Just last month, Croydon Minster was packed out for an evening concert which included Carmina Burana.   It was very pleasing for everyone who had worked hard on the concert to see the Minster so full. After the concert, I reflected on why it had been particularly popular – even on a dark winter evening.

To my mind, we overcame the iffy problem – the barrier which prevents people who enjoy going to concerts from attending events which take place in church because, to them, church feels somehow iffy. A bit suspicious. Unknown. Possibly even slightly threatening.

Churches with active concert and event programmes need to:

• Overcome iffy every time they promote an event
• Reward people for turning up, with a great event
• Build a relationship, gradually increasing the size and loyalty of audiences
• Avoid proselytising unless the event-goer expressly opens a door

Overcoming iffy

How had the Minster overcome iffy this time?

First was the programme itself – excellent music, performed to a high standard. Without this, there was no chance of success.

Next, we put a lot of effort in to promoting the event – this began at a silent movie show earlier in the year where we asked the audience to give the Minster their email address.  The email addresses were entered in to our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database – CiviCRM.

As we promoted the event to this audience, and wider, the copy was written assuming, without patronising, that the audience would be strangers to this type of event. This is crucial in reaching beyond your wonderful stalwarts (who should be treasured) who ‘always come‘.

It was important to let people know exactly what to expect. To many, music titles are meaningless. The web page included a short YouTube excerpt from Carmina Burana, the instantly recognisable O Fortuna. Would there be refreshments? Yes. So we said so. Would the church be a comfortable temperature? Yes. We said so. The only thing we really didn’t do – and should have done – was to indicate an end time for the event.

Be welcoming

Next, a sense of welcome. Many churches are guilty of going to little effort to encourage people to attend events, so we put the welcome right at the top of every major communication, in bold:

All are welcome to this concert contrasting rousing favourites with intimate contemporary songs of love and joy. This is an evening which promises to delight and surprise, bringing light to a winter evening.

We amplified this sense of welcome by using social media (principally Twitter and Facebook) to build momentum around the event, and ensure audience members would know they were not alone. These tweets were typical:

Today, 10 more ppl bought £5 tickets for Carmina Burana on Saturday, join them! All welcome #Croydon http://t.co/LUopltum

November 14, 2011 8:14 pm via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@croydonminster

Croydon Minster

Last day to join 70 others who’ve booked to see Carmina Burana for £5! Prices go up Friday http://t.co/LUopltum #Croydon

November 17, 2011 8:41 am via Twitter for iPadReplyRetweetFavorite

@croydonminster

Croydon Minster

The tweets are automatically pulled in to the Minster homepage, so people didn’t have to be on Twitter to see the messages. However, I dropped in the hashtag ‘#Croydon’ so the tweet would be picked up and passed on by services which tweet news about Croydon.

Posters. Churches serve local and global communities, and posters are still an excellent way of engaging the local community – getting your poster in key newsagents and other meeting points can rapidly boost ticket sales.

Be professional

We made it easy to book – you could buy an e-ticket online (using CiviCRM, mentioned above, so that we can market future events more selectively to those who have attended events in the plast) or by calling the office, or by buying in cash on the door.

The price point was within reach of the community. At just £5 a ticket if booked in advance, £10 on the door, we put the event within reach of an impulse purchase for many, or an affordable luxury for some. We encouraged word of mouth – if someone had just bought a ticket for £5, and wasn’t sure they would know anyone at the concert, the easiest way to fix that was for them to persuade someone else to come.

Respect the audience

Finally (crucially) we respected the reason the audience had come, and gave everyone a warm welcome on the night. There were enough volunteers on the doors, and all of them smiling, warm, troopers.

We had advertised an evening’s concert, not a sunday service. I have attended too many church concerts which have been opened by a ten-minute mini-sermon from the curate. Don’t do it!  The clergy are the face of the church, and if they are engaged with the music programme and want to welcome the audience, that’s brilliant. The welcome must be friendly, focused on the event, informative (even educational), and preferably brief.

It is also important that clergy be there for any concert-goers who do want a deeper or more personal conversation, and it is entirely appropriate through follow-up communications or messages to educate the audience on the wider mission of the church.

Close the loop

There was so much positive feedback on and after the evening, we didn’t do what we should have done – and closed the loop with a short post-concert survey of the audience experience. This is very important to improving the concert experience time after time.

None of this is rocket science, but it’s important to get the basics right if you are to overcome iffy - otherwise a great evening could be under-attended because your audience just don’t feel quite comfortable “going to church.”

As I’ve mentioned in earlier blog posts, a CD and DVD is about to released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini - the little beans. It contains, among other things, two pieces of music for a phenomenal forty separate voices* (hence my attempt to get the #phenomenal40 hashtag off the ground – help!). One is called Spem in Alium (a well known piece to music boffs and people who generally don’t see enough sunlight), and the other is called the Missa Ecco sì beato giorno / ecce beatam lucem.

This is such a crazy, big, groundbreaking recording, I’ve gone out and bought a surround sound DVD system just to hear it at its best.

Composed around 450 years ago, there is a real connection through this music to an age long past, but which fascinates us still – the age of Tudor England, and our intoxication then and now with the elevated lives of royals and high society.

If you’ve seen the first of these two videos, you’ll know that last weekend I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth. In this video there’s a tantalising extract of the recording, you get a sense of what it is like to stand in the middle of these ethereal voices – choral and instrumental – and how it feels to be totally enveloped by Striggio’s mighty, long lost Mass.

If, like me, you learned a new word while watching the video. You’ll find the definition of “bifurcated” here. A day without learning, ey?

Because this recording is unlike anything so many people will have heard before, I really want to encourage you to share this video and blog post, to get news of the recording out there. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, Facebook ‘like’ it (up there at the top!) and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40.

Thanks!

• MUCH MORE about the recording available on the official site at www.ifagiolini.com/striggio

More from me:

• Video: Introducing the recording
• Buying a surround sound system off eBay, just for this.
• A ten minute radio recording on the history of the piece and the recording

* It gets even better – at one point the ‘new’ Striggio piece goes up to sixty separate voice lines. Incredible.

On Monday, a CD and DVD is released by a group of singers called I Fagiolini – or the little beans.

It contains, among other things, two recordings of giant scale. They are two pieces of choral music composed around four hundred and fifty years ago. One – Spem in Alium – is well known to music boffs. The other – Missa Ecco sì beato giorno - has rested in a dark corner of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, undiscovered, for most of that time.

Both pieces are, in their own way, phenomenal. Both are for forty separate voices, seemingly doing their own thing, but wrapped around one another to construct the extraordinary whole. This is music the like of which you may have never heard. There is nothing in modern music to compare it with. Despite that, it’s not up there on a pedestal, it’s not the preserve of the posh. It’s coming out on CD and DVD on Monday, and you can pre-order it now for £9.99. I urge you to do so.

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to grab a couple of hours with the man who has made this recording happen – Robert Hollingworth, Director of I Fagiolini. We met in the stunning church of St John the Evangelist, Upper Norwood, South London. Standing in the middle of a set of surround sound speakers, won on eBay for £60, convinced me I have to share more about this recording with you. So here’s the first of two videos which we recorded that day in which he talks about the recording – where he was surrounded by performers – and how that was transferred to CD and DVD.

I hope this will go some way to persuading you to get this recording, and perhaps even to do as I did – and spend a few quid on a surround-sound system in the process. If you’re excited by this recording I’d love you to share this blog post, and if you tweet it, it’d be great if you could use the hashtag #phenomenal40. I’ll be posting the second video – which goes more deeply in to the music – later today.

Thanks!

• MUCH MORE about the recording available at www.ifagiolini.com/striggio
• Video: NEW: A first glimpse of the recording, in surround sound
• Buying a surround sound system off eBay, just for this.

Two weeks ago my car inched its way through the rain-soaked streets of a run down corner of Ipswich, to pick up a particularly special set of eBay winnings – a surround sound DVD system, won for £60.

One week tomorrow, a spectacular CD and DVD by the vocal group I Fagiolini will be released. It is the first recording of a complex, vast, and yet somehow intimate piece for forty – and then finally sixty – separate voices.  A huge choir. The piece is a mass entitled Ecco sì beato giorno (that blessed day), it was composed 445 years ago, but only very recently rediscovered – there is a Spectator article on the discovery here. I heard its first modern performance at the Proms a couple of years ago, and on the strength of that performance, I am filled with anticipation.

The piece was recorded in the round – with the listener completely surrounded by a circle of singers. That is why this lost jewel of a composition is worth buying a surround sound system for. In eight days from now, I will be able to be surrounded by this magnificent sound, hearing it travel the room around me. The only way, in my opinion, to listen to what should be a ground-breaking recording.

As an introduction to the piece, here is a video from the academic who rediscovered the score:

If you follow my Twitter timeline you may know that on each day of Advent I posted a video of a piece of choral music, in a series of blog posts tagged Choral Christmas.

I had an idea that this time of year was a perfect opportunity to share some of the music I enjoy – Christmas music and non-Christmas, sacred and secular. It  also became an opportunity to find some new music. All told, about three days worth of effort went in to the series – watching, researching, writing blog posts, and occasionally recording an Audioboo or two. Each selected video was put in to a blog post, and scheduled to be posted each day. As it went up, an automated tweet was posted to Twitter, which was the main means of promoting the posts.

So was it worth it?  Measured in terms of conventional web analytics, that has to be a big fat no. If I’d spent three solid days throwing eggs at passers-by I would have made greater impact (!), reaching many more people.

All told the posts averaged between five and fifteen views each, predominantly from clicks on the auto Twitter posts. Moving the posting time back an hour from 9am GMT to 10AM GMT had no noticeable effect.  Unsurprisingly, the posts which did slightly better were those where I was a emotive in the subject line – The spine-tingling return of I Fagiolini performed best with 44 clicks over nine days, though I later chose to remove the much overused “spine-tingling” from the headline.

As the post titles were deliberately kept under 140 characters, they are not very well set up for ongoing search engine optimisation, so now the series has concluded I may go back and rewrite more titles with a view to Google rather than Twitter.

So was it a total waste of time then?

No. Not at all. In terms of conventional analytics it wasn’t a roaring success, but it was very satisfying to do, for a number of reasons:

• The tweet advertising the Perotin post Rewind 800 years was favourited on Twitter by a couple of people, an understated gesture that they have enjoyed, or will enjoy later, your writing. Other posts also received favourites.
• The return of I Fagiolini post attracted the attention of the ensemble leader, who wrote a full, informative comment enriching my understanding of a performance which I had loved, even if I had not entirely understood it.
• Several people replied on Twitter to individual posts saying how much they had enjoyed them. Twitter comments lead me to change the final days selections.
• As well as posting up favourites of mine, I discovered new music, and new performers, through clicking on related videos in YouTube.  For example, though I knew the piece well, Voces8′s performance (and Voces8 themselves) of O Clap Your Hands was so enjoyable I played it on a loop for hours. I’ll very likely go and see Voces8 in concert as a result.

Next time, and I think there will be a next time, I will think through the promotion of the posts a bit more to see if the average number of views can be raised a bit. But on balance, I’m happy. As a series of posts it didn’t set the world alight, but it was a learning experience, it appealed to a few people and started a satisfying number of conversations, and it was an opportunity to listen to hours of great music.

For those who did, I’m glad you enjoyed it too!

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I have been posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

Introducing Spem in Alium:

Thomas Tallis: Spem in Alium, performed by the King’s Singers

For this final day of my choral advent calendar, I wanted you to be able to see the performers singing, rather than a still abstract image or album cover. So, we see this piece intended for 40 voices performed by just six, using multi-tracking to stitch together several different performances.

I hope you’ll take a few minutes to listen to the Audioboo above before enjoying the piece, and that you might feel that Reprieve is a worthy cause to donate to at this time of year.

In all it’s taken about three days – three consecutive Saturdays – to produce this series of blogposts. It’s been something of a labour of love. The overall traffic to the posts hasn’t been huge, but within the visits that there have been there have been a lot of tweets favourited, and recurring web visits. It’s been wonderful to know that people out there have appreciated some or all of the tracks, and I hope given the breadth of music covered there has been something for everyone. I heard many of the pieces for the first time when researching this series.

And, of course, there were the videos I would have liked to include but couldn’t. If you aren’t all sung out by now, I send you on your way with links to three bonus performances from the Tallis Scholars of Allegri, Byrd, and Palestrina.

Whether you came along for one day, or all twenty-four, thank you. Have a restful, peaceful, and very happy Christmas.

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I have been posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

It wouldn’t be Christmas without hundreds of concerts of Handel’s greatest hit, The Messiah being conducted across Britain, and very probably thousands more around the world.

Which video to choose from this iconic oratorio? It’s impossible to select just one. So three highlights, then:

Handel: And the Glory of the Lord, performed by the Cantillation Choir

You see And the Glory performed at all manner of tempi depending on the conductor’s preference. I like it best when it is taken at a brisk canter, so here’s a version which is a full minute shorter than many.

Handel: Lift Up Your Heads O Ye Gates, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra & Choir

By special request of Twitter’s glitterati @saturngirl, the best recording of this movement I could find unfortunately doesn’t allow embedding, so you will find that by following this link.

Handel: Hallelujah Chorus, performed by the The English Concert & Choir
It seems performances of the Hallelujah Chorus just get bigger, more bombastic, and dare I say it… a little shrill?… each time I see them. Catch me in the right mood and the racing tempo and screaming brass of Andre Rieu’s interpretation can impress – in the same way that being overwhelmed by the force of being hit by a bus is, on some technical level, impressive. Just as impressive, as @jaydubblah noted on Twitter earlier in the series, are the frocks.

My choice is a little steadier of pace, and is a nicely balanced recording featuring some of the baroque instrumental ‘voices’ which would have been prominent at the time of its first performance.

That’s it. Our own mini-Messiah. With Christmas fast approaching, tomorrow is the final installment of this musical advent calendar. Can you guess which piece can possibly be coming up tomorrow?

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I am posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

John Tavener: The Lamb, performed by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge

This is the second appearance from the choir of King’s College, the first appearance was back on day eight, but the composer is not to be confused with John Taverner’s entry from two days ago. John Tavener (one ‘r’ in the surname) is still very much alive, and today we hear perhaps his most popular composition – an arrangement of William Blake’s poem The Lamb.

The four part piece was composed for Tavener’s nephew Simon as a third birthday gift. In 2004, Tavener said:

The Lamb was written twenty-two years ago for my then 3-year old nephew, Simon. It was composed from seven notes in an afternoon. Blake’s child-like vision perhaps explains The Lamb’s great popularity in a world that is starved of this precious and sacred dimension in almost every aspect of life.

Little wonder, then, that the piece is most commonly performed these days as a Christmas carol.

For me, its hauntingly simplistic nature strikes through our tendency towards ever increasingly complexity, processing and refinement of music. It is a paean of praise for child-like innocence.

A score for piano can be downloaded from Sheet Music Direct (£)

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I am posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

Bernard de La Monnoye: Pat-a-pan, performed by the Dale Warland Singers

To end week three and really get us in the mood for Christmas, here’s a carol that isn’t performed often enough. This was originally a French carol, and it dates back to the early eighteenth century. Many, even most of the popular carols you will hear sung out of churches across the land over the next four days were composed in the nineteenth century. I would love to be around in a hundred years to see if our descendants will in turn have abandoned the Victorian carols we love, in favour of the Christmas music of the 20th century. Village Halls the length of the land belting out secular christmas number ones from the 90′s and 2000′s? Don’t rule it out.

I’ve copied the full English lyrics from the brief but informative Wikipedia entry on this carol, though this recording is a reduced version. If there were an online score I’d urge you to print it off and put it under the nose of your local choirmaster!

Willie, bring your little drum;
Robin, bring your flute and come;
And be merry while you play,

Tu-re-lu-re-lu,
Pat-a-pat-a-pan,
Come be merry while you play,
On this joyous Holiday!
When the men of olden days
To the King of Kings gave praise,
On the fife and drum did play,

Tu-re-lu-re-lu,
Pat-a-pat-a-pan,
On the fife and drum did play,
So their hearts were glad and gay!

God and man today become
More in tune than fife and drum,
So be merry while you play,

Tu-re-lu-re-lu,
Pat-a-pat-a-pan,
So be merry while you play,
Sing and dance this Christmas Day!

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I am posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

John Taverner: Gloria, from the Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas (‘Glory be to the Trinity’ Mass)

Given his influence over the composers who were to follow him, it’s a crime that the name of John Taverner is not more widely known today. As Gimell Records point out:

Originally in a spirit of wanting to flatter Taverner by copying him, composers of every generation up to that of Purcell, and including Purcell himself, tested their contrapuntal techniques by basing music on the ‘In nomine’ section of the Benedictus of Taverner’s Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas.

If anything, Taverner’s Western Wind Mass is more well known than his Trinity Mass, but for me it is this work, and this Gloria, which cry out to listened to in rapt attention. I dream of being allowed to sit in front of a choir in, say, Durham Cathedral, just me, a choir, and this. I’d be jelly on the floor come the final, awesome, Amen.

A score for the Gloria can be downloaded from CPDL.