Ep1: Be Brave Enough to Suck at Something New

We kick off Midlife Choirsis with a clear mission: to celebrate community choir singing as a place for joy, connection, and unity. We share our own winding path into choral directing and make the case for starting before you feel ready, even if you’re going to suck at first. 

• why we choose the name Midlife Choirsis and what the show stands for 
• community singing as a practical antidote to division 
• the lonely parts of choir directing and how comparison can make it worse 
• early choir leadership stories that prove we learn by doing 
• the university choir moment that turns choir into a calling 
• starting Vocalize Choir and the steep learning curve of director craft 
• being brave enough to suck at something new and why singers need that safety too 
• Jonas Rasmussen’s reminder that the choral world needs openness over gatekeeping 
• the sing-along tradition and why we end with a song 

If you've enjoyed the episode today, please share it! You can subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast app, or you can share the episode on social media, or you can go super 'midlife choirsis' and share the link via email - mlchoirsispodcast@gmail.com. If you've got questions, thoughts, feedback, ideas, I'd love to hear from you from wherever you are listening around the world! 

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Transcript

Welcome And Podcast Vision

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Hello and welcome to Midlife Quiasus, Community Singing in All Its Glory. My name is Carrie Polkinghorn, and I'm so excited to be here today recording my very first podcast. I've never done podcasts before, but you know, I just decided I'm going to give it a go. So I'm coming to you from Little Old Adelaide, South Australia, and I'm in my husband's studio. He is a film producer, and we're going to be doing our podcasts here in his studio, which is really cool. So yeah, my name is Carrie Pulkinghorn, as I mentioned, and I'm a music teacher, choir director, all-round choir nerd, and mother of two. My daughter's name is Ava, she's 13 years of age, and my son is Hayden, he's about to turn 11 next week. So Midlife Quiasis. Where the heck did that name come from? Well, to be honest with you, it was a name that I decided to save and put away for a little while just in case I wanted to start another choir. And then I thought about doing a podcast and thought that name is fantastic, and there's no way I'm actually going to start another choir. I don't have time for that. So that name was adopted for this podcast. So, community singing in all its glory, that's what we are going to be talking about on this show. The podcast is designed to be light and fun. It's a celebration of choir singing across a whole range of community contexts. So it's for anyone of any age, any persuasion, any level of experience or interest, people who just love singing, or perhaps directing, or perhaps leading a choir of any kind. And I just feel like in this political climate where people groups are polarized and divided, talking about this wonderful thing of choir singing is one thing that just unites us and brings us together. So in this show, we're going to be celebrating the joy, connection, and magic of choir singing in communities all across the world. We're going to be looking at the vibrant spaces where people come together to make something extraordinary. Each episode we're going to be uncovering inspiring stories of group music making while shining a spotlight on the creativity and skill of these directors and arrangers. And at its core, the community choir is the beating heart of music making. It's joyful, it's messy, it's powerful, and it's absolutely worth celebrating. So that's what I'm going to do. So I'm going to start with me. I come from South Australia, as I mentioned before, little old Adelaide. I call it Little Old Adelaide because I feel like as choir directors, whether we come from Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, or Samoa, we have this isolation about us to some degree. Because of the work we do. We work with a lot of people, but we kind of do it on our own. We do a lot of preparation on our own. We do these rehearsals, we do these performances, we do a lot of planning very much on our own, even though we are surrounded by people. But in terms of a community of workers, it's not like we have a big office where all the other choral directors are doing their thing and chatting amongst themselves. We are pretty much lone rangers in that sense. And that's not something to be sad about, but it just means that we have a feeling of being on our own. And I think there are a lot of us out there that have this experience. And of course, there are opportunities to reach out to other directors, reading other people's work, watching videos. There's a lot of content out there nowadays. And that can help us to feel connected, but it also can sometimes make us feel more isolated because we feel if we watch a video of an amazing group, we might feel like, I'll never be able to do that. Or, wow, look at this person, I don't think my choir, or I don't think I'm going to get there ever. Or imagine I was over there in the UK, or whatever it might be, and I had such a huge amount of people, but I'm here in my little country town. That might be a mentality that other choir members share, and if that is something that you resonate with, I'd love to hear from you. But I'm from Adelaide. So Adelaide is down south of South Australia, which of course Australia is south. So we are south of south of south. And apart from Tasmania and Antarctica, there's not much else further south than than Adelaide. Coral singing is absolutely alive and well here in Adelaide. There are choirs on every corner almost, which is fantastic. So my story is that I've been a musician for pretty much most of my life. And I mean now I'm 44 years of age. You might not call that midlife, but I'm going to claim it because of this podcast now. I'm going to be 45 at the end of the year. So I've been a musician for most of my life, but never really considered myself a singer, if you like. I played the flute, I played the saxophone, and recently with my school teaching work, I've also picked up the cello. But I never, when I was young, never really considered myself a singer. And that's a very common story you'll hear from people. They never considered themselves a singer, whatever that means. However, I sang all the time, so I'm not sure what that really meant to me. It was just a mentality. So I sang all the time, as lots of kids do. And I really should have seen the writing on the wall because my first experience of wrangling singers was when I was about 10 or 11 years of age, and it was for my birthday. I don't know what you did for your 10th or 11th birthday, but uh for me, my birthday is two days before Christmas. So it was a Christmas performance. So I put together some repertoire of various carols and put them in a manila folder. And I asked my friends, select group, of course, to attend in a black skirt and a t-shirt of red or green. And they had to show up to my house in those colours, and then I assigned them a manila folder and tinsel of the aforementioned colour palette. And we went to a nursing home, I believe, and we roped in my music teacher from primary school. We roped her out of her school holidays? Like, can you believe that? And she came and played for us at a nursing home, and then we went to a shopping centre and performed there at Westfield, Marion for any of our local uh listeners there. Um, and of course, I thought nothing of it. Doesn't every kid do choir for their birthday? And that was the first, my first experience of putting together a choir of any kind. And of course, I sang in the primary school choir, my choir director, she was a wonderful piano player, but didn't teach any harmonies or anything, just we all sang unison, which I now reflect on as actually incredibly important. However, we made up our own harmonies and we would go and perform at different performances and things. In high school, when I was 16, I decided to start a church choir at my church. And I remember finding my music teacher at high school and saying, tell me what I have to know. What are all the hand gestures? What do I have to know about starting a choir? Give me all the things. And he showed me some of the different gestures for the different beat patterns and whatever else to do with my left hand, and talked a little bit about score preparation, but pretty much left me to my own devices. And I started up a choir, and we did that every week for quite some time, except when I had homework to do and my mum would have to ring everybody and say it's cancelled. We did that for two years. So that was really fun. But it was actually in university where I had my most profound experience of choir singing. I remember having to do choir as one of my subjects for university. So even though I was focused on flute and performance on flute, we had to do choir as one of our subjects. And I remember going into choir lessons each week, and we did some marvelous music, which really took me by surprise because I wasn't expecting to love it as much as I did. And I had some amazing directors, one of whom was the late Timothy Marks, who took us through just some wonderful repertoire that really had a profound impact on me. And it was during those times of singing in university choir that I decided, yes, choir singing has to be on my bucket list, or leading a choir has to be on my bucket list at some point in my life. And I thought, you know, maybe in the next 30 years I'm gonna start a choir. Well, those 30 years turned out to probably be about three or four years, and I ended up starting a choir not long after I'd finished all my university studies and everything, in 2012. So in 2012, I decided that's it, I'm gonna do this. And I remember finding a venue, deciding on a name, I called it Vocalized Choir, Decide on a Colour scheme, and had my husband, whose arm I regularly twist to do wonderful things, and he designed a logo. We put up ads in the paper. I don't know if you remember what a newspaper is, but we put up ads in the local paper, and uh we also put physical flyers, a physical post on a physical wall, advertising our choir and when the first rehearsal was and things, and put it up at community centres and shopping centres and anywhere I could think of. We also did a little bit of social media, but not a lot at the time. And I found myself on the 16th of April 2020 twelve standing in front of 29 singers, all shining faces, looking at me. And some of them are new because I twisted their arm to come and help be the core of this choir, but some of them were brand new, and some of them are still in the choir now today, and it's a marvelous choir, and we are now over a hundred members, and such an amazing journey with that group. But anyway, going back to the first rehearsal, I remember having absolutely no idea what to do. So we sang a song. I don't know what it was, but we sang a song, and at the end of the song, I just went cool. Um next. And I didn't really have any training on how to rehearse a song, how to listen and respond. And that is something that I have absolutely dived into since that day. Trained myself in little courses and done a lot of reading, I've done some little courses and ongoing professional development throughout the last 15 years, as well as now being the choral director at Woodville High School and running lots of choirs there. So my learning curve has been very steep since then. But I just remember starting it and I decided to do the same thing with this podcast. You know, I haven't got it all worked out, I haven't got everything in a big script, that I'm just, you know, so prepared and waiting for that moment where I have all the knowledge. I don't have that, and I'm not gonna have that. But I'm just gonna do it and then work it out later. So I'm hoping that you will come along the ride with me on this podcast, and maybe you're in the same place that maybe you're waiting for the right moment for something to fall in your lap or an opportunity to present itself, and maybe that will happen. That's fantastic. But maybe you just need to get cracking and work it out later. So hopefully that's an encouragement to anyone out there who's thinking the same way. Today I want to talk about being okay to fail, being okay to suck at something. There was a quote I can't even remember who said it, but it was something like, be brave enough to suck at something new. Perhaps someone who's listening might be able to find who actually said that quote, but be brave enough to suck at something new. I don't know the last time where you tried something new. Maybe it was today, maybe it was last week. Maybe it's been a few years since you've actually done something completely new. I remember when I started the cello, I completely sucked. I still do sometimes and I haven't picked the thing up for months. I remember starting tennis, and just to hit the ball correctly was about nine different steps that had to be accurate. You know, the foot had to be in the right position, your distance from the ball had to be the right distance, your racket going back had to be at the right correct angle. The forward motion and then the upward motion across the body had to be just right, and all these things had to be just right. And to actually get that right is like years of practice and so incredibly frustrating, especially for an adult, to be doing something brand new and sucking at it. But I want to encourage you today, whether it's choir stuff or whether it's something completely different, to be brave enough to suck at something new. Because it's so important for us to not take ourselves too seriously and to put ourselves out there. So I really want to encourage you to try something new, to be brave and to give it a go and not worry too much about being perfect. Because isn't that the message that we want for our singers as well? To be brave, to try things new, especially in choirs where people feel self-conscious and they feel that their voice is very personal to them. The act of being brave is huge for our singers. And so I encourage you, either as a singer yourself or as a choir leader yourself, to be brave and to try something that you've been thinking about or something that you haven't done before and haven't quite worked out all the details. Be brave, give it a go. Who knows what could happen. It could be ridiculous, it could fail. Who gives us stuff? It could be amazing and open up all these opportunities. You just don't know. I actually want to reference a quote that I read this morning and it was super inspiring. And it's from the Danish choral director Jonas Rasmussen, and he is a wonderful content producer, I suppose you'd say, as well as a director and a chor clinician. And he posted something today on Facebook, a Facebook on Facebook, and I want to read it out because it was so encouraging for exactly what I'm going to talk about today. He says, One year of posting choral content online has taught me something very simple. There is a huge appetite for choral knowledge, practical tools, and inspiration. And that appetite is far bigger than a small handful of creators can meet alone. I do not want social media to be a place where only a few people dare to share. I would love it to be overflowing with rehearsal ideas, warm-ups, conducting insights, vocal tools, repertoire thoughts, reflections, experiments, and all the strange little things that make our field so rich. Because honestly, I think there is still too much fear in the classical choral world. It could also mean community choral world. Fear of being too visible, too informal, too mainstream, too much. But our field does not need more distance or gatekeeping. It needs more openness, more generosity, and a lower barrier to entry. We can take the music seriously without taking ourselves so seriously. How good is that? I love that last part. We can take the music seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. And that's exactly what this podcast is all about. I'm not going to be taking myself too seriously, but I'm going to be taking serious the wonderful work of so many people across the world in making community music and making community through music, because that is an absolutely wonderful thing to do. But we're going to do it in such a fun way. We're going to be talking about ridiculous stories. We're going to be looking at the varied and wonderful techniques that different directors use, the inspirations that they have behind their music, some of the funny anecdotes that they have to share about where they got to where they got. And we're going to be learning a lot about ourselves along the way, learning some great tools, learning some great warm-ups, learning some great ideas, and hopefully you yourself can share what you've heard as well. So at the end of each show, to wrap it up, we're going to be doing a sing-along segment. We're going to be singing a short section of a song of the guest's choice. So today I'm the guest, so I get to choose the song that we're going to sing today. And I thought, what a great way to wrap up this sort of try new things type vibe. I'm going to be singing a short chorus of a song called Buses and Trains, and it's by a band called Bachelor Girl, which is an Australian band from the 90s. That's my vintage. And I'm going to be singing the chorus. And I just like that this theme resonates a little bit with me and what we're talking about today. So I'm going to be singing the chorus. And if you know the harmony, then you do that. Like you sing that harmony, you sing that counter melody, or the bass line, perhaps, and I'll try and stay in pitch. Um, and so we're gonna sing it a chorus twice. So it goes, I walked under a bus, I got hit by a train, keep falling in love, which is kind of the same. I've sunk out at sea, crushed my car, gone insane, and I felt so good. I wanna do it again. Yeah, I worked under a bus. I got hit by a train, keep falling in love, which is kinda the same. I've sunk out of tea, crushed my car, gone inside, and I felt so good. I wanna do it again. Thank you so much for singing along with me. You are amazing, by the way. If you've enjoyed the episode today, please share it. You can subscribe to the show on your preferred podcast app, or you can share the episode on social media, or you can go super midlifequiasis and share the link via email. If you've got questions, thoughts, feedback, ideas, I'd love to hear from you from wherever you are listening. My address is mlquiesispodcast at gmail.com. So that's mlcoasispodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. So thank you everyone. Have a wonderful day, and we'll see you soon.