Singing in the Schools: Putting Education in Chorus DNA

When Chanticleer started its Singing in the Schools program in 1986 it was a modest affair. The organization was just eight years old, and though it was already recognized as one of the finest male vocal ensembles in the world, it had not yet realized the dream of its founder, Louis A. Botto, to pay each of its 12 singers a full-time salary.

But as kids, each of the members of Chanticleer had sung in a chorus, and the music director at the time, Joseph Jennings, had an interest in working with children and warm relationships with a number of school choir directors. It just made sense that Chanticleer would want to encourage young people in their pursuit of choral singing. As it turned out, there were as yet untapped sources of support for educational programs, an enticing draw for the newly established 501(c)3 organization. So with funding from the Haas Foundation they started small, working with an all-city middle school choir in a variety of educational activities, including masterclasses, lecture-concerts, and skills-targeted lessons.

“It was part of our organizational DNA to offer students the real thing. It was the real Chanticleer in the classroom. No surrogates were ever used.”

Singing in the Schools grew from there. A number of schools got multiple visits, designed sequentially to complement their own music program, focusing on such topics as vocal technique, music theory, sightsinging, music terminology, music history, and ensemble-building exercises. When Christine Bullin arrived in 2000 to become Chanticleer’s president and general director, requests from schools were coming in regularly. And Chanticleer was conducting workshops and masterclasses while on the road. It was clear from the feedback that what the students and their choral teachers appreciated the most was the chance to interact directly with members of Chanticleer.

“It was part of our organizational DNA to offer students ‘the real thing,'” said Bullin. “It was the real Chanticleer in the classroom—the members of Chanticleer were the teachers. No surrogates were ever used.”

Building on Experience—One Festival at a Time

Building on the “up close and personal” element, it was a logical progression to invite school choirs in the San Francisco Bay Area into the city to work even more intensely with Chanticleer. The annual Youth Choral Festivals, begun in 2000, draw some 200 students each year from area schools for a non-competitive festival that includes small-group vocal workshops (with two Chanticleer singers assigned per group) and a full-scale evening concert featuring performances by youth groups and the full Chanticleer ensemble. Once students were regularly putting on concerts with Chanticleer, it made sense to start the Student Composer Competition, which was inaugurated in 2001 as a biannual event.

They then added another biannual festival just for middle schools and, in 2005, launched Chanticleer in Sonoma, a summer singing festival program at Sonoma State University for 60 singers ages 18 to 80. In 2009, again with funding from the Haas Foundation, Chanticleer inaugurated Open Door, inviting choir directors and general music teachers from the Bay Area to observe its rehearsals and participate in workshops. By then it was clear that Chanticleer’s array of educational programs needed someone’s full-time attention: Ben Johns, a former member of Chanticleer, stepped in as education director in 2008.

Approaching the 10-year anniversary of the Youth Choral Festivals, Johns came up with the idea for a national youth choral festival—an endeavor sure to be labor-intensive, but not as scary as one might expect. “We just built on our experience in education over the last 10 years of doing one-day youth choral festivals,” Bullin said. “We knew that our method and our format was effective. Everybody knew what to do, and it seemed natural to take it up a few notches.”

What unfolded in March 2010 was a four-day choral immersion for some 416 singers from 12 selected high school choirs—seven from California, and five from communities as far-flung as Hawaii and Virginia. As with past festivals, there was no participation fee—the choirs had to pay for their transportation and accommodations.

In addition to an intense schedule of rehearsals, the young singers attended workshops on such topics as IPA, vocal technique, and “stage deportment” and, with their choirs, participated in coaching sessions with members of Chanticleer. A 23-member volunteer honor choir was pre-selected from recorded auditions and rehearsed with Chanticleer's music director, Matthew Oltman, on pieces they performed at the final concert. Some 16 singers trained by Ben Johns from non-participant Bay Area schools acted as a “laboratory choir” for the sessions offered to choral directors with Vance George.

The climactic event on March 29, The Singing Life, featured Chanticleer and the choirs in a day-long residency at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall. There, the choirs performed individually, and attended vocal masterclasses led by mezzo-sopranos Frederica von Stade and Zheng Cao. That evening, all 12 choirs joined Chanticleer and von Stade for a gala concert under the direction of Matthew Oltman.

The program featured the American premiere of L’Annonciation, a cantata by French composer Jean-Yves Daniel-Lesur. Also on the program were Renaissance masterpieces by Gabrieli and Byrd as well as the winning composition in Chanticleer’s Student Composition Competition, "Chou Nu Er," by Taiwanese composer Yi-Wen Chang. Irish composer Michael McGlynn, a Chanticleer favorite, was represented by a lively folk-song arrangement with the composer participating in the rehearsals via Skype to help with tricky Gaelic pronunciation. Von Stade joined the group for a performance of another Chanticleer staple: "Shenandoah."

Quality Programming Fixes Things

Artistically, the concert program was challenging, requiring that the choir sing in six languages— English, Latin, Irish Gaelic, French, Chinese, and Kenyan—and master tricky rhythms and tonalities. But in its work with students over the years, Chanticleer has never backed off from programming the best and most beautiful choral music, no matter its difficulty. “Quality of programming can fix a lot of things,” said Oltman, who became Chanticleer’s music director in 2009 after 10 years singing with the ensemble. “People should not be scared to do pieces that have stood the test of time or have challenging elements that reap solid and substantial rewards. It should not just be hard for hard’s sake. The final outcome should be something of great beauty and great excitement. Kids will appreciate that more than something simpler or jauntier and without as much depth.”

Even with this belief, Oltman admits to momentary doubts that he had bitten off too much for the massive unauditioned group standing before him. “This was not an honors choir. We had invited whole choirs,” he said. “We had everything planned to the minutest detail. The only thing we didn’t know was if the singers would know the music, which was a little scary. But they came, and either they knew it or learned it quickly. The sheer volume of the singers and enthusiasm and energy made everyone perform at the top of their game.”

“People should not be scared to do pieces that have challenging elements... It should not just be hard for hard’s sake. The final outcome should be something of great beauty and great excitement. Kids will appreciate that more than something simpler or jauntier and without as much depth.”

Having a broad mix of musical abilities provided some teaching moments, as well. Oltman mixed up the 400-plus singers into quartets, rather than the typical SATB configuration, so that students from different schools could get to know each other, but also so that singers would learn to stand on their own rather than lean on their section. “I challenged them,” Oltman said. "Saying, 'You have SATB around you, and that is your unit. You act as a group, you help each other, and if something goes wrong, you fix it amongst yourselves.’ It didn’t work always, but overall it was a great success. Not everything was directed at me; there was a shared sense of responsibility.”

Because of the sheer numbers of singers, flagging attention spans, and the time crunch, Oltman had to be very efficient in rehearsals and not get lost in the “weeds” of small details. “With 416 kids on a hot Saturday afternoon in your sixth hour of rehearsal, nitpicking about some tiny thing wasn’t going to be effective in bringing the piece to life,” he said. “That was a tricky balancing act for me, because in Chanticleer, we get down to every last detail and talk it to death. But I knew that wasn’t going to work.

“Ultimately the whole festival was intended to encourage people to keep singing,” he said. “This was not an academic sort of festival where students learn to sing with perfect Irish diction. The goal was to give students a taste of all the wonderful choral music that is out there, to have them interact with living composers, to explore different languages, and to perform in collaboration with instrumentalists. I wanted to give them as many experiences as possible. That was the main goal.”

Getting Beyond the Notes

Chanticleer also wanted to impress on the young singers the importance of getting beyond the notes and details and into the heart and soul of a piece of music. Toward that end, in rehearsals and individual coaching sessions with the choirs, Chanticleer members talked with singers about the meaning of the words and the context in which the composer created the piece. “We talk about what the music is about and draw out the musical inspiration,” Oltman said. “That can fix a whole bunch of little technical issues.”

While rehearsing John Wilbye’s madrigal “Sweet Honey-Sucking Bees” with the laboratory choir, one young singer expressed concern about dynamics and pronunciation of the word bees, Oltman recalled. “All you need to do is picture yourself as little shepherds and shepherdesses out in the field underneath the tree with picnic baskets,” he told the group. “You’re covered from ankle to neck but you’re trying to flirt a little. If you just sing the piece with that coy sensibility, it will all happen.”

And it did happen, Oltman said, on the last run-through. “This is where artistry comes in,” he told them. “Just decide, today, I am going to become an artist, I am not going to be told what to do, I am just going to internalize it, do my own inner monologue, paint my own picture, and I am going to be an artist.”

Chanticleer members Alan Reinhardt and Matthew Curtis made similar points about singing musically in a coaching session with the Palo Alto High School Concert Choir. “We don’t try to put the p in the word lip on the last half of the 16th note,” Reinhardt told the group. “We just sing the word lip.”

It is a perspective that choristers don’t often hear, noted Michael Najar, director of the Choir. “So often it is top down, conductor to singer— ‘here is the musical phrase I want to impose upon the music,’” Najar said. "But this was singer to singer, musician to musician. Chanticleer breaks down the walls. That is one of the reasons they don’t come off as arrogant at all. They are singers and they know the challenges because they are living it.”

“Just decide, today, I am going to become an artist, I am not going to be told what to do, I am just going to internalize it, do my own inner monologue, paint my own picture, and I am going to be an artist.”

Though it is notoriously difficult to measure the impact of such events, the flurry of comments on Chanticleer’s Facebook page the day after the closing concert of the Festival provides some indicator of what the students took away.

Ana Dimapilis, a member of the Santa Rosa High School Choir, confessed that, with so many other required courses to take, she had intended to quit choir her senior year. “You guys inspired me with music,” she wrote. “After spending the weekend with all of you, there is just no way I can leave. I just want to thank you guys for the most amazing weekend of my life.”

John Hui, who sings with the choir at Lowell High School in San Francisco, said that he learned at the Festival to be more direct with the music. “Don’t wait for another to do something,” he said. “Take action if necessary. Also, have an idea of what the music is about. If the song is a love song, try to be gentle and flowing. If it’s a lively piece, try to have fun with it and add bounce to the singing.”

“There is so much more to music than I thought there was, and you taught me so much,” wrote Gianna Boba, who came to the Festival with the Gioventù Musicale of the Hawaii Youth Opera Chorus.

"You guys make me want to be a better musician,” wrote Caitlyn Yosh, also with the Hawaii Youth Opera Chorus.

Which is the whole point, Oltman said. “We don’t do competitions. We don’t do placements and grades,” he said. “But we do say, ‘Make yourself a stronger musician,’ because we really believe that by making yourself a stronger musician, you will ultimately make yourself a better person.

“Even if you go out and become a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or a garbage man, these kinds of experiences can make you learn how to work better with people, to have a sense of pride and self worth and a place you can go when the world gets rough, an experience you can have and revisit and think, ‘Hey, I did that once, and I can do it again. It is inside me.’ That’s why we do it.”

Keeping a Net Under It and Managing Growth

To make room for magical moments to unfold required a herculean behind-the-scenes effort in organization and execution. The logistical heavy lifting fell to Johns: “It was the biggest event I had anything to do with besides my wedding,” he said. “It was new for me to be telling people to do things.”

What made it work, he said, was a high level of expertise and cooperation among Chanticleer’s small staff and core of volunteers. “Curt Hancock, Chanticleer’s director of operations, is a logistical mastermind,” Johns said. “He took care of things that I was just oblivious to, like moving chairs from one room to another. It never occurred to me, for example, that so many parents and chaperones would want to watch rehearsals and needed a place to sit.”

During the planning stages, “ideas were refined quickly” as each staff person brought his or her expertise to the table, Johns said. But in the heat of the Festival what was required, he said, was “people really buying into what was going on and not being too proud to jump in and help.”

It also made a difference that four of the seven staff members had a combined total of more than 50 years experience working for the San Francisco Opera. “Lots of moving parts don't scare us," said Bullin. "Even being in Davies Hall and assembling a youth orchestra—we were able to keep the net under this large operation.”

Holding to its “no surrogates” credo has put some useful boundaries around Chanticleer educational outreach plans. After all, they are just 12 men with family lives and an increasingly busy international touring schedule. One shift in recent years has been that Chanticleer members appear slightly less in Singing in the Schools appearances in the Bay Area. However, Johns, a former Chanticleer member, now gives more than 70 clinics himself, “which is vastly more than the whole ensemble could ever have done,” Bullin said.

One idea that took years to germinate and got its trial run at the National Youth Choral Festival is now beginning to take off. Johns is recruiting singers from Bay Area schools that Chanticleer has worked with in the past to participate in “LAB Choirs”—three 10-week sessions of rehearsal, study, work-shopping new music, interaction with Chanticleer, and performance opportunities in their communities. Students audition for the choirs and after successfully completing one session, may participate in others.

In the 2011-12 season, one of the three LAB Choirs will join two other high school choirs in Chanticleer’s Mission Road 2 program, the run-up to a June 2012 tour of California missions with newly exhumed music from the period. The three choirs will be trained in the music and perform it for elementary schools (it is a requirement that every fourth grader in California study and visit the Spanish missions, an important part of the state's history). Artistic advisor to the LAB Choir program and enthusiastic supporter is conductor Vance George, who notes that no such opportunity presently exists for Bay Area choral singers.

The term LAB Choir evolved naturally to reflect the hope that it would be a true laboratory. Johns soon realized that the letters L-A-B had a special significance for Chanticleer, so the official name of the latest education program became the Louis A. Botto (LAB) Choir. It’s a fitting way to honor the founder, who had such large dreams for Chanticleer. "Even though only one member remains who knew Louis,” Bullin said, “his infectious spirit of curiosity and adventure, his artistic standards, and his insistence on never standing still are very much a part of the DNA of Chanticleer.”

For more about Chanticleer's National Youth Choral Festival and a list of participating choirs, go to http://www.chanticleer.org.

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This article is reprinted from The Voice, Fall 2010.