Singers as Leaders

Posted October 27, 2024

It has been a busy Fall for Ars Nova Singers. Our Rendezvous Outreach Series launched on September 22 with a performance at the Boulder Rotary’s Peace Week event at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Our Ensemble Singers (eight singers) presented a 30-minute program devoted to songs of peace, including one of our favorites, Deep Peace, by Bill Douglas.

The last weekend of September the choir traveled west to Rangely and Aspen to perform in The Tank Center for Sonic Arts and at Aspen Community Church at the invitation of the Aspen Historical Society. It was a wonderful weekend of community building that just happened to correspond with prime leaf-peeping season! To learn more about The Tank, check out Tom’s blog post and The Tank’s website.

In Rangely, we were thrilled to present our EDEN-Colorado educational workshops to elementary and middle-school students. Ars Nova Singers altos Ellen Moeller and Julia Hilton inspired more than 75 students, many of whom had never sung in a choir before. Additional workshops are planned to reach Title I students in the Adams 12 school district, as well as students in Leadville.

We also presented a program for the residents of The Academy, and on December 15 we’ll perform a Holiday concert for residents of Frasier Meadows and their families. Our commitment is to create emotionally rich experiences for multiple generations. With these events we reach all ages!

Ars Nova Singers has also had the opportunity to participate in some interesting leadership workshops, where the facilitators use the choir to model the interaction, inter-dependence, collaboration, and cooperation inherent in making music together as it relates to working together in a business setting.

Ars Nova Singers soprano Karen Ramirez wrote about her experience in two recent leadership workshops:

“Sometimes, as we finish a song at an Ars Nova concert there is a collective pause, a moment of silence or a perhaps deep exhale before any movement or applause, and in these moments, it feels like time stops briefly. This collective, communal experience between singers and audience is one of the many reasons I love singing with Ars Nova.

“Recently, Ars Nova has sung as part of two leadership training workshops, and these experiences have expanded that feeling of communing across singers and audience in meaningful and new ways. In May we sang as part of a leadership experience run by Boulder’s Conversant Chairman and Founder, Mickey Connelly. For this performance we quietly entered the room and circled the attendees who sat in silence with their eyes covered. They didn’t know exactly what to expect, beyond the goal of listening openly through senses other than sight. After we finished singing and the attendees removed their blindfolds, they shared with us some reflections about what it was like to absorb our singing. We learned about how our music felt in their bodies and about their heightened sense of the immediacy of listening. It was a gift to have a group of deep listeners so reciprocally involved with us in the sharing of song.

“In late August this feeling of reciprocity between singers and audience expanded even further when we sang as part of a 3-hour leadership workshop for employees at the Denver company Truewerk. In this workshop, Hal Adler, the Founder and Executive Coach of Leadership Landing, served as our conductor/leader, and he drew both singers and the Truewerk leaders into conversation about our experiences of singing and listening. I appreciated learning leadership principles and practices alongside the workshop attendees, but I especially enjoyed how the workshop’s collaborative sharing process helped me learn about my fellow singers and how they think about our singing together. At one point, Hal asked us to sing standing in a circle facing out, so that we could not see each other or him as conductor. Though we stayed together through the song relatively well, it was difficult to really know when to come in, and I found myself focusing on counting beats rather than feeling or enjoying the music. In talking through this experience as a group, one of our tenors, Miguel, commented on how the piece requires collaboration across the singers because it has phrases that are too long to be sung in one breath, and that without clear direction from a conductor, it is difficult to know how to collaborate with the other singers. I loved hearing Miguel’s perspective and how he verbalized the ways we work together as we sing and breathe — something that I intuitively knew but wasn’t thinking about in quite that way. While our singing helped the Truewerk leaders consider leadership principles, the lines between singer and audience began to blur in inspiring ways, leading us to also grow together as a singing group.”