Richard Morrison

Why do amateur choirs insist on singing bad pop arrangements?

Why cool choral arrangements are best left alone

As you hit that Great Barrier Reef of washed-up regrets known as middle age, a horrible temptation looms. It’s to try getting ‘down with the kids’ by adopting fashions that are absurdly inappropriate for your spreading girth and creaking knees. There can be only one result. Selfinflicted humiliation.

I sometimes feel that about choirs as well as people. The great British choral tradition is overwhelmingly amateur, and nobody is prouder of its quality than I am. It has consumed many of my waking hours for more than 50 years. Its enduring strength means that – unlike in France and Italy, for instance – our historic churches still resonate each Sunday to the sound of polyphony, rather than a tone-deaf cleric crooning infantile refrains into a microphone.

It means that the great choral masterpieces – from Machaut to Macmillan – can be enjoyed far more regularly here than in countries where there are mainly only professional choruses. And, of course, the weekly choir rehearsal gives many thousands of us hardworking adults the sort of physical and spiritual lift that might just keep us sane and happy.

In short, singing in a choir is probably the finest hobby you can have without taking your vest off. But if I could suggest one way to improve on this delectation, it would be a law preventing choirs from struggling through someone’s lumbering, cool-as-your-grandad’s-cardigan choral arrangement of a (probably at least five years out-of-date) pop or rock song.

I write as someone who recently stumbled upon a ladies barbershop choir doing a rendition of that South Korean mega-hit, ‘Gangnam Style’, replete with hand jives, knee bends, and harmonies so approximate that I wondered whether, like the music of John Cage, they were based on chance elements derived from the Chinese book of I-ching. Full marks to the ladies for enthusiasm and recklessness, but nul points – as they say on the Eurovision – for an accurate assessment of their own technical and cross-cultural capabilities.

They are far from being lone culprits. When Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry declared that a man’s gotta know his limitations, I’m sure he meant to add ‘and so do non-sightreading second altos with a range of half an octave and a hankering to sing the greatest hits of Celine Dion in close-harmony’. And lest I come across as misogynistic old reactionary by picking on the women, let me add that life holds few terrors more petrifying than a male-voice choir following Sam Smith into the stratospheric heights of ‘I’m Not the Only One’.

Why do they all do it? Two reasons, I guess – both wrong. The first, to which I’m slightly more sympathetic, is that choral singers enjoy pop ballads and rock belters as much as anyone else and don’t see why they shouldn’t have a go themselves. But really they shouldn’t. Most successful pop songs are performed by people with very good voices backed up by the finest instrumentalists and computer enhancement that money can buy. For a local community choir to attempt to emulate that is bit like trying to build a NASA space rocket in your back garden.

Or, secondly, the choir director thinks that by tackling pop material, the choir will seem more hip‘n’happenin’. Wrong again! The result will be like watching your dad do the YMCA dance moves at a wedding. And believe me, I’ve been that dad and got the emotional scars from my children’s derision to show for it.

It’s easy to blame choir master superstar Gareth Ma lone for this trend, but there are mitigating circumstances. Gareth sprang to TV glory by doing remarkable work with disaffected pupils in tough schools. In such circumstances, any repertoire that motivates stroppy teens is allowable. Adults, however, can access such a wealth of fine music that’s actually been written for choirs, that sounds great sung by amateurs, and that sets technical challenges which can actually be achieved.

So the next time your choir feels the urge to launch into the collected oeuvre of Ariana Grande, ask yourself these questions. Does the result sound good to you? Does it sound remotely like how it sounds on the radio? Are audience members wearing the fixed grins of passengers trapped on the same bus as a gibbering drunk? And do your loved ones laugh uneasily when you ask them afterwards if they enjoyed it?

Choral singing can be many things beginning with ‘e’– exhilarating, elegant, educational, ethereal, entertaining, expressive, epic. But the one ‘e’ it should never be is embarrassing.

I recently stumbled across a barbershop choir doing a rendition of ‘Gangnam Style’