The Business of Choir: A Choral Leader's Guide for Organizational Growth

By Alex Gartner and Emily Williams Burch

Today' s choral leaders wear many hats: fundraising director, development associate, communications manager, marketing designer, volunteer coordinator— the list goes well beyond beautiful choral performances. In many ways, leading a choir is much like running a business.Written by two authors with extensive experience building choral programs from the ground up, The Business of Choir offers new insights, best practices, and practical action items for choral leaders looking to master the organizational and administrative elements of running a successful choral program. Features include:A behind-the-scenes look at elements of running a choir that are seldom the focus of college music education courses.An actionable toolkit to bring a greater focus to accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion in choral spaces.Strategies to demystify fundraising and finance.Practical approaches to recruitment, retention, marketing, volunteer management, and board interactions.Whether you' re looking to expand your fundraising efforts, hire your first administrative professional, or fine-tune your organizational policies and practices, this resource will provide the direction and clarity you need as you take the next big step in your organization' s journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781622777020

Book preview

SECTION 1.

BUILDING CAPACITY and SUPPORT

Imagine for a moment that you are at your local banquet hall. You’re outside the dining room, standing underneath a lofted ceiling and on top of an abstractly designed carpet. Out here, it’s quiet…so quiet that you can

hear the dull rumbling from the room ahead. Inside is an array of tables filled with people enjoying a main course. You finished your meal a little early and stepped outside for a bit of quiet, calm air.

At ease, you return to your seat. The room is dimly lit but freshly adorned. Each table bears a white tablecloth, an ornate flower arrangement, and flickering votives. As you walk in the direction of your seat, you notice how happy everyone seems to be, laughing, talking, and the like. As you pass one particular table, you notice how captivated they are with one another. One person is telling a story while the others are raptly listening. Suddenly, they erupt with laughter, obviously responding to some hilarious joke.

Instantly, you’re overcome with nerves. You feel the color drain for your face as a cold sweat develops on your forehead. As you sit in your seat, your hands start to slightly shake. What am I doing here?

After taking a sip of water, you cast a glance across to the person seated opposite you. This is the parent of a member of your choir. They also happen to be the president of your local Rotary club. As they explained it a month ago, their child, along with many of their friends, has enjoyed an incredibly beneficial experience as a member of your choir. As such, they thought it would be appropriate to invite you to be a guest speaker at their annual Rotary dinner.

At the time, you were elated with the invitation! What a great opportunity to talk about your choir and the impact of choral singing in general. But looking around the room, you don’t recognize any familiar faces. There are no fellow music teachers, no school administrators, no frequenters of your concerts. The only two people that you recognize are seated at your table: the parent who asked you to speak and their spouse. Why on earth did I accept this invitation?

Because you did your research, you know that Rotary is a network of business and professional leaders who come together for mutual goals of service and community prosperity. But who are these people, exactly? Are they lawyers? Doctors? Small business owners? Car salesmen?

As far as you can tell, none of them are musicians. What do I even say to these people?

If you, the choral professional, have ever found yourself in this kind of situation, or when you inevitably are faced with similar circumstances, it’s important to remember one thing: your choir is worthy of a keynote speech. Your choir is worth talking about. It is worthy of being recognized by your community. It is worthy of being known.

So why is it so easy to let stage fright take over when we are faced with the opportunity to talk about our choir’s value to those outside our organization? Why is it so easy to feel like we aren’t meant to be in the room? Why do we sometimes feel that our choirs are irrelevant to our communities?

Before we answer that, we’d like to set the stage for section one of the book by introducing you to someone who would likely thrive in the setting depicted above: Dr. G. Phillip Shoultz, III. Dr. Shoultz serves as the Associate Artistic Director of VocalEssence, a multifaceted choral organization that is based in Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Why would Dr. Shoultz thrive in a room full of non-choral people? Because Dr. Shoultz excels at translating the value of choral singing to the masses.

In the following conversation with Dr. Shoultz, you’ll witness the communicability of choral music. Beyond musical matters, Dr. Shoultz describes a mindset that effectively conveys a musical mission and vision to a broad spectrum of potential supporters.¹

How would you describe the mission of VocalEssence? How do you communicate that mission?

VocalEssence is an organization that believes in using the power of singing to create community connections, to embrace differences, to amplify voices that haven’t often been heard, and to make a difference in our community.

It is important that you can articulate exactly what your mission is as well as how you live out that mission based on your values. Within my group, Singers of This Age (formally Vocal Essence Singers of This Age, or VESOTA for short), we define this at the beginning of each season. When VESOTA began, our stated purpose was to create a space where students could bring all of themselves and their communities into a new community; to learn from each other and grow together; and embrace difference. Over time, the singers put flesh on those bones by saying that VESOTA exists to give students the skills to be agents of social change. We achieve this through the lens of creativity, collaboration, and communication.

What is the value of choral singing?

The act of choral singing is one of the most transformative and vulnerable experiences. Music itself can be transformative. With music, we can learn about cultures different than our own, or sing profound texts that make us think about how we engage with the world around us. Yet singing together is even more vulnerable. There are people next to you who can hear your voice. You must be willing to share that freely and work together in an organic way.

For me, the value of choral singing lies in the people. In all my choirs, I want to create a space where singers can be brave, where they can have courage to say what they need to say in love, and know that it will be received with love. And while we may disagree, we should be able to communicate with one another, find the differences, and gather toward some commonality—a common ground. It creates something that’s larger than each of us. There aren’t many spaces like that in this world.

How do you communicate the value of choral singing to those who have not experienced it for themselves?

We know more and more that leaders of independent choruses and school choirs are entrepreneurial leaders. We are going to engage our singers, their family members, our constituents, donors, and patrons. There are some whose experience with singing was not lifegiving. Some might recall a time when someone told them that they couldn’t sing altogether.

Regardless of the experience, for me, it starts with the music. That’s the vehicle we use. Through music, we create an environment that develops confidence, the ability to communicate ideas and work with others. The way this is accomplished is through the gift of singing together. We use singing to spark conversation, to create.

Let’s create a visual scene. Your singers are divided into small groups to create a silent movie for a particular text that they’re singing. There are all sorts of creative possibilities. This allows them to use their imagination and bring meaning to the music. None of this can happen without an environment where they can be listened to, accepted, and received for who they truly are. Choral singing creates an environment for possibilities. I have found that this idea lands well with people who are not musical. With an environment where anything is possible, you can create a connection that translates to other parts of their lives. This idea is sticky. It speaks to everyone.

Once you’ve built a relationship with those outside your organization, why do they continue to support you?

There are many layers to that. I can speak first from the decades-long legacy of VocalEssence. Once you’ve created a relationship with a supporter, there is a sort of equity that’s built. It’s an equity that’s built on trust. When you’re starting out, you have to be transparent about what you’re going to do, and you have to stick to it. If anything changes, you have to explain exactly what’s changing and why. It’s not about over-communicating. Just communicate and stay in touch.

Philip Brunelle, the founder of VocalEssence, is great about communication. He doesn’t want people to get too far away or not hear from us for too long. It’s not always about asking for something. Sometimes, it’s just a little note to share what’s going on so that we stay front of mind. Letting them follow the journey of our story helps us authentically create equity. With this equity, we can go back to them with new, bold ideas and seek their advice. They might give you other people to connect with, or they might be the ones to support you in one way or another.

VESOTA benefits from this type of legacy. As a new program of VocalEssence, VESOTA is a youth choir that sings, dances, writes their own music, raps, and most importantly, reflects the diversity of its community through its membership.² A fresh, newer ensemble, we’ve been able to speak to what people have been silently saying they’ve wanted to see from our art form. With racial reckoning at the forefront of our society, we did not want to fall into the trap of becoming a program that stops simply with having more colors of faces on stage.

It was much harder to state our goals and be true to them. When people don’t understand, we keep explaining. This is what we hope to accomplish. This is what we anticipate the result to be. These steps are going to move and shift, but if you’re staying true to the same values that are in place, you have a consistent story. People can see the authenticity and sense your sincerity, and they’ll respond. Even if they don’t believe 100% of your vision, they will be compelled by it. If they believe in you, they will support you because of the equity—the relationship—that you’ve built.

What message do you hope to send as a champion of diversity in a choral setting?

One of the many ways I show up in this world is as a Black man in the choral field. For many years, this field has been involved in performing music of different cultures, especially one type of music that has been organic to my culture: the spiritual. We know these haven’t always been performed in the healthiest ways. (I still think I’d rather have that than no performance at all.) Diversity is defined by dimensions of difference. We often get caught up in thinking that diversity is the amount of melanin³ in someone’s skin. Diversity occupies so many different dimensions, whether it’s social, economic, gender expansiveness, abilities, faith perspectives, and all the ways that we can identify. There are so many choirs, both in rural and urban parts of the United States, that appear homogeneous because of the predominant skin color, but this ignores the many facets of diversity amongst their participants and constituents. When you ignore all but a few dimensions of difference, there’s no way you’re ready to embrace the diversity that shows up more visibly.

After a recent concert, we conducted a routine evaluation of our patrons. I was fascinated by how the audience perceived one of the pieces, which featured a wonderful rap section. Many comments praised the fantastic performance of that young man. How I wish I could have told these patrons that though this person presented as male, they didn’t actually identify as such.

We all make assumptions based on the way people look, and in doing so we ignore getting to the core by staying on the surface. By acknowledging and engaging with the differences of everyone in the room, we can better reflect who we are as the sum of all the individual parts. There are times that we get it wrong. There are times that we miss things. There are times that we speak words that we wish we hadn’t. We must have the language to acknowledge these things and walk them back. Equity is built when the recipient of your corrective language is appreciative of your work to do better. That’s what diversity is for me. It’s much richer and more complex.

When it comes to diversity in a choral setting, we’ve always programmed music from a lot of composers from different backgrounds and of different genders. What we have not historically done so well is to go beneath the surface and invite these people to come perform with us as well. Why not go a step deeper into the relationship and learn the circumstances that enabled this musician to create this music? What can we learn by connecting with them as a person through their lived experiences? When we peel back the layers, when we create space for conversation where we share our experiences, that’s engaging with diversity.

How do you communicate these types of messages to those outside your own walls?

Those who are closer to the organization, those who read our publications, are more likely to know what we’re talking about internally. For the casual concertgoer, they are not engaging with us in this way. They’re engaging with what they see. For example, VESOTA made a shift from having prescribed uniforms to just concert black. In our evaluations, we received several comments about the perceived lack of uniformity. While that feedback was received, the concern is minimal when I consider the positive gains of allowing singers to show up the way they want to. It made me think that I may have missed a moment at the beginning of the concert where I could have explained why we had a new uniform.

In another recent concert, I made a decision that some might consider controversial. In the second movement of Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, I selected two black teenagers who identified as female to sing the solo that is traditionally assigned to a boy. For anyone who knows of that tradition, I hoped that they were engaging with the why. Sometimes we have to explicitly communicate the why and let people sit with it and wonder. It creates an opportunity to re-engage with it later.

What does it mean to engage with the why, especially as it relates to the value of choral music?

As humans we are always changing. Choral music, like many things, is meant to evolve, ebb and flow, and embrace the expansiveness of possibilities. This is engaging with the why: living into your truth and living into possibility. People today like to use the word innovate. While that’s great, you can’t innovate if you aren’t letting yourself conceive of what’s possible.

As you read this book and this interview, you have to be able to envision things outside of what you’ve already seen and give yourself the space to do it. When we consider that these possibilities can be reality, new things will emerge and our art form will be enlarged, as will its impact on our singers and audiences. It does not take away from everything that came before. We will still love Beethoven and Mozart, among many others. All of that music has its place. But we need to enlarge the possibilities.

As Dr. Shoultz said, there is power in engaging with the why. He shared that sentiment from the perspective of someone sitting in the audience asking themselves why something sounds, looks, or seems a certain way. Engaging with the why goes beyond the concert hall. For choral music, our why is a combination of our singers, our teaching, our audience, and so much more.

Engaging with our why opens a world of possibility for our choirs. We’ll start in Chapter 1 by exploring the concept of value and how we communicate it both within and outside of our organizations. If communicated effectively, value can build a solid case for increased support for your choir. This concept will be expressly explored through the lens of fundraising in Chapter 2.

As Dr. Shoultz reminds us time and again, value must be authentic. This is particularly important when it comes to conversations about diversity, equity, inclusivity, and accessibility. In Chapter 3, we will explore these concepts even further with the expertise of Dr. Marshaun Hymon, a choral conductor and founder of the True Change Alliance, a group committed to building leaders who champion diversity and build anti-racist organizational structures.

What might you learn from this section? As the title suggests, it will help answer the question of how to build capacity and support for your choir. To begin, you must first be comfortable with holding up a mirror to your organization, asking some tough questions, and be willing to do the work. Let’s get started.

Dr. G. Phillip Shoultz, III is the associate artistic director of VocalEssence, where his most visible impact is seen through his leadership as founding conductor of the VocalEssence Singers of This Age. He also serves as mentor to educators through classroom visits and as an adjunct faculty member in the graduate music education program at the University of St. Thomas. Additional post-secondary teaching experiences include work at the University of Minnesota, Georgia State University, and the University of Georgia while he completed his studies. His service as a public school educator in Georgia garnered multiple Teacher of the Year honors. While there, he also served as Artistic Director to an adult community choir (Gwinnett Choral Guild) and a youth organization (Atlanta Institute for Musicianship and Singing), founding director of the Georgia Young Men’s Ensemble, a part of the Grammy Award–winning Gwinnett Young Singers, and the Assistant Director for the professional chamber choir, Coro Vocati.

Notes

1G. Philip Shoultz, interview with Emily Williams Burch and Alex Gartner, Music (ed) Matters podcast, episode 81, podcast audio, November 23, 2021, https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/musicmatterswdremmyb/episodes/2021-11-23T10_00_00-08_00.

2To learn more about VESOTA, visit https://www.vocalessence.org/who-we-are/performing-ensembles/vocalessence-sota/.

3Melanin refers to a broad group of molecules that are responsible for skin pigmentation.

CHAPTER 1.

SELLING THE MUSIC BOX

A CASE FOR YOUR CHOIR’S VALUE

Amusic box. Suppose that you are the world’s foremost purveyor of music boxes. As a craftsperson, you toil and labor whilst constructing intricate, beautiful music boxes that produce delicate, dulcet sounds. Music box collectors flock to your shop because they agree that your music boxes are truly one-of-a-kind. Your creations are lauded—coveted, even. Those who purchase your esteemed music boxes like to show them off at parties. They tell their friends about your music boxes.

One evening, as you locked up your shop after a hard day’s work, a well-dressed stranger addressed you on the street. I pass by your shop every day on my walk home, they said pleasantly. Through polite conversation, you learned that until they had encountered one of your creations at a friend’s home, they’d never before had an interest in music boxes. Now, your music boxes were intriguing, and they were interested in learning more.

The first question they asked was, What exactly is a music box? At first you were taken aback by the question, for the answer seemed obvious. Nevertheless, you explained how a music box works and what it does. You talked about the intricacies of building the musical mechanism and the patient work and craftsmanship required to create the box, which holds a beautiful song inside. After a couple minutes of informative explanation, you felt confident and thorough, like you’d let an outsider in on some industry secrets.

After you finished, you looked at the stranger. They still seemed interested when they asked, Why should I buy a music box from you?

Feeling proud and assured, you explained that your music boxes are crafted with the finest care and nuance. The music they featured was specially curated, and you took great care ensuring that their quality is among the best. This explanation was good enough for all of your current customers, so it should also suffice for this stranger.

The stranger nodded nonchalantly in agreement, clearly deep in thought. There was a pause…not a long one, but one that was just a few moments too long. They let out a hmm and responded: It sounds like your music boxes are quite special. Thank you for sharing! They smiled politely, gave you a nod, and walked away.

Watching the stranger turn the corner, you stood outside your neatly manicured shop absolutely bewildered by this encounter. Almost instantly, you were overcome with a mix of emotions. Disappointment came first. You didn’t nail the sale. What a missed opportunity.

Next came doubt. Did I not clearly describe my quality music boxes? Wait, you thought as you attempted to validate yourself. Of course I explained myself correctly. They just didn’t understand.

The validation continued: I was so clear, you thought. And indeed you were! You’re regarded as one of the foremost purveyors of music boxes, remember? Of course you know how to explain a music box.

Finally, you were able to remove your feet from the spot where they were so firmly planted. It’s clear the stranger didn’t have a true interest in music boxes. Sadly, you lost a potential customer, but there will be others to gain.

A week passed. As you closed your shop for the evening, you spotted the same inquisitive stranger walking toward you. In their hand, they carried a bag—one that looked all too familiar. As they walked closer, you could more clearly make out the logo of your arch nemesis, the other music box vendor in town.

Confused, frustrated, and a little mad, you felt the urge to say something. But you’re a professional, and you intended to stay that way. As the stranger approached, you greeted them with a smile. They returned your greeting with the same pleasantness as your initial encounter. There was no air of awkwardness in their voice, which you thought was odd, as clearly they had purchased your competitor’s music box. Surely that should have made talking to you uncomfortable, right?

After polite small talk, a short silence occurred before you realized it’s your turn to speak. I see you’ve purchased something, you said. The stranger stood dazed for a minute and then realized that you were referring to the bag on their arm. Oh, this! they said with enthusiasm.

Yes, I was peering in the window of another music box store today, they continued. The owner noticed me and invited me in. They wound up several music boxes for me and I was overcome by the beautiful songs they played. After listening to a few, I was filled with joy! I suppose the owner saw it on my face, because they explained that many people feel that way when enjoying a music box.

Before I knew it, I was laying down my credit card, the stranger chuckled.

Feeling awkward and somewhat annoyed, you attempted a smile. The stranger didn’t seem to notice your grimace over their own grin.

Anyway, great to see you again. Have a pleasant evening! the stranger said as they strolled toward home.

At some level, it’s easy to identify with this gold standard purveyor of music boxes, especially as choral leaders with our extensive knowledge and expertise of our craft. Describing our work comes naturally, and this makes sense. As experts in our field we are front-row purveyors and spectators of the impact that choral music can make on another’s life. This is a rather easy concept to explain to those who are already in the know. These people include music educators, choral conductors, parents of children who seriously study music, and educated arts patrons, among others.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to empathize with feelings of confusion, rejection, and frustration that come when we realize a potential customer (i.e., singer, donor, patron) favors another organization over our own. Oftentimes these individuals are folks who are just dipping their toe into choral music or music education in