The Green Room

There's a particular quality to the light along the Costa Blanca in late August. It softens a little earlier in the evening, and the cicadas seem to know something we don't quite want to admit yet: summer is winding down.

There is a moment near the end of every concert I direct when I stop conducting and just listen. The final chord is still hanging in the air, and I watch the faces in front of me instead of the ones behind. What I see is never polish. It is joy, relief, pride, sometimes tears. That moment is the reason I have spent twenty years of my life doing this work on the Costa Blanca, and it is the reason I want to talk today about something I believe deeply: amateur performers are not the understudy to professional music. They are its heart.

People often picture a musical director standing in front of a choir, arms raised, guiding the sound like a director in a film. That image is real enough. It is also a tiny fraction of the job.

There is a moment in every Canto Mundial rehearsal that I love more than almost any other. It happens when a singer, halfway through learning a phrase in a second language, suddenly stops worrying about the words and simply sings. The vowel opens, the shoulders drop, and for a few bars the language stops being a barrier and becomes the music itself.

When people hear the word "choir," they usually picture rows of singers all blending into one big sound. That's a wonderful thing, and it's exactly what some of my other groups do beautifully. TheatreSong Collective was built to be something else. It's a place where the group sound matters, and so does the individual voice within it.

It is, without question, the question I get asked most often by singers who want to understand how it all works.