A little while ago I was fortunate to sit down with Rebecca Legard, Director of Education and Participation at Ex Cathedra, to talk to her about their work with young people.
For those of you who are not aware of what Ex Cathedra do, they are a choir based in Birmingham. They are an absolutely fantastic choir made up of a core of professional singers as well as very talented amateur singers who perform not only all across Birmingham and the UK, but all over the world. But as well as being a fantastic choir (absolutely go to see one of their concerts, an Ex Cathedra candlelight concert has been a staple for the Christmas season in my family since I was a girl), they have a thriving Education and Participation department who have developed different programmes working with children who are in Birmingham Children’s Hospital, their Singing Medicine (an inspiring topic for another day), with schools across Birmingham, their Singing Playgrounds Initiative, and a series of Youth Choirs, with their Vocal Academy. In my meeting with Rebecca Ledgard I wanted to concentrate particularly on the Vocal Academy, and the opportunities for children in our city to be part of this wonderful choir.
GKIM: What age children do you work with?
RL: We have different activities for children from 0-18! And those activities change depending on how old the children are. We have groups that meet on one Saturday a month for babies and toddlers with their carers, and three groups for younger children, so one for 5-6 year olds, one for 6-7 year olds and another for children aged 8 and over. These all meet on a Saturday once a month. And every week on a Wednesday we have another set of groups who meet, our Junior Academy who are broken up into separate groups for Years 3-5 and Years 6-8. Then we have our seniors, from Year 9 and over. Each of these groups have their own leader, but our ethos is about working as a team, so the children will see that we all work together, and there is an opportunity for the individual children to be either supported or maybe stretched where we think it’s appropriate. If we have, maybe a superstar who is in Year 7, but they’re already doing grade 8 on their instrument, we’ll try to stretch them musically in one particular way. Equally if we have a senior who is, says dyslexic, or doesn’t read music for whatever reason, then we will find a way for them to be included that is appropriate for them. Each choir we do think about them in terms of being an age group, much like you would do in school because we put a lot of value against the children’s personal and social development. So there may be some of the juniors that musically they could handle singing with the seniors, but the seniors want to feel that, you know they are all teenagers together and there with their peers. It’s a real social thing.
The children in the choirs love working together across the age groups, but they also like that feeling of belonging in their own group as well, and there is as developmental pathway that we try to get the children to follow all the way through form the babies through to the 18 year olds.
We are very proud that every single one of our 18 year old leavers has gone off to do a music degree, many with choral scholarships.
GKIM: Do you have children that start off really early on and go all the way through the programme with you?
RL: Yes, we even have some of the team who work with us in the Education and Participation Team who started with us in the Junior Academy!
GKIM: What sort of time commitment is involved for the children?
RL: For Juniors and Seniors it is every Wednesday for 10 Wednesdays per term, so 30 Wednesdays per year. For the younger children it’s 9 Saturday mornings throughout the year, roughly once a month but just during term time.
We aim to create a welcoming and understanding atmosphere for our children. For example, with our A-level students, we might not see them for a little while during their exam period, we try not to add on any pressure to them from our end. But equally, many of them want to come each week as a distraction from what they are doing, a break from the stress of their exams, they need to sing.
Performances wise, we have a really lovely variety across the year. Some of these performances we weren’t able to do over the pandemic, and we are only just starting to go back to doing. We try to do plenty of things that are really different over the course of the year. So each September we sing for a charity called A Touch of Basil, there was a member of the choir many years ago who died just after he left and this was a charity set up by his parents after his death and we go to support that. In early December we sing for the Sankta Lucia service at Birmingham Cathedral. This is a service that the Seniors sing at, which is an absolutely gorgeous service held by the Swedish community here in Birmingham. Then also in December the treble voices in the Juniors and the altos and sopranos in the Seniors sing in the snowflake chorus for the Birmingham Royal Ballet Nutcracker, which is amazing. I remember one year, one of our children described doing this – I should explain that just before we go on for this chorus we are waiting in this wide corridor, then we get the signal to go on and we quietly go into the orchestra pit standing just behind the brass section in the pitch black, and then we sing – and one of our children afterwards said that it was just like going from a black and white world to a world of colour! It’s such an amazing experience because where we stand in the pit we can see some of the audience, and there are snowflakes falling all around us, even on us and the orchestra, it’s just magical. Even for this, the time commitment for parents isn’t too much. We work rehearsal sign ups the way you would do if you were a professional signer, we have availability sheets for the children and parents sign their children up for the availability they have for the shows, and they may only want their child to do a certain number of shows. Most of the children do probably about 8 of the shows, but they often wish they could have done more! And of course there’s a lovely show at the end of December, Angels, Stars and Kings, our family Christmas show featuring all of our choirs.
Then in the Spring term we have a Spring Concert where we bring all of our children together in one space for a fun concert, sharing what we have been doing with parents. This concert has a wide ranging repertoire, with some serious pieces, some more fun pieces. Invariably, there is something in the concert that one of our team has written that brings all of our choirs together and meaning that all of our choirs can be challenged in their own way. There is usually a song that reflects our values – last year it was “Your voice is you, and you are everything”. The Seniors then sing for Ex Cathedra’s Bach Passion performance on Good Friday in Symphony Hall. Then suddenly they are in an environment with a professional choir and orchestra, so that is an extraordinary opportunity for them.
Then in the Summer Term, sometimes there might be a special project, which is when Ex Cathedra brings together all of its elements, and we may perform something we have commissioned. Last year we did a project called “When a child is a witness” written by Liz Dilnot-Johnson and in that then children were creating their own accompaniments and their own ideas as well as learning the songs that Liz had written for us. Finally there is a Summer concert where everyone, again, comes together in a fun kind of way.
So that all sounds like a lot, but it is split amongst the different groups having different opportunities. So I think, and would hope that most families say it is enough. We want them to feel that their involvement is inspiring, and enjoyable for their child, but not too much.
For us, the values of the group is really important to us. We’re currently recruiting for a senior conductor, and we got our children involved in asking questions of the new prospective conductors. One of the children was asking one of the possible new conductors why they wanted to join us and they said that they saw something in both the job advert and the role description they had never seen before because we had put the values of the group right at the top, front and centre and they really wanted to be part of an organisation that does that. And of course it was the young people themselves who came up with those values – we are friendly, we are supportive, we are kind, we strive to do our best, we are a community, we are a family.
GKIM: Choral singing is all about community, isn’t it?
RL: Exactly, yes. And we run our rehearsals that way. It’s not about our children and young people coming along and sitting in a row, all learning the same thing and not talking to their neighbour, or not talking to them until break time. We run it so that within the rehearsals and the workshops, the activities and learning we are doing are designed so that we are actively moving them around. They then get to maybe sit with someone new, someone of a different age to them. There’s a big value of ours that children are creating as well in our activities – child voice, child agency is really important to us. So we will do songs that the team write, or warm up and gathering activities or learning and development activities before we move on to work on something like Bach or a Liz Dilnot-Johnson piece to bring out the teaching points will be for that rehearsal. Then we will be encouraging the children to create and write their own. We might ask older children to help the younger children, or to work amongst their peer group, or even within the moment improvising music. Sometimes our team have written music in response to messages the children have given us when we’ve asked them “What would you like the grown ups to hear?”
The children got really invested in these projects. Some of them went away and wrote down their ideas, others sang a little idea or motif into their phones and one of our team has liked their ideated written something based on it. They get that sense of ownership when they hear their ideas reflected back in the music that we have written, it’s more meaningful for them.
GKIM: How do children hear about you?
RL: It’s word of mouth mainly. We have a very small marketing team, and so parents might see something about us on social media or at a concert, but that’s it really. Obviously, we have our Singing Playgrounds and Singing Medicine activities, and some people hear about us through them.
This has been rather harder since the pandemic, and we have found that there is less singing going on in schools, and things are very challenging for music in general in schools at the moment. We know that there are far fewer music ensembles taking place in schools at the moment as well, and so children just aren’t having the same exposure to music in schools as they have had in the past. We have been part of the Birmingham Music Education Partnership and we do part of the singing strategy for them. So we have been given a small grant from them each year to work with the primary schools in the city and some secondary schools. So through that we are making connections with schools. So some children from the schools we work with come to us. We have, just this year, started a partnership with a nursery and primary school right in the city centre which we hope will bring lots of children in. They are giving us free rehearsal space on a Saturday morning in return for their children having free membership. In fact we started the partnership just before our last Angels, Stars and Kings concert and, because of the way the concert runs with all the different groups joining in with different songs throughout the concert, a couple of the children were able to come along and join in with what they knew and what they had had a chance to learn, and so they could take part in a performance pretty much straight away.
GKIM: Is there an audition process for joining the groups?
RL: Everybody’s welcome. We have never turned anyone away. Now, for the seniors the pace is a bit faster, so if young people who want to join the seniors can read music it is much easier for them. However, we put the support in place so that if they don’t read music, we can support them. By the time the young people have got to the seniors we hope that they have found their singing voice, but otherwise we will put coaching and support around them. Some of the younger ones might not have found their singing voice yet, but that’s the point of the work we do with the little ones, and the question and answer exercises we do with them. That’s all about listening to each other and matching each other’s pitch. And we can adapt those exercises to the children who are there, and their confidence levels with joining in. We have songs where we go around in a circle and ask children to sing about, let’s say “I get my power from eating chocolate” and then everyone replies “Rebecca gets her power from eating chocolate”. If a child isn’t confident to sing that by themselves we will change it so that we sing “You get your power from…” and the child can complete the sentence and the song moves on. If they don’t sing it, we wouldn’t draw attention to them not singing because by the time we have done the same exercise 3 or 4 more times they will then feel comfortable enough to sing. Same with our little ones. We will always start with name games to welcome them to the session. Each person will have their name sung to them by everyone else.
GKIM: Do you notice a drop off in participation between younger children and the older ones, the teenagers?
RL: Not lately. In fact we recently moved rehearsal venues into the city centre because our young people were telling us that they found it difficult to get to lour old venue outside of the city centre. So by moving to the city centre we made it much easier for them to get to us via public transport, and so we removed that barrier for them. But then we have our Saturday morning venue for our youngest participants who are more likely to be driven in and that venue has a car park, and is close enough to the city centre that people can walk there as well.
GKIM: If you had a parent in front of you right now and they were asking you “What will my child get out of this?” What would you say to them?
RL: A huge amount! One parent says to us that after singing with us it’s the only time each week they get their child back after being in school all week and working hard which is just lovely.
So, obviously we’re all about singing, so when people are singing together oxytocin is released, cortisol is reduced and with that feelings of stress and isolation are reduced. Your breathing deepens, and there is evidence that better breathing helps improve your immune system. Every part of the brain is stimulated when singing. Singing together in a choir provides connection between people, it provides friendships, and these are friendships outside of schools, broadening young people’s friendship circles. They also develop friendships across age groups. They all love it!
And we give them some amazing experiences as well. We have taken children into recording studios and into concert halls. We have taken some to Oxford to do Choral Evensong, to a huge variety of places. And they learn an enormous range of skills. With us they are not just turning up, learning a piece of music and performing it, there is so much more to being in a choir than that. Music should be about being there in the moment as well. That’s why I think that when we do concerts, like Angels, Stars and Kings, even with really young children it’s rare that a child is overcome with nerves or even feels nervous because of the way we do the teaching and learning – we’re playful; everybody feels noticed, and it’s not just about learning that set of words and the music and doing it accurately. We definitely do all of that as well, but then they’re more comfortable with it. So later when they’re 16 and singing a significant solo in Coventry Cathedral they don’t get nervous about it because every since they have been 3 or 4 they have been singing age appropriately. If you have good expectations of them, we do it in a careful, kind way and they feel supported and not vulnerable, then they can do it.
If you are interested in finding out more about Ex Cathedra’s Vocal Academy, and your child would enjoy taking part in the many amazing opportunities offered by being part of this fantastic Vocal Academy right in the heart of Birmingham, then contact Gemma King, Ex Cathedra’s Education and Participation Manager: gemma@excathedra.co.uk For my own family, my children will be moving schools in September and I will almost certainly be asking them if they want to try the Vocal Academy out. In the meantime, I shall leave you with these words from Ex Cathedra themselves:
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