel's Messiah, Verdi's Requiem and the like) to pieces by lesser known composers such as Caldara or Loewe, and both use professional soloists and orchestras. The Bach Choir has a longer and possibly slightly more prestigious history, but Oxford Harmonic Society isn't far behind, with a reasonably impressive 90 years of music making behind them. The other main difference between these two choirs? Well, subscriptions for Oxford Harmonic Society are currently £99 p.a., but the Bach Choir cost a hefty £180!

That's it. Now it's up to you to do the searching, find the choir of your dreams, and, most importantly, start singing.

The highs and lows of singing

Taking middle C (C4) as a starting point the average bass singer will cover roughly a couple of octaves below, and a soprano two octaves above that point using their normal (modal) voice. So how many other types of singing voice are there, and how high or low can the human voice actually go? There are links from several of the named indiviuals below to examples of them singing, so have a listen and prepare to be amazed.

Well, apparently there are four vocal registers, although they are of variable use in practice. After the normal or 'modal' register next up is 'falsetto' as used by most male altos / countertenors and other men wanting to discretely sing along with women's parts in rehearsals. Then there are 'whistle notes' normally used by female singers for extreme high notes (E6 and upwards). Finally, the lowest vocal register is known as 'vocal fry', 'glottal rattle' or any number of other terms implying that it is basically a non-musical growl of very little use in 'serious' singing.

So what are the extremes achieved by less than average singers? Let's start with the top end of male voices. Some of you might know about Michael Maniaci 'the male soprano'. He's got a beautiful voice covering the standard soprano range because his voice simply didn't break when he went through puberty. Given the lack of castrati these days that makes him pretty unusual. Have a listen to Adam Lopez though. He's naturally a tenor, but can go down into the bass range and way up high using whistle notes to hit a Csharp8 (that's an 8 octave range and a world record high note for men). Being an Australian he's eager to clarify that he is 'all there' but it's still a bit disconcerting to hear a man sing that high.

Over to the ladies then. In classical music the top note required in standard repertoire is a G6 (in an aria by Mozart, a Massenet opera and in Thomas Ades' The Tempest which also asks for 17 E6's in the first scene alone) and F6 appears in a number of pieces, most famously the Queen of the Night arias in The Magic Flute. Beyond that a few works were written specifically for soloists such as Erna Sack and Mado Robin which go up to C7, but these are hardly ever performed these days. To break the ceiling set by Adam Lopez we've got to look to pop singers. Individuals such as Mariah Carey and Minnie Ripperton regularly zip up into whistle notes, but the highest of the high is Brazilan pop singer Georgia Brown. She also has an incredible 8 octave range, with a G8 appearing on one of her records, but as the world record she  managed an astounding G10!

After that we'll drop into the depths. Unfortunately I have no idea of the lowest note achieved by a female, but true women basses do exist, so it's going to be pretty low. For men the obvious place to go for a proper basso profundo is Russia, and you can find a reasonable number of 'Octavists' there who basically sing an octave below normal bass range down to around E1. Vladamir Pasjukov and Aleksander Ort are two examples. Penderecki wrote an F1 in his Song of Cherubim, but for choirs luckily the lowest requirement is 'only' a Bflat1 in Mahler's 2nd Symphony and Rachmninov's Vespers. You can hear a performance of the Mahler on 5th November in Oxford Town Hall being put on by Oxford Symphony Orchestra with Oxford Harmonic Society as the main choir. That means I personally will be attempting to plummet to those depths - wish me luck. Outside of classical music there is certainly some competition from gospel and country singers such as Paul David Kennamer, Tim Storms and Roger Menees amongst others. The latter has managed to use the vocal fry register to growl his way down to 0.393 hertz (we're into negative numbers on standard terminology here) which might possibly be the world record. I wouldn't exactly call it singing though. For a more pleasant exampled of vocal fry try listening to Abert Kuvezin of Yat Kha - a group who combine Albert's growls with a spot of Tuvan throat singing. Ah yes, Tuvan throat singing - how does that fit into the four vocal registers? Maybe you'll have to ask a Tuvan that one.