How Can We Keep Them Singing: Older Singers and Their Place in the Community

Extract: How Can We Keep Them Singing: Older Singers and Their Place in the Community by Matt Schlecht - writer and editor, Brooklyn, New York. Publication: Chorus America's The Voice, Spring 2020

“In the Yarra Valley east of Melbourne, Australia, music director Belinda Gillam Derry had also noted that advancing age was becom- ing a barrier to some members’ participation in her group, the Yarra Valley Singers. Some had left, or were considering leaving, because they could no longer stand safely on the risers or even at floor level during performances. “Rather than dismiss these concerns,” Gillam Derry says, “I began researching ways in which the choir experience could be adapted to enable older people and people with disabilities to participate fully, without compromising the musical output.”

Her research first led to a number of changes that addressed physical mobility barriers, from purchasing new risers with side and back rails and height-adjusted music stands to a new public address system and body packs for members with hearing impairments. She also introduced small-group “voice checks,” inwhich singers are encouraged to consider how the part they’ve been singing might be affecting their vocal health. “Then I let them know the ranges for each part in the next year’s repertoire and ask what they would like to sing,” Gillam Derry says. Some of them choose to stay with a part because, they tell her, it’s what “they have always sung,” she says, and they leave out “the extreme notes.” But others take the opportunity to shift to a different part.

Eventually a daytime ensemble was formed, too. Gillam Derry says that she rehearses that group at a much more relaxed pace, as its only performance commitments are a “mini show- case and lunch” at the last rehearsal of each term, where family and friends are invited
to hear the pieces that the singers themselves choose from that term’s repertoire. “There’s much more time during rehearsals to have a chat, respond to individual needs, give people a chance to try a solo, and celebrate every little success,” she says.”

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