Religious people know what a great responsibility lies with the church choir, but this does not scare enthusiasts. A respectful attitude towards religion and a passion for your favorite work helps to cope with the stress of performing in a temple. This type of work is suitable even for students who know and love to sing.
Reconomica magazine managed to talk with a student at the Academy of Arts from Vladivostok. Alina has been singing in the church choir for a long time and has no plans to stop doing so. You will find all the details of this interesting profession in her story.
Who will benefit from the courses?
Training is useful not only for churchgoers, but also for secular people. Taking singing courses will help:
- People who want to connect their life with singing and improve their vocal abilities. The Russian vocal academic school became noticeably influenced by the professional church choir.
- Conductors and leaders of vocal groups. The practice of church chant and regency experience will be useful in building a musical career.
- For parishioners who want to show obedience through singing in the choir.
The chants have a calming and are equated to meditation and are ideal for residents of large cities.
How did he start singing?
Little Gleb was born in December 1978. He studied at the Moscow Boys' Choir No. 122, where he studied music and art in depth.
Later, the boy admitted that as a child he did not have special hearing or voice. Besides, he was terribly shy. After a while, he stopped playing music, left the choir, but remained at school.
Gleb tried to sing on his own, recorded his works on cassettes and once gave them to his parents to listen to.
He still remembers the horror in their eyes. Then no one, except the grandmother, believed in the boy as a vocalist. It was she who once decided to try her grandson as a soloist and brought him on stage for the first time in front of a large audience.
Gleb will feel gratitude to his teacher only a decade later. And at that moment he had a throat spasm, terrible shock, and loss of voice. He no longer wanted to sing in public and wanted to leave the choir.
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And yet I tried to learn to sing on my own, without any help. He listened a lot and imitated the performance style of Alexander Gradsky, Muslim Magomayev, Elvis Presley, Freddie Mercury. He returned to music a couple of years later.
After graduating from school, he studied at GITIS in the acting department. After graduation, he worked briefly in the theater, but was not impressed and returned to music.
How and where you can apply the acquired knowledge
Graduates use the acquired knowledge while working in churches. Despite the fact that church singing is a service to God, you can receive a small reward . The fee for one participation in a worship service will be no more than 300 rubles. However, most singers work for free.
Also, course graduates are involved in organizing educational and outreach activities in parishes and dioceses.
Work schedule and salary
Typically, Sunday service lasts 2.5 hours, Saturday - 3 hours. Holiday services last longer, for example, on January 7, the service lasts all night. Payment, of course, depends on the length of the service itself.
If we talk about payment, then usually it is from 500 to 1000 rubles. Payment depends on your skills and abilities, how well you sang, and it also directly depends on which temple you sing in. They pay 1000 rubles if you have done your job perfectly and without any complaints, you just keep the party on track perfectly.
There are also training services, this is for beginners, and I have not encountered this. But for such services they can charge a maximum of 200-300 rubles. Some come to sing of their own free will, they are not paid anything, and they do not make any money from it.
Reviews from those who took the courses
Elena, 24 years old:
“It was a discovery for me that singing courses can be taken online, via Skype. Study, work, small child... There was not enough time to attend classes in the temple. Organizing the process via the Internet has become a real salvation. I planned to listen in detail to the osmoglasiya and the church charter, but I got a lot of practice interacting with the choir members, figured out the sequence of chants, and organized the meager knowledge I had about church life. In addition to practical classes, a huge part of the work was carried out independently using the recommended educational materials.
The theory was helped by the book by Claudia Nikolskaya - Beregovskaya “Russian vocal and choral school. From antiquity to the 21st century" In listening, it is useful to listen to the manual "School of Church Singing. Osmoglasy" for understanding and practicing singing in a mixed four-voice choir. The courses systematized existing knowledge and provided a lot of additional material and practice.”
Mikhail, 37 years old:
“Before I came to church and asked to join the church choir, I was studying at the P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory. The training took place at the monastery of the Moscow Sretensky Theological Seminary. After completing the singing course, I took part in chanting at the temple. Sometimes I was asked to lead the choir. After some time, a group of singers was assembled and organized, which I was to manage. That is, from a singer I grew to become a regent. But, in addition to working at the church, I am engaged in opera singing, which was largely prompted by church singing and work in the church. Now the regency is more of a hobby than a main job. However, this is a huge contribution to the spiritual and professional development of the musician and the acquisition of experience.”
Natalya, 41 years old:
“I have always been a churchgoer and attended liturgies and services. Gradually the desire to sing in a choir appeared. It seemed to me that this brings me very close to God, creates an atmosphere of grace and spirituality. When I approached the regent with a request, I received a recommendation to take singing courses and did not regret it. In addition to singing experience, I gained a lot of basic knowledge about church life, musical notation, voice development and working in a choir. I plan to take regency training in the future.”
church choir
I have been working in the choir for a total of 7 years. And during this time I have accumulated very serious experience, because I have encountered almost the full range of choir problems. Some problems I was able to solve, some I wasn’t, but in any case, experience can’t be taken away, and here’s what I found out from personal experience about choir work in general.
So, kliros, it is also the place where the church choir stands/works and it is also the name of the church choir. In most churches, the church choir is formed according to a simple pattern. A team is formed from invited musicians who have vocal skills, some vocal abilities, and sight-reading skills. A certain payment for the service (output) is established - for example, a conventional 100 rubles (this figure can be one for reputable churches in the capital and very different for the outback). The more often a musician goes to services, the more outlets he has, and the more money, accordingly, he will earn.
It would seem, why is the conversation about money at all? Can serving the Lord be measured in monetary terms? My many years of choir practice have shown that people who work in the choir for free are treated even WORSE than those who work for money.
What gives rise to this phenomenon? Element of responsibility. If you don’t receive money, you’re a free bird; if you wanted to come to work, if you didn’t want to, you didn’t come. Choirs made up of non-professionals singing for the Glory of God are not stable. Situations are not uncommon when, at a major service, instead of magnificent singing, there is unintelligible croaking.
Well, this is how it turned out. This one can’t, this one has work, this one’s child is sick. That's all.
And I won’t even be able to reproach him too much (I sing as best I can for the Glory of God). The regent (choir director) often does not even have any leverage over such people. You can't punish them with a coin. In addition, those who work for free are naturally touchy.
How is it that we give so much time and energy to the temple for free, and yet they also make comments to us?
There is also such a thing as “training period”. Any singer needs to be trained. For a long time. VERY. It sometimes takes several years to raise a great singer. For example, it took me about 3 years to reach my current level. When a person earns money from the choir, there is at least some reasonable hope that the person has plans to make money from the choir, and, therefore, a new professional (professional means one who makes money from this) singer will appear in the diocese.
What to take from someone who sings to the Glory of God?
He has his own job, his own specialty, and for him the choir is a hobby. Yes, good, yes, godly. But it's a hobby. The forces invested in such a person can disappear into thin air at any moment without producing any fruit. A person will either get tired, or burn out, or run into problems and leave this activity, because he earns money elsewhere. And all...the huge, absurdly large expenses for his training disappeared into thin air.
So, my practice has shown that professional choirs are more durable. But the creation and survival of a professional choir in a parish (in a church) very much depends on the personality of the rector.
It would seem that a rare abbot is a musician, or even has hearing. How can he influence the choir? Firstly, a rector who is indifferent to singing will not encourage the formation of a strong team, guided by the principles of minimal sufficiency.
It seems like the service is going well. And how they sing there... well, it won’t be very scary. And you have to pay less.
Therefore, a more or less good musician, interested in making his work interesting, needs to ask how interested the abbot is in general in beautiful singing. In words, they are all interested, but in reality... how does his interest manifest itself, how does he demonstrate it? You need to find out such things before joining the choir.
An abbot interested in singing will encourage singing by showing interest (and the abbot’s interest always greatly raises the level of singing...musicians are artists at heart and they need feedback on singing, and if the abbot has the practice of giving objective feedback on how a particular service went , this, in my opinion, always strongly encourages singers to give their all, to introduce interesting works more often, because the performer’s passion appears).
A bad rector may not objectively (or objectively, but rudely) criticize the choir, scaring away the team, and, in fact, forcing them to resign. A bad rector can give the reins of the choir to his wife (mother), who is not necessarily a professional in her field, but has the self-esteem that is enough for ten professionals. Such a woman is capable of scaring away the entire choir and driving away all those undesirable.
Few people understand from the outside how difficult the life of a singer-musician is. Firstly, musicians have always lived poorly. Bad - this means they earned little, lived poorly, barely made ends meet, and there is always the risk of becoming unsuitable for a job, for example, losing your voice (which, of course, clearly does not add peace of mind for your fate).
Therefore, a musician is often a vulnerable person, very modest in income, and a very proud person (since there is no money or power, all that remains is to boast of his performing talent, in other words, to crave performing glory).
All this places interesting demands on the abbot. He must be a good psychologist and grasp the fine line between the amount of payment, the degree of his pickiness and exactingness, and the quality of the choir he requires. If the abbot pays very generously, he has more right to a certain courage, and musicians, in principle, will forgive harshness in criticism and demands. It seems like a person demands, but also pays.
Problems begin when the singer clearly feels that the payment for the work is clearly not commensurate with the level of discomfort. When I was young, I saw a rector who compensated for the lack of pay simply by idolizing the singers. He praised them after each service, personally addressing the choir, he mentioned them in sermons, and hugged individual choir members when they met. Musicians are people who are hungry for recognition, and often recognition is more important to them than an extra 15% of their salary.
I mostly met difficult abbots. Who paid little, demanded a lot, and did not miss an opportunity to offend you with any word. Well, a good abbot is a rare gift.
After all, the rector and his attitude towards the choir are only part of the problems of a potential church choir singer. A whole bunch of problems are buried in the singing process itself. Firstly, it is physically difficult. You stand for the service on your feet, in often very cramped rooms, in conditions of crowded people (choirs are rarely spacious), so the singers on the kliros are often crowded like sardines in a barrel.
Compare this to the comfort of a performer on a huge empty stage and feel the difference. Temperature conditions in the choir are often uncomfortable. I saw at least two choirs where it was just very cold. I'm seriously afraid of catching pneumonia there. Sometimes you just have to sing in your clothes. In addition to the fact that it is very uncomfortable - stand indoors for two hours in outer winter clothes, as I mentioned above, if there is not enough space in the choir, then the clothes further increase the amount of space occupied by each chorister.
It would seem, why do we need free space on the choir at all? Well, it’s kind of cramped, but no offense? Yes, if only...
The fact is that quite a lot of hymns, that is, what a singer of a church choir should sing, are placed without any notes in the form of ordinary (or Church Slavonic) text in liturgical books. Imagine ONE book, near which a crowd of very thin men and women is huddled)) Imagine how you can sing in a crouched position, when the text is almost invisible. Introduced? But this is often what the process looks like.
There are also difficult relationships in the choir. One singer doesn't like another. For any reason. For example, someone may not like the way you sing (well, you bother him with your voice).
Some people want more exits, but you dare to pretend to also go out more often. Someone, tired of serving, begins to insult everyone around him. I've seen this. I saw how choir leaders humiliated singers during the service and even beat them))
You cannot describe all the problems of the choir in one article, because this is a whole universe about which you can write and write. For on the choir all facets of human nature are revealed. And man, like an atom, is inexhaustible and always capable of surprising. By the way, you shouldn’t judge the author and his attitude towards the choir and choir singing based on this article. It makes sense to study all the author’s works in order to get a more or less adequate idea of what is going on in the little head tired of choir service...
ps Love singing, and remember Whom you serve...
Why do they sing in church?
It is often unclear to visitors why they should sing during a service, since prayers can simply be read.
Experienced parishioners, church rectors, and regents respond to this that a church without singing is a church without a soul. Songs in the temple are an expression of a person’s mental pain, his experiences .
All services in churches and temples are sung:
- in chorus;
- clergyman;
- parishioners.
A person who comes to church with pain, a question, or spiritual experiences receives inspiration and relief thanks to church singing, which brings the parishioner closer to God. The text of the prayer in the form of a song penetrates more easily into the heart and soul. Church splendor is achieved more quickly through singing than through the dry reading of psalms and prayers.
Cost of singing in a choir
Choral singing for adults
- Group composition: from 10 participants.
- The lesson lasts 90 minutes.
Price 4000 rubles for 8 lessons
We recruit choir groups for various age categories and levels of training. If you have never sung or studied with us before, then you need to sign up for a trial lesson, based on the results of which you will be assigned to a group for singing lessons: beginner level (vocal solfeggio group), advanced level, adult choir or children's choir.
