Why choral singing is still so worth it

Music, leadership, and a look back

Tonight, in the city of Boston, I will be returning to sing with the Back Bay Chorale, after a two-year hiatus (and a few halting attempts to restart). I’ve been singing with this ensemble since 2008, and it was an aching night when, in early March 2020, the group gathered at Emmanuel Church to sing a concert of Heinrich Schütz, whose centerpiece was the delicate and contemplative Musikalische Exequien, a requiem for a pandemic only beginning. Tonight, we gather again—triple-vaccinated, masked, and tested—to begin work on another German requiem, this one written 232 years later by Brahms. If all goes as we hope, our first major performance in two years will happen in early May, on the stage of Sanders Theatre. But this has hardly been a time of things going as we’d hoped.

In October, we had a brief time of rehearsing an obscure Bach cantata for what was to be a pop-up, outdoor performance at the Boston Public Library. It wasn’t to be, and even that rehearsal experience was difficult: trying to generate all that tone and the fiddly diction while wearing masks was a chore, and being near people, while nourishing in some ways, felt draining and frightening in others.

Still, through everything, I’m excited to return. I’m aware it’s still a risk; choral singing was one of the first things to go as far too dangerous when the pandemic began. But the rewards are great, and the boost to my mental health, I believe, will be worth it. There’s also a good bit of research, some of it coming out only a few years ago, suggesting that choral singing is not only good for a sense of community and well-being, but for all kinds of brain health. There’s a certain balancing of risks that feels necessary to take on right now, and the very careful protocols make it feel worth it to me.

But there’s another major reason I stay with this group, as I note in the post I’m reviving below, excerpted and updated from my therapy blog nearly ten years ago. That reason is the leadership, craft, and kindness of the Chorale’s conductor, Dr. Scott Allen Jarrett. I go into a lot more detail in the post about what makes him so great, and why his way of working keeps me motivated to continue singing (mostly) sacred music in a large group. But I also go into all the embodiment that singing requires, and how it relates to the somatic therapy work that I, at the time of the original post, had just finished training in.

The original post is titled "Fail Better: The joys of gentle and respectful leadership," and touches on two of the key concepts that figured in the earliest part of our training: gentleness and respect. In a future post I’ll share the writing I did on the six words making up the acronym “GROUND,” which form a literal basis from which my work stems.

But for now, here’s the text, edited and updated, about why singing with this particular conductor encourages me in so many ways, and why, through all this difficulty, I crave the challenge.

Fail Better – the joys of gentle and respectful leadership

from March 19, 2012

My good friend and fellow therapist Michel recently pointed to this article about the importance of allowing failure if you want kids to do better in school. In brief: researchers found that kids who were told that problems were difficult and failure was common did much better on subsequent tests than kids who were not given that explicit encouragement.

This got me thinking about my experiences with The Back Bay Chorale, an excellent amateur chorus here in Boston. Singing, perhaps especially with a large group, is such an embodied experience, concerned with breath, muscle control, placement of subtle shapes in the mouth and throat, and emotional expression. It engages me in all my parts – mind, body, emotions and spirit. It is also concerned, in a large choir, with an exquisite communion between the group and the person directing it, bringing all of these pieces together into one great voice. And of course Ilana Rubenfeld, the mother of Rubenfeld Synergy, started out as a symphonic conductor, and the work is deeply informed by her experiences in music. A Somatic Therapy session can proceed like a piece of music: each movement happening in its own time, with crescendos and diminuendos, climaxes and rests.

I’ve been singing in some formal group or other for most of my life, but I’ve never experienced as much pleasure and satisfaction – not to mention marked improvement of ability – as I have since I started singing with this chorus.

I tend to blame this fact on Scott Jarrett, the marvelous director of the group. For a long time I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is that makes his direction so inspiring, so precise, so effective. Sure, he really knows his stuff; you can tell at every rehearsal that he has learned the music inside out and could probably sing the entire Bach St. John Passion from memory. But I’ve known plenty of conductors with this kind of expertise – great professionals – but I still haven’t enjoyed working with them.

So many conductors, especially orchestral ones, seem to prefer the use of shame and fear to get the desired results. “How many times do I have to tell you the same thing?” “No, no, no, NO!” Imitating our tone in a mocking voice. Questioning the man- or woman-hood of choristers. Yelling, berating, and belittling are all popular tools. I don’t know whether this comes from a tradition of eccentric geniuses crossed with corporally punishing boarding school dons, or whether it is encouraged in conducting school: you must be a jerk to make an orchestra or chorus respond to your demands. The musical results can be good from this technique, just as training a dog with fear can promote obedience. But it doesn’t infuse the musicians with joy in the work.

With an amateur chorus, you would think things would be different. Generally they are not, but at Back Bay they are, and people stay with it in spite of the sometimes grueling schedule and hard work because they love the music, yes, but also because they love Scott.

The thing that most profoundly characterizes his style is a winning combination of gentle encouragement, and the findings of the study above: he lets us know he knows it’s hard, and that he knows we’re working hard. And he does work us hard: rhythmic precision, cleanness, gorgeousness (and appropriateness!) of tone is incredibly important to him. He does a tremendous job getting us to articulate the music in the proper style, and brings the emotional components to it as well. The most frustrated I’ve ever seen him get had him saying to us firmly – not yelling – “Come on, guys! Just…[sigh]…don’t do that. You know better than that. Just…do better.”

Because we do know better. We can do better. And the best encouragement he can give us is that reminder: this is hard, but I know you can do it.

And we do. Each concert I’ve sung with this 120-voice chorus has been better than the last, and I believe it is because this director shows us respect, allows us to rise to his level of excellence – the excellence he demands of us, with a gentle hand. I discovered early on that I didn’t just want to do this music. I wanted to do this music for Scott, because he deserved that I give back at least 1/120th as much as he was putting into it.

And the respect he offers makes this not only possible, but so much more likely. He has a subtlety of bodily communication that is so lucid that we as a chorus respond with him. Sometimes he tests this in rehearsal, saying things like, “Okay, sing what I show.” It always amazes me how highly developed his gestural language is, and how the chorus responds; it’s especially funny when he wants us to do something “wrong,” then correct it to what he’s looking for. When we tune our bodies to his, it works beautifully.

Over and over it seems, and in so many different venues, I learn that the best thing I can give to any effort is to connect with the person or people involved, meet them where they are, and be an encouraging guide. I’m grateful to have Scott and the Chorale in my life, and I hope I can be as inspiring to my clients as he is to me.