All About Harmony, Connections, Community
Twenty-seven singing groups, about 800 singers are members of the Greater Rochester Choral Consortium
By John Addyman
Maybe you remember this.
From a quiet hallway, you enter a room that’s bustling with talk and laughter and smiles and looks of recognition. You know many of the people in here. Some you don’t, but they smile at you anyway. You’re connected.
Putting down your jacket and stuff, you turn off your phone. The place where you belong is across the room, with several people you know pretty well: you see them regularly.
You take your spot and turn to the front of the room, where one person stands alone.
She raises her hand.
You take a breath. In your head, all the waves and spheres of a very hectic day stop turning and vibrating.
Her hand comes down.
You breathe again. Softly. Purposefully.
Her hand comes up again and now she’s pointing out at you, smiling and encouraging.
The hand comes down again, directed at you.
And you open your mouth and sing.
Where 60 seconds before there was noise and laughter and small talk, there is now one beautiful sound. Something you and all the other people in the room have made together.
Chances are, you do remember this. No?
Walk into any Wegmans and one out of every six people shopping there has sung in some kind of organized choral ensemble in their lives.
They’ve sung in church.
They’ve sung in school.
They’ve sung in a family.
They’ve sung in college.
And maybe they’re singing now.
Rochester is blessed with many choirs and choruses and chorales. So many, in fact, that in 1996 the Greater Rochester Choral Consortium was formed by six vocal groups.
“It came together because of scheduling issues,” said Bob Slon, who has been the president of the GRCC for 12 years. “They were scheduling concerts on the same days and times, so we said, ‘We’ve got to stop this.’”
With necessity came invention and with invention, expansion.
“Now we have 27 groups,” Slon said. “And 800 singers. We have big groups, like the Rochester Oratorio Society, with 140 members and we have groups of 10 to 12 singers.”
In September, the GRCC co-sponsored (with WXXI-FM) a special film, “Choral Singing in America — Nurturing the Country’s Soul.” The film laid out its message of the connections between singing and life in neighborhoods and communities, deciding “if we sang every day, it would be a more beautiful world.” You could hear the sniffles in the audience. When someone says they love to sing, know that they love to sing.
Sue Melvin, who sits on the board of the GRCC and directs the all-women 40-voice Rochester Rhapsody chorus, said she was surprised at all the different kinds of choirs in the film: “The Alzheimer’s Choir, the Threshold Choir [a very small group that sings in hospices]…they don’t just sing different kinds of music, they have different missions, different purposes, and all the joy that brings; The Music Medics are part of the Barbershop Harmony Society, they send groups of singers, in scrubs, to children in hospitals, children with cancer and other serious diseases. They brighten kids’ days by singing fun songs and inserting the children’s name in the songs.”
The GRCC indeed has its own diverse groups — members include the Rochester Jewish Chorale, the Rochester Gay Men’s Chorus, the Taiwanese Choral Society, the Mount Hope World Singers, Akoma (Gospel music), the Bach Children’s Chorus, the Eastman-Rochester Chorus, Grace Choir, Madrigalia, Musica Spei, the Robert Dean Chorale and the Victor Community Chorus.
The complete list is on the www.choral-rochester.org website.
GRCC
What does the Greater Rochester Choral Consortium do?
Slon explained that the organization helps choir directors do their jobs with more success and satisfaction for everyone involved. GRCC meets three times a year and tries to cover significant ground each time. A lot of the meetings involve problem-solving.
“We talk about different issues choirs were having,” Melvin said. “We have opportunity for open discussion — what are their problems? What my choir’s problem is, Bob’s chorus might have been successful at solving that. We share a lot of best practices.”
“The other thing is the networking and collaborating,” Slon added. “Choirs get together; instead of carrying a full concert load they share some air time with one another. We have guest appearances. One time we had a children’s choir join us, which was kind of self-serving, because they brought their parents and we had a better audience.”
Melvin said the group has recently been focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion in choral singing.
“We’ve provided some training sessions within the consortium, recognizing that we’re not really that diverse in the Rochester choral community. We’re working on it. We have a large diversity of music, male and female groups. It’s about becoming more sensitive to try to reflect the community we serve.”
“And helping choruses make their own decisions that are best for their particular group,” added Slon. “For example, some choirs might be perfectly fine doing religious music. Other choirs may have agnostics or atheists in their group who don’t feel comfortable with it. We try to help leaders of choirs understand all the different aspects so they can make educated decisions for their choirs.
“I was at a couple of concerts recently where the directors provided some audience education about what was to be sung. So, if you’re going to do a piece that’s got some touchy material in it, set it up for people.”
“A perfect example is that we do a mass sing piece at our prism concert,” Melvin said, “where we close the concert with everyone in the hall singing the same song, including the audience (they put the sheet music in the program). What we selected the last time is what’s known as the ‘Black National Anthem.’ It’s called, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing.’ We made sure that in the program we had a little background and all the verses so that it was being sung in context. You set the song up so that you’re not culturally appropriating anything.”
The prism concert, “A Taste of Song,” is scheduled for Feb. 16, 2025, at the Eastman Theater. In that 75-minute concert, 15 of the GRCC’s groups will sing.
Getting started
Have you left your choral experience behind? Are there moments when you think you’d like to start again? Remember when the conductor coaxed those first beautiful sounds out of you and everyone around you was doing the same thing?
Melvin has some serious reasons for you to step into the shower and tune up.
“There are hundreds of health and mental health benefits to singing,” she said. “The endorphins produced and the full airing of your lungs; singers are less likely to get pneumonia and bronchial things.
“If you’re a senior citizen looking for something joyous and healthy and fun with great camaraderie, Bob and I can’t think of anything better to do than sing. Go to the GRCC website, where there’s a list of our member choirs and there’s a link to each choir’s own website. Read the description. See which ones click with you — the style of music, whether it’s an auditioned or non-auditioned choir. Distance is a factor. Maybe you don’t want to go to Brockport.”
Slon noted that size of a choir might be important if you’re still getting your voice tuned up: “You can bury a lot in a 120-voice choir.”
“The Rochester Gay Men’s Chorus and the Rochester Women’s Choir are examples of non-auditioned groups,” Melvin said. “Mount Hope World Singers, they sing music from all over the world and I don’t think they’re an auditioned choir. Sometimes people want to start with something like that. Just go to a rehearsal. Mostly that’s true of our choirs; one or two might say on their website, ‘Contact Us First.’
“If the choir’s website says the rehearsal date and time and place, then you can just show up. Otherwise they wouldn’t put that on their site.”
“Then you introduce yourself to the director and introduce yourself to the other singers,” said Slon. “That will start it off for you. They will probably have you buy some music or give you some music to sing from.”
Membership procedures will be explained. Some groups have dues.
“In Rochester Rhapsody we have a very organized six-week program for prospective members where we assist them in practicing their audition song,” said Melvin. “I can’t say that every group does that but they all have some kind of assistance for new, prospective singers.”
At the Rhapsody’s first rehearsal in September, one woman new to the chorus was collected by a couple of experienced singers. She began singing on her own, then was joined in harmony with the others. The beauty of the joined voices blossomed.
“Some groups will put out practice recordings with your part featured on an MP3 or something like that and you can sing along and learn your part,” said Slon.
Melvin said some groups do not require that you read music.
“That’s another thing that’s very off-putting to people,” she said. “Not all of our groups require that you can read music.”
“I was surprised to find out how many people in our Rochester Oratorio Society don’t read music,” admitted Slon.
“They actually read better than they think because they can follow the ups and the downs of the notes, but they don’t know what the notes are called,” added Melvin.
Expect most chorus rehearsals to last from an hour and a half to two hours, once a week.
“If you’re interested in singing in your own community choir and it’s not a GRCC member, check it out,” said Melvin. “They don’t turn anybody down in a church choir and they always need singers, especially male singers. Male singers are in high demand.
“We don’t want to give the impression that only the upper echelon of singers can be part of the GRCC. We have a wide span of skill levels. Anything with the title of ‘community choir’ is your best bet.”
Slon and Melvin agreed: Wherever you sing, it’s joyful.
If we sang every day, it would be a more beautiful world.