Welcome And Why It Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the choir director podcast, the essential resource for choir directors, conductors, and vocal leaders who want to build stronger choirs, run better rehearsals, and create outstanding musical experiences. Welcome back to the choir director podcast with me, Russell Scott. This is episode 30. Well, this episode is quite timely because just a few weeks ago I had the pleasure of taking my own choir to one of the main regional theatres here in the UK to be part of what was a pop-up stunt as part of the UK tour of the choir of man. And it was a wonderful, wonderful experience as so many choirs around the country have found out whilst taking part in this amazing project. And today I am welcoming my very special guest, Jack Bloom. Jack Bloom is a UK-based composer and producer and the arranger, orchestrator, and musical supervisor behind the Olivier-nominated West End show, The Choir of Man. And in this episode, we get practical about contemporary a cappella singing, how you build arrangements that land with an audience, and how you keep blend and style consistent across performers, and the impact the show has had on choral singing, with a bit of controversy over AI thrown into. Please welcome Jack Bloom. Well, welcome. I'm so, so thrilled to have you, Jack, on the show. Thank you so much for spending the time. I mean, you you are incredibly busy. I mean, you are a composer, musical supervisor, arranger. I mean, you do so much and you've achieved so so much. I'm I'm really thrilled to have you on here. Just just give us a little bit of background, first of all, before uh before we really start digging into the nitty-gritty.

Jack Bloom’s Musical Pathway

SPEAKER_01 1:45

Thank you for having me, Russell. Uh it's a pleasure to be here. So uh I am, as you said, composer, musical supervisor. I think um my uh most known piece of work is The Choir of Man, which I was the original uh vocal arranger and orchestrator and musical supervisor of. Three roles uh rolled into one uh for the sake of convenience, maybe, and skill set. Um it's evolved over the years. But so that's that's kind of uh how I found my way into theatre, um, ended up uh on the team for that show. Uh and now I work predominantly in theatre, but also bits of scoring for the occasional bit of film and TV stuff, um, TV commercials, TV shows. Uh and yeah, I guess that's mostly what I do.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

So, how how did you get into this? I mean, how did it all begin right at right in the early days? How did you get into singing and composing and arranging in the in the way that you do? Because you primarily work with a cappella, really.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Sure. I mean, um I well, I I try to avoid working with a cappella as much as I can, but it's it's one of those things that when you find yourself with a bit of a specialism, people keep coming to you for it. Um so yes, I followed a pretty traditional music pathway, I suppose. I I studied music through school. I started out playing the cello when I was a when I was a kid. Um I followed that through playing in picking up guitar and bass and playing in bands and things like that as a teenager. Um, but then I went and did a music degree at university and I was focusing very much on composing. I wanted to be a film composer. And uh after graduating, that's that's the career I I sort of set about on. Um and most of the work I was doing in the first few years of my career was orchestrating um film music for other composers, uh pitching on TV commercials, uh, a lot of that sort of stuff, and honing my music production skills, doing all of that. Um meanwhile, I I carried on uh something I'd started at university, which was being in a cappella groups, performing as a singer, beatboxer in a cappella groups. And through that world, found myself at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, met some great other creatives and cool people, and ended up um creating theatre shows um with a heavy, heavy vocal um component to them, I should say. The first show that I created, co-created was an entirely a cappella show in that traditional um contemporary a cappella style with beatboxing, and then Choir of Man has musical instruments in it. We were very set um when creating that second show that it wasn't going to be completely acapella. That was uh very clear.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

And it's interesting because we we met through a an a cappella competition called the voice festival um uh many, many years ago, and you were you were hosting actually, and I was I was on the the adjudication panel. Um, but you you you do have this specialism, and I think I think that at singing a cappella, arranging for a cappella is very, very different from arranging perhaps a barbershop or traditional choral pieces, whether classical or contemporary, it's very

Contemporary A Cappella Versus Choir

SPEAKER_00 4:52

different. Can you talk about that a little bit? Just explain to our listeners the the differences that it and and and the writing techniques, I suppose, in writing for a cappella and beatboxing.

SPEAKER_01 5:03

Yeah, um I suppose a cappella is an interesting thing because the the technical definition of acapella, um, I'm sure most of your listeners are very familiar, but the technical definition obviously just meaning, well, technically in the church style, but basically singing without musical instruments and without musical accompaniment. Um so a cappella music can include all of the other things you've listed, barbershop music and and uh a cappella church choir singing. These days, a cappella is often used as a shorthand contemporary a cappella, meaning cover shop songs, uh, with with making all of the sounds using using your voices only. Um I think that arranging contemporary a cappella and arranging contemporary choir music, whether a cappella or not, have a big crossover, although some intrinsic differences. And I am fascinated by both. I haven't actually in the last maybe 10 years done any contemporary a cappella arranging because I think that that um that wave is uh is slightly changing. I think um the the general public's fascination in contemporary a cappella may be waning somewhat. Um but nonetheless, I think contemporary a cappella arranging is very much about a combination of replicating instrumental sounds using extended vocal techniques, so all sorts of types of um vocal production that you may not generally consider singing or very singy, you could say. Um lots of percussive sounds, even if that's pitched, you know, by playing a uh singing a synthesizer part, um, you may do lots more percussive type uh sounds like doo-doo doo rather than that something that you would consider very um singy. Um whereas choir arranging, even if that is arranging pop songs, um, and even if that is arranging for a choir to sing a pop song unaccompanied, uh I think the approach is very different because numbers of voices to a part makes a big difference. Um, skill set of the ensemble makes a big difference, you know, a community choir, even a professional choir, is a very different thing to a small uh a cappella group. And the way in which you use your voices as part of a choir needs to generally have a lot more um uh we call them in in a cappella ranging, we often talk about pads, um, which are essentially singing long sustained chord shapes, um, as opposed to those more rhythmic percussive things. And I think choir singing it needs to feel a lot more like humans singing vocal lines than replicating instruments. So they're they're very different approaches, and often acapella groups, contemporary a cappella groups will do both. Um yeah.

Vocal Orchestration And Iconic Groups

SPEAKER_00 8:00

And it's it's interesting, isn't it? Because yeah, I think it does. And I but I think it's also interesting that with with a cappella singing, you you you rely more on the I suppose I've spoken about this before, about about the about voices becoming part of an orchestra, about the voices that have different colour and different tone and different timbre, and they are doing different things in different ways to create the whole part, the whole band, the whole arrangement, the whole track, just with voice only.

SPEAKER_01 8:29

I think the the original group to um really take it to another level, I'm sure everyone knows pentatonics, and they were by far the first group to sing a cappella music in this way. Um, in fact, my close colleague and friend Nick Dudson, who founded the Magnets many years before Pentatonics, um, would probably uh have something to say about that. But I think Pentatonics really took it into the mainstream, and part of that was through, even though they were only five voices, having unbelievable arrangements that really um use their particular skill sets as vocalists and beatboxers to do exactly as you're saying, to create a range of sounds. When I first came across Pentatonics very early on in their their time on the internet, um I saw, I think the first video I saw of theirs was uh a song called We Are Young by Fun, very early on. And they were sat around one microphone like this, the five of them on a sofa around one microphone. And I just it really took me working my ears to pinpoint some of the like what's is that sound coming from that person or that person? Especially when you think about the bass singer who is predominantly replicating a bass guitar or a bass synthesizer and the beatboxer. So that rhythm section combination, if they do it as well as as those two guys did it, um, that's Kevin Alushela and uh Avi Kaplan. If you do it as well as they did it, their sounds will blend together so beautifully that you're starting to go, ooh, and you're hearing gestures, you're hearing musical gestures. It's the same as orchestration, it's exactly the same as orchestration. A brilliant um orchestral arrangement will use uh, I don't know, you'll have a flute line that is doubled on a marimba, and that you get the attack, the wooden attack of the marimba, and the sustain of the flute, and the two sounds just blend together to create um an entirely new sound. It doesn't sound like a flute and a marimba, it sounds like that that thing, uh, which is completely different to taking an oboe and a glockenspiel. Um, so I think that contemporary a cappella singing, using your voice in this more instrumental way, you do have the full range of sounds that a human voice can make. And when you start to think beyond singing in the in the traditional um understanding of it and start to go, what sort of how can I use the overtones of my voice? How can I use um my tongue? How can I create different shapes and do, you know, do some weird things, then you start to open up a lot of possibilities. It's kind of uh fun.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

And I think the wonderful thing about doing that is that you can be more explorative. I mean, you you you can explore a great deal more doing a cappella because you're so exposed, so vulnerable within a group. And I remember, I think the first group I ever heard were the swingles. And I remember hearing The Flight of the Bumblebee uh as a child, and uh it was just the most amazing thing because I couldn't believe that they were just voices, you know. Um amazing sound that they were making to explore all those different types of colour.

SPEAKER_01 11:38

The swingles have always been at the forefront of pushing the boundaries, I think. Um and uh I mean they they started they actually didn't start out as I know you'll know, but they didn't start out at a cappella, they started out uh with a uh a bass and drums rhythm section. So they were doing um jazz, vocal jazz arrangements of classical music. They're they're amazing, famous Beethoven things you can go and find on YouTube, I'm sure, from the early days.

SPEAKER_00 12:02

You're on a G screen, remember that one?

SPEAKER_01 12:04

There you are. And they had they had a uh uh drummer and a and a bassist. And then at a certain point they realized that they could do that without the drummer and the bassist. Um, and they could do that all vocally as well. And then they sort of went full circle, and not that long ago, I think they released an album that did have uh instruments on it again because they're they've always been trying to be progressive and and progress their art form and try new things, which is uh what real artists do, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 12:30

Um I think it's great that that choir directors Yeah, and I think it's great that choir directors are willing to try these things and are willing to explore and to try new things and to bring their groups together in different ways to really push push the boundaries, as you say. And I I think in universities particularly, um, you know, we've both seen hundreds and hundreds of different a cappella groups within universities that come together. They're all trying to get on an edge on each other, especially in the competitive world. And do you find do you find that that is difficult in university? Because there are are there a lot of people really competing for those positions in a group? Or do you th and do you think they're being pushed really, really hard to be innovative?

University Competitions And Their Trade-offs

SPEAKER_01 13:14

I uh I think competitive singing like that has its pros and cons. Um I think that it really drives people to make progress. When you're in a university group of any kind, you have very limited rehearsal time and you know, time doing what you love. You you'll often have, you know, one, maybe two rehearsals a week. If you're taking it really, really seriously, you'll be as as I was in my time at university, you you fit in rehearsals with your friends anytime you can. And the smaller your group, the more likely you are to be able to do that. But you know, people have different lectures at different times and different evenings, and you end up doing a short rehearsal and focusing that with things like competitions, working towards a goal, going, we need to get an amazing 10-minute set together, and we need to rehearse this and drill it. That definitely helps um give some structure. Um, and then allowing, giving an opportunity for those groups from different universities around the country or the world to meet up together and um have friendly competition, progress their own technique, learn from each other, um, return each year and see see each see everyone else progressing. I think that's a that's a really good thing. Obviously, sometimes the competitive nature of of art um has downsides. You know, you want to be uh open to as many people as possible, give opportunities to lots of people, um, and to create a warm, inviting atmosphere. And sometimes competition is not that. Um, but I think that these these competitions that you're speaking about, the voice festival where where you and I first met, and even the ICCAs, which is you know the big American one, which is over here now, they um I think they generally do it really well. I think they're run by people who really care, and uh I do think it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

So, how did you get from university, singing a cappella, beatboxing, to coming up with the choir of man?

SPEAKER_01 15:47

So, um the choir of man, uh, to give credit where it's due, was um

Building The Choir Of Man

SPEAKER_01 15:54

was co-created by two gentlemen, Nick Dudson and Andrew Kay. Nick, um, as I mentioned before, was one of the founders of The Magnet. So he had a 20-year career performing, touring around the world as an a cappella singer. And Andrew Kaye is a uh Australian producer, um, theatre producer impresario. In fact, he created Soweto Gospel Choir, whom many people will be familiar with. Um, and Nick and Andrew knew each other from the past. Nick and I, um, as I mentioned earlier, we first created a show together called Gobsmacked, which was a full contemporary a cappella show. Uh, we we set about creating a contemporary a cappella show that wasn't defined by a specific set of people. We wanted to be able to cast amazing singers, amazing beatboxers, and put them into a show that we could tour with different casts. Um, and Andrew produced that show, and we did we did that in Edinburgh at the fringe, and then we did it uh we did a USA tour and we did it in London with Underbelly, and once in Hong Kong with Underbelly, and it was a really excellent learning experience for everyone involved. I think I learned a huge amount on that production about arranging. I was really quite young at the time. I think we we started that in 2015. Um God, that's 11 years ago. Um, so yeah, I was I was quite young and um confident in my arranging, but actually probably didn't know quite how much I didn't know. Um, and same about uh as a musical director, um, I was uh working with a cast of unbelievable professional singers um and beatboxers. We had world champion beatboxer Ball Z. Um, and they were wonderful people to work with. But again, this was my first time musical directing at a professional level, and I'm sure that I got a lot of things. I know that I got a lot of things wrong. Um, but the the show was moderately successful, as I say, it did quite a lot of touring. Um, if if Nick and I look at it now, we see it mostly as the step that came before Choir of Man because we learned so much doing it. Choir of Man, um, the idea came about because Andrew wanted to create a show about a choir of normal blokes um uh and something uh blokes that people could relate to, people who were just like normal guys but who sang together. And Nick had always really wanted to set a musical in a pub with in a working bar, working pub. Um so those two ideas just merged together, and uh Nick called me up and said, Hey, we've got this idea, it nothing exists, um, but would you like to work on it? Um, and we got together and we we started just batting ideas. We brought in um uh an amazing choreographer called Freddie Huddleston, and uh Nick, Freddie, and I literally sat down in my studio at the time and we started doing song lists, just brainstorming songs. Um the shape of the show itself really came about in a very organic way. We we were music first, so um, like a lot of these projects when you're doing RD and pitching and trying to secure more investment, we started with two vocal arrangements um that we workshopped and created a uh we we filmed a beautifully shot promo video, um, or two promo videos, one for each arrangement. Um, and if people go digging through the choir of man YouTube channel, you will be able to find them. These were these would have been from 2016, and it was Hello by Adele and Some Nights by Fun. And these two numbers are still in the show today, uh, in a slightly different version. But um we created this promo content, and then once we started creating our full Edinburgh show, as I say, it was very music first. We worked out what songs we wanted to work with. Um, I did arrangements of all these things, and then we we put our cast together and we got into a rehearsal room and we really workshopped it with this great cast. Um, and we tried so many things out and we scrapped them. And then I think after two weeks of rehearsals or something, Andrew came in, he flew over from Australia, and he came and he watched what we'd done in the rehearsal room and gave some absolutely brutal feedback that made us scrap loads of stuff, cut things and change it and rework it. And then what we took up to Edinburgh was very successful very quickly, and the whole thing sort of I mean, it really did blow up from there. It's uh it's we're on next year will be 10 years, so it's um it's all it's still having a good life.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

And it's you've had tremendous success, obviously. You know, you you're on cruise ships, you had a tour of North America, you're you're currently on tour in the UK at the moment, heading to Australia and Asia. Uh, it's it's incredible. And and what's incredible about it, I suppose, is that um and I've I've had the pleasure of just recently my own choir being part of uh of uh some some stunts, let's call it some stunts for now. We can talk about those in a minute. But I've seen you know I've seen the show a couple of times myself, and it is very engaging and interactive, and it's just a feel-good where everyone feels part of it. Um and it doesn't just feel like a show or a bit of musical theatre or a or a gig. It's a combination between all of those things together with amazing singers and musicians, um playing the same parts, you know, the actor mutos, if you like, and they and but they are in i interacting with the audience all the time. Yet yet you get you manage to get across some really raw emotion in the show as well, and you can see it's affecting affecting those on stage.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Yeah, the emotion is really what takes choir of man from people's expectations if they have them. If they if they go in knowing anything about it, they'll have some expectations based on the posters and what they've been told. And

Masculinity Community And Pub Nostalgia

SPEAKER_01 22:06

then I think almost everyone leaves surprised by how much they felt um at the end of it. And we we have the most unbelievable responses from people. I love when we take it to some venue in the middle of nowhere, which happens mostly on the US tours. I think we've done th three or four US tours now, and you'll be in some town in the middle of some state with where you know people don't necessarily see a huge amount. Theater, certainly not anything like this, and the emotion you get from some butch you know right wing American who loves uh beer and Jesus and whatever it is, and has you know, you uh probably doesn't tell his kids he loves them very often. This guy he comes up to you afterwards, or or you know, when I'm there they don't know who I am. So I often I love to just to stand in the foyer after the show and listen to what people are saying and get hear the most honest things. And you see these guys crying and and saying that it touched them in ways that they never thought. Or I did have a guy come up to me somewhere similar to my description I just gave.

SPEAKER_00 23:20

Very stereotyped there.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

I know, yeah. Well, but but you know, there are there are a lot of these people in America.

SPEAKER_00 23:26

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Um, and he said, he said, when I told him who I was, he he thanked me profusely for the show, and he said, like, son, um may the Lord bless your soul and keep doing what you're doing. He just said something so heartfelt, and he looked like he was about to break down saying it. And it was it it's so meaningful because this show is very universal, I think. Um, and and that often surprises people as well because it's not what they're expecting, but it it is it has themes a lot centered around masculinity, but those things are universal for men and women and children and adults and and um and everyone really. It's about community, it's about loving the people around you, respecting the people around you, being there for each other. Um, and the pub happens to be the kind of the center of this world as as we share it. Um so there's a lot of pub nostalgia, um, but it's a very um idealized version of a pub. I think um the traditional British boozer isn't necessarily historically known for being a place where people come and share a lot of feelings, but we acknowledge in the show that the um the nostalgic image of a traditional British pub or Irish pub is a place where people can come and uh to take to take words straight out of the show, simply be in simple company. It's a place where you can just spend time around people. And if you want to have a beer and and go deep, you can, or you can have another line from the show, two teas and a talk. You know, it's it's uh it's a it's a place for sharing feelings and and the importance of that, especially for men.

SPEAKER_00 25:11

And it's fun because uh the audience get to go up on stage and have beer on stage in the interval and and uh right at the start of the show as well. It's it's a lot of fun. Um what's also interesting is is that how it's evolved over time. And as you say, stepping stones, you know, you create something that leads to the next, and you learn all the time, and we're constantly learning. And even uh, you know, being with you um just uh recently, um just watching you uh listen and make critique and make changes and and and want to change things, um, it's really you know, it's really exciting to watch, it's really creative, even though it's been going for quite a long time now. What was interesting for me, um having seen it twice now, is the first time I went, I saw it in London's West End, and I was I felt slightly out of place. I was probably one of maybe 30 men in the audience. It was primarily women in the audience, and this was the first time round when it had first come out, and I thought it was you know, it's one of those shows where I just thought, oh my goodness, and then you know, there's a couple of scenes where you just think, I just I'm not sure if this is me now. And uh it's very, very funny. Um, and I had a great time that night. I mean, I absolutely loved the show, and my wife went several times afterwards to watch it, as I know many have. Uh but when I came, when I came recently to watch it, um, it was pretty much 50-50. I mean, it it was a completely universal audience of men and women and just people that wanted to be there, to sing, to experience the occasion and the theatre of it. How do you think um writing and the changes that you've had to make have attributed to those those changes over time?

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Changes in audience, you mean?

SPEAKER_00 26:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

That's interesting. Um

Audience Behaviour Filming And Singalongs

SPEAKER_01 26:58

I think a large part of what you're describing is is actually uh just with a producer hat on for a moment, is is the effect of uh women of a certain of a of a particular age range being the predominant ticket buying audience of theatre in general. Uh so when a new show comes to the West End like Choir of Man did, um the people who are gonna buy tickets and try it out are usually gonna be women, and they're either gonna drag along their husbands or some other women to come and see it. So that definitely would be the starting point for why earlier audiences probably would have been. Also, Choir of Man has always been a show that uh attracts a lot of women to it. I mean, the if you take the very surface level thing of it's a group of guys, it's a group of good-looking young performers with great voices on stage singing, you know, it's often quite quite a good sell.

SPEAKER_00 27:48

And also, actually, if I can just interject for one second. Actually, when that first came out, you know, 10 years ago, uh, choirs were very different. Choirs were just a thing, you know, certain people did. It wasn't universal. You know, it wasn't, there weren't the the the sheer amount of community choirs that we have these days didn't exist.

SPEAKER_01 28:08

Yeah, yeah, and I uh I really didn't think the choir of man was a good name. I thought that people wouldn't come. I really thought um we were quite strongly, I think, considering calling it the lock-in, because the original concept was sort of that it was a pub lock-in. Um and I thought, oh, the lock-in, that's a much punchier theatre theatre show name that will pull people in, choir will put people off. And um apparently it didn't. Apparently, I was wrong. I mean, we'll never know if the lock-in was a better name or not, but the choir man has work to treat. So um I think the so then what happens is people will come and see it, and then they'll love it and they'll come back. And if there were 30 men in that audience the the time you first went, I bet you a number of those men came back, brought friends, um, told their friends. So that's why over time that audience will have become more even. Um, we do have very, I think, uh really quite a wide um audience demographic. And I think that we pull in audiences that a lot of traditional musicals, traditional West End shows don't as well, because it feels we like to sort of break the rules a bit. Where other shows say absolutely no filming, no cameras, no photographs. Um, that's not the rule at Choir of Man. And I we all completely respect why those rules are important in most shows. Um, but in Choir of Man it's not, and uh we we say a kind of a sweet thing at the end of the show. Uh the the poet um who kind of narrates the show, he acknowledges to the audience. I know I saw some of you guys filming, and that's okay as long as you tag us on social media. So, you know, we really don't want people filming the full 90 minutes and sticking it online as a bootleg. But if people get clips, that's part of how people enjoy stuff these days. We we appreciate it. Obviously, it's also good publicity. And in terms of singing along, um, generally, again in theatre, it's not okay to sing along. And for most of our show, lots of chunks, it's pretty obvious that if you were singing along, you'd be annoying other people in the quieter numbers, the prettier, more choral moments. But then there are really loud moments and there are specific moments for singing along where we make that very clear as well. So there's plenty of opportunity for people to really get involved and to um get more out of their night than I think you do in a lot of shows.

SPEAKER_00 30:36

Yeah, I agree. And it's interesting because on this current tour of the UK, you have invited choirs from all over, from

Pop-up Choir Stunts On Tour

SPEAKER_00 30:43

all the towns and all the areas that you're um uh performing, and you've invited choirs to sing at the end of the show, and it's been hugely popular. You know, the the opportunity for for community choirs um and and other all sorts of choirs to to get involved and sing alongside the cast at the end of the show as a bit of a pop-up, um, bit of a flashmob kind of thing, but obviously it's become very known now that it goes on. And it it's been a very exciting thing to watch and a very um community feel, I suppose, to the whole thing, which which actually brings the whole of choir of man even more together, I suppose, with with communities.

SPEAKER_01 31:24

Totally. It makes it more real. I think we we're um we have quite a strong message in the show about community, as I said, and about the importance of um uh the value of choir singing. Um, and so we want to we want to share with audiences the fact that there are so many incredible choirs who do go and and and share moments every week with each other in a room, um, looking after each other, becoming friends through singing, um, and the beauty of that. It's uh it felt like such an amazing opportunity when traveling around the country to to bring more realism to that and share that with these choirs. It was actually something that we um we tried out for the first time in London with two wonderful choirs, one uh from Solihull and one from uh near Ipswich, uh, pop chorus and pop voices. Um, and these two wonderful choirs wanted to come and see the show, and they what they asked if they could book out the whole theatre together and bring, you know, 300 of their choir members collectively. Um so they booked that show out, and then they said, would it be cheeky to ask if there's any way we could sing as well? Um, so we organized it with them for the first time, and I actually, because we were doing this one-off thing, I personally went to both um Solihar and Ipswich and ran a workshop with each of their choirs um to teach them the musical arrangement. Uh, and then when we did it for the first time at the arts theater, it was such a beautiful moment. It was so powerful for everyone that we felt we have to do this on tour. Um, and actually, if uh if anyone wants to find it, there is there's a YouTube video, uh kind of short documentary um of that journey, of that process for the first time at the arts theater. It's really sweet to see.

SPEAKER_00 33:17

And I'm sure it, you know, it's it obviously helps publicity and marketing. I mean, it's win-win all round. It gets in the audiences, it provides the audiences, it gives the audience experience. I mean, all of those things that that are really, you know, bring everything together. It's it's very exciting. Now, you you don't just work on Choir of Man, obviously. Uh, you've had tremendous success, but you've you've also arranged for TV and stage, and obviously you you also did the cast album of Choir of Man as well. So where's your where's your I suppose where does your ambition go in terms of your passion for writing? Do you do you think that writing for A cappella and Acdomusos is is something you're so good at that you just can't relinquish?

What Jack Wants To Write Next

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Or do you really try to push the boundaries and write outside of those of that remit?

SPEAKER_01 34:06

I I try and write outside of that remit as much as possible. It's um uh I really don't do a huge much, a huge much, I don't do tons of a cappella arranging these days anymore. Most of it is the choir of man stuff. So for example, um we we're just mounting a Korea, our very first Korea season in Seoul of Choir of Man. And uh in that because of some music rights, we were unable to get the rights to uh Hello. And so we've replaced it with a Korean song. Uh, and I I teamed up with a wonderful colleague um called uh Jenny Kim Godfrey, who is uh an American Korean uh music director, singer, vocal arranger, and uh and together we arranged this Korean song for the choir of mancast in Korea to sing. Um so occasionally I do bits more of it, usually when we're needing to add more material into the show. But most of my time spent at the moment is um is writing a new musical, which is a proper musical. Uh it's uh uh a book musical telling a story, you know, what you think of as a Broadway show. And I've been working on that now for coming up to two years. Um writing, rewriting. Um and that yeah, that's that's where my passion is at the moment, I think. I'm I'm still doing, as I say, occasional bits of stuff for TV or other projects that come in. But I'm loving theatre, and I think that the way technology is changing the world right now, um, especially, you know, if you think obviously I'm referring to AI in a big way here, but um, AI is already having a huge impact on the music

AI And The Case For Live

SPEAKER_01 35:48

industry and on the film and TV industries. And it is currently not having a big impact on the theater industry, and that is for two things, for two reasons. One, uh theater is an intrinsically live experience and requires a lot of people to be there in person every day, every night to make it happen, and audiences too, and everyone likes that. Um, and the other reason is the theater industry is really pushing back hard against AI in a way that the film industry is not, and the music industry is not. Um, so with that in mind, I love theatre. I've loved what theatre has been in my career so far, and it feels like the right thing for me to be focusing my time on now is creating more theatre, not trying to release more records or or work on more films, because you know, right now you can type a prompt into uh into a web browser and you can have a you know, you can have a pop song or you can have a film score, but you can't yet have a live stage musical by doing that.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

So I don't think anything will replace live. I mean, I mean who knows? I could be proven wrong.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

But No, I think you're right. I think it's gonna boom. I think that I'm hoping that because of all everything that's happening, more and more people are gonna get driven to wanting more live experiences and also live experiences that prove their liveness in a bigger way. So obviously, live music performance has over the last 20 years probably gone m closer towards recorded music. You've got more processing used live, more auto-tune, more click tracks, everything is immaculate. Sounds like the CD, and that's what audiences have wanted. But I think that's gonna change now. I think people want, and this is this is what we do in a large way in Choir of Man. And actually, um, in the Choir of Man program, if you if you read the program on tour, I've got uh a note in there which I kind of talk um talk about the beauty of imperfection. I think that people are gonna want live experiences that change a bit from night to night due to either the artists wanting to create variety in in the night-to-night performance, more elements of improvisation. It's why with stand-up comedy audiences are absolutely loving the um uh audience work, the crowd work that stand-up comedians do all the time, because you know it's real, you know it's not scripted, you're working with, you know, you're you're you're observing a master of their craft just using their brain. Um, and I think that music and theater experiences will go more that way, more raw, more um allowance for error. Audiences will accept a crack of the voice because it tells them that that's a real human being doing something amazing on a stage. Um and I hope I hope that that's the case.

SPEAKER_00 38:46

I think I think the thing is, I think more and more artists that are doing, you know, one-man shows or one woman shows, you know, I think a lot of them are now using backing tracks with their own voices on to support them in live, you know, in a live environment because it takes away the risk of of forgetting a word, forgetting a note, cracking, something that's not right, the you know, the sound engineers can make things sound great. And I I look I I I support that in some ways, but I also and I I love AI and I love technology, but and there is a big but, as much as I love seeing the progress of AI, you cannot take away live music. Because, as we, you know, as as in in a way you've just said, you know, if you use a backing track of something, or something is recorded, it is going to be the same every single time you hear it. Whereas the exciting thing of watching an artist live or a show live is that you could have you could see it ten times and it'll be ten different performances. And I know people, just in fact, we both know people that have seen Choir of Man a hundred plus times, and they get a different experience out of it, depending on what the audience is like or where they go to see it or which cast they're in. It's different every time, and you will never be able to replace that ever. With AI or tracks, you know, you can't you can't replace live musicians, live singers. Certainly you can't replace live dancers, but you you just can't you can't replace live theatre. It's it's just not possible for it to sound real and personal to the audience every single time.

SPEAKER_01 40:22

I think I think you're absolutely right. And I I really hope that it's um the biggest threat to theatre and to live, to everything live will actually be uh the economic downturn that that may happen due to AI and people being able to afford to go and experience art. Um I think that the demand for it will be exceptionally high. I really do. Uh I mean, I'm that's that's that's the optimistic look, and I haven't always taken the optimistic look, but I think that if I were to put my money on it now, I think that that human audience demand for human live experiences, theatre, music, will be at an all-time high in the coming years. Um, the question is does the way the government and the the global governments handle change uh create an economy that supports that? Uh but it'll always find a way. It's like nature. I think that art will find a way through and um and yeah, we'll see. Hopefully it'll it'll absolutely flourish. I was just thinking when you were talking about um music and the nature of those performances. I remembered that um I don't I don't know if you know this, but back in the kind of romantic era of of of music, classical music, romantic music specifically, um, the great virtuoso romantic pianists would start their concerts. If they were if they were playing um uh a great piece of piano music, they would actually start the first 15 minutes or so would all be improvised. Um so they would sit down at the piano and do these unbelievable improvisations, which would then sort of act as an intro to the to the piece that the audience had paid to come and see. And I think that that's really fascinating as a like we've always

AI Tools For Learning And Big Risks

SPEAKER_01 42:08

wanted that. So even you know, shows now are having greater degrees of improvisation or greater degrees of um audience interaction or you know, variety from night to night, but that's that's not new. Um, and even in art forms like uh Western art music, classical music that are seen as being quite strict, and you play the dots on the page and it's it's exactly as the composer intended. Actually, no, that's not not how it always was intended. It was supposed to be more artist expression, and I think that's uh pretty cool. And I think we'll see more of it.

SPEAKER_00 42:42

It is cool. It's interesting though, because the from an AI perspective, I know more and more choir directors now that are using AI to produce tracks, learning resources, all sorts of things. And from that perspective, it's very, very useful indeed. And I suppose people are having to become more uh technically driven. Uh, and there are some people that are just completely technophobes that don't want to know, but it it's really helping to create better resources for singers to learn by ear and to learn by watching the page a bit more. So there's there are pros to it. It's just from the performance from the live, it's a completely different ball game.

SPEAKER_01 43:18

A no a number of years ago, not many, maybe I think it was during the pandemic, I uh had this great idea. I thought this is gonna this is gonna be where I make my money. It was uh an idea for an app which uh was aimed at choir directors and bands and all sorts, but it was uh specific mostly for like a cappella groups and and choirs, where you, the choir director, musical director, could upload all of uh the individual parts for your for a song um as separate stems into it, uh, and a PDF of the score, and it would uh allow your choir singers would all have a login and they could sort of mix their own part, hear what they wanted, follow the um follow the PDF at the same time. Had all these clever features that would allow it to split that up and make it easy so that you weren't always just sending Google Drive links and things like that. I thought this is all going to be centralized in an app, you can give access to people. Now, I mean, very shortly after that, I started to realize that AI was going to mean that anyone could split stems off from a track at a push of a button. And the I and also app development didn't require thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds because people can do it using commands. So um I never went down that route. But now, uh exactly as you say, if you're whatever you're doing, you can, you know, drop your song into an app like Moises. I don't know if you use that one. There are a whole bunch of these music apps, and it'll split the stems out. You can hear any of the parts. Um, and that is useful in so many ways. Um useful for problematic in many ways, but also useful if used in the right way, I think.

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Absolutely. And and uh it's it none of it's perfect quite yet, but it's getting really close. It's get definitely getting easier to produce resources.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

The unbelievable and devastating one is Suno, which is the the the major music um creation uh AI uh platform, which is the one that has been in the media a lot. Also, many large um well-known music producers have been on board and have been kind of representing it and saying this is this is the best thing to happen to to pop music ever. Uh, because you can type in prompts and it can it can it'll make music for you that sounds unbelievable, like fully polished records, or you could be being a producer and writing a song, and actually you just want a little trumpet part in there, and you type a prompt in, and it'll um it'll do those bits. Um it's obviously devastating because it's it's taking the art and craft away from so many people, and you know, a history of musical development is is just like that, and it's forcing homogeneity of um of music.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

Everything we're listening to on Spotify now really sounds the same, um, which is why most of our is it hasn't come from your brain, it hasn't come from the musician's brain, the producer's brain, it's come from a computer. So you take out all the the the whole point of composition.

SPEAKER_01 46:24

The thing is, people don't know now. If you listen to something on Spotify and it's AI generated, you probably won't know, and that's because the music of the last 10 years has all sounded pretty similar to to each other anyway, um because of algorithms and things like that. So people won't know, and I don't I don't subscribe to the theory that AI generated music or AI generated art can't invoke emotion in humans. I think of course it can, because it's so closely mirroring human art that if you don't know that it was created by a computer, it'll it could it it could invoke some emotion. Totally. But I don't think that that's a good thing necessarily. I think that um it won't it won't drive artistic expression, it'll make it harder for humans who are creating art to break through all of this, you know, dearth of AI generated content.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

Well I think that I think the place is a very exciting one right now. I really do. I think it's very exciting technically to see what's possible and what people are doing, and I think it's a great way of of being able to compose and share ideas and create ideas. But as you say, and we've agreed on today when talking, there's just nothing that's going to replace live, and it and it's and it's there is gonna be uh an influx of a need for more and more live, which which is a great thing.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

I is, and I think probably um more and more people going to look for those experiences themselves, like joining choirs or finding opportunities to be a part of music making. I also really think that we lack that in in the UK. Culturally, we lack um a cultural uh desire and platform of opportunities for people to make music who don't consider themselves musicians. In so many other countries, uh music is just ingrained in culture and everyone considers themselves to do it at a base level, whether they call call themselves a musician or not, they will sing in all sorts of environments, they will, you know, play percussion and do whatever. Um, and the uh even in the States, I think the the culture of music making, particularly through churches, is such such a strong, powerful thing that more people do it for community rather than for the sake of performance. But generally in Western culture, we sort of think music is about perfection and being good. And if you're not good, don't do it. If you're not if you're not good, you shouldn't be on a stage. Uh, and I hope that that changes as well because everyone should experience music making as well as as well as uh observing.

SPEAKER_00 49:02

Couldn't agree more. Jack, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It's been such such a pleasure having you and such a great and interesting

Final Thoughts And Listener Actions

SPEAKER_00 49:10

conversation. Uh, and I and I know our listeners are gonna absolutely love it. Wish you all the very best with all your amazing projects. We can't wait to see what's next.

SPEAKER_01 49:17

It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00 49:24

Thank you so much for listening to the choir director podcast. It's been wonderful having you here today. And if you found today's conversation valuable, please take a moment to leave us a rating and review. It genuinely helps us reach more choir directors and grow this community together. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you know a fellow director who'd benefit from today's conversation or any of the amazing guests we've had on the show, please share it with them. It means the world to us and it could make a huge difference to them. To stay connected between episodes so you never miss a thing and receive exclusive content. Do join our mailing list. Link is in the show notes. And if you have a question about today's topic or any of the topics that we're covering, perhaps a question to our guest or something you'd love us to explore on a future episode, you can email the studio or leave us a voicemail. Both links are waiting for you in the show notes. Well, thanks again for being part of the Choir Director Podcast. I'm Russell Scott, and until next time, goodbye.