Bass Jonathan Lupton reflects on being in the audience rather than the choir for one of our performances.
Do you ever wonder what you sound like? We all hear our own voices as we sing or speak, but not in the same way that other people hear us (mainly because the sound gets to our ears via our skull bones as well as through the air). I don’t know about you, but I cringe any time I hear my own voice on a recording. And as for videos – don’t even go there!
But have you ever wondered what your choir sounds like from the outside? From inside, it’s always hard to get a sense of the balance of voices – usually because you are in the middle of your fellow basses (or whatever) and the sopranos are miles away. For various reasons I was unable to be part of the choir recently, but was able to go to a concert to listen to them (us?) from the outside. It’s definitely worth sitting in the audience once in a while to hear and see what the rest of the choir both sounds and looks like.
Current choir members can relax – you sounded magnificent! A really difficult programme performed really well. But there were a couple of points that struck me – not least because they apply to me when I’m “on the inside” just as much as everybody else. One was diction, something most choirs can improve. It’s so tricky to get the balance right between making those consonants audible, yet not over-emphasised – not just at the end of words but in the middle of words too.
And the bane of conductors: choirs that don’t look up! I hadn’t realised how important this is: it’s not so much that looking up enables the choir to keep in time (although that helps!), it’s more the contact with the audience – seeing smiling faces provides an amazing lift to the whole experience for us (them!).
So whatever choir you are in, spit those words out and smile, smile, smile!
Come and see if we look up and smile in our ‘Cathedrals of Sound’ concert, St John the Baptist Church, Beeston, NG9 1EJ, Saturday 25 April 2026, 7.30pm!
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