Excellence through Group Singing: Repertoire and Vocal Leaders

The Youth Music Voices project made a commitment to commissioning new arrangements and compositions for the choir, with an emphasis on new and emerging arrangers and composers.

This was to “ensure that the process of commissioning gives Youth Music Voices a pool of relatively young committed role models who will inspire and encourage the participants”.

Vocal leaders were chosen for their ability to work with large groups and a variety of abilities. All vocal leaders recruited were regarded as experts in their genres, bringing with them integrity in the style of music they taught.

Using vocal leaders from a wide variety of genres was intended to support the outcome of broadening horizons for the young people, and indeed young people reported that the project had ‘opened their mind to different ways of working’, ‘learning different styles of music’ and ‘appreciating different angles and views of music.’.

Your project could support high quality provision by supporting artists to achieve their potential through a number of means, including pairing less experienced vocal leaders with more experienced artists. You might also like to include a system to support young people within the project who aspire to be composers/arrangers.