Paul Spicer: lone voice

Peter Kingston meets Paul Spicer, professor of choral conducting

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday April 19, 2005

In the article below we mistakenly described Paul Spicer at the Royal College of Music as the country's only professor of choral conducting. At the Royal Academy of Music, Patrick Russill also teaches choral conducting. Both are heads of department, but neither is a professor in the sense of having a university chair. It is customary in conservatoires to give all staff the courtesy title of professor. Mr Russill, however, also has a visiting professorship in Leipzig, where the title signifies rank.

Surely England, not France, should have produced The Chorus, a quirky surprise-hit film about a teacher turning a bunch of delinquent boys into a decent choir and transforming their lives. They do wines, food and haute couture but we are the nation with the great choral tradition, the world-famous boys' choirs, aren't we?

Our choral tradition was the biggest thing in English culture at the end of the 19th and into the 20th century, but no longer, says Paul Spicer, the country's only professor of choral conducting. "People coming out of schools have no knowledge of, or interest in, singing."

In the not too distant past all children would have sung at school. Now, if youngsters become interested in music through playing an instrument and are encouraged to try singing, they might have a go at it, he says.

At the Royal College of Music, where he is professor, there is a big chorus that is compulsory for all first-year students. "I was amazed to be told by a number of these people that they'd never sung a note in their lives. These are budding professional musicians! This is so tragic."

We still produce world-famous choirs, but it is despite, rather than because of, an education system that neglects singing. The choral world must also share some blame. It has to be extraordinary that Spicer is the first person in modern times to hold such a professorship. In the US, for instance, it seems that no self-respecting university lacks a professor of choral conducting. Across Scandinavia there is a similar degree of concern for teaching people how to direct choirs, a completely different business from conducting a band of instruments. "I have felt for a long time," he says "that it was a nonsense that in this country, which was world renowned for its choirs, we have absolutely no process for training people to become choral conductors."

This lack of professional training has been the case at all levels, including in those rarefied cathedral choirs. For years the person doing most of the conducting has held the title "organist", and, indeed, that has been the route they have come to the job, as players first and foremost. At every level, right down the food chain, the baton has been handed to an instrumentalist - often an organist - with the assumption that not only will he or she know how to conduct a choir, but they will have an educated interest in voices.

"Why on earth, just because somebody can play the organ well, should they automatically have the skills to be a good choir trainer?" Spicer asks. "In many cases they do not."

But that was pretty much the route he took himself. As a student at the Royal College, where he has ended up as professor, he studied composition under Herbert Howells and the organ. Indeed, he won the Walford Davies Organ Prize in his final year.

"I've never had a conducting lesson in my life," he confesses cheerfully. But of all his many musical activities - composing, record producing, musicology, playing the organ - conducting singers has turned out to be what he likes best. "I think it's bringing music alive, with other people."

And although he has founded his own professional group, the Finzi Singers, and has directed many others, amateur choirs give him his biggest buzz. "I just love making people sing better than they thought they could ... getting people to understand techniques better than they did before."

He holds up a letter that has just come through the post to his handsome house near the cathedral in Lichfield, Staffordshire, whose arts festival he directed for 11 years. It's from a choral society in Hampshire, which he recently conducted. "You handled difficulties with considerable tact and it paid off," he reads.

Like many men who end up with choral careers, Spicer was a choirboy, in his case at New College school, Oxford. "One goes back to the point that people with a natural ability and talent will find their own way of learning," he says. "I've done it through watching and listening and learning about the voice, and teaching oneself the basic requirements, and by doing it endlessly and finding ways that work."

It sounds terribly hit and miss, a throwback to the days of the English amateur playing at doing things that other nations have taken a more professional attitude to. On the other hand, perhaps only the best will win through in such a chaotic system.

"I'm still learning. I'm 52 and I'll go on learning until I drop, but it only makes sense to teach people while they are at the student stage, when they are young and starting out. They should be taught properly.

"You teach organists, you teach clarinetists and violinists. You teach orchestral conductors, but you don't teach choral conductors."

After completing a PGCE at Durham University, he taught music for 10 years from 1974 at Uppingham School and Ellesmere College before becoming a producer for BBC Radio 3 in 1984, and senior producer for the Midlands region in 1986, based in Birmingham. In 1990, he became the Lichfield Festival's artistic director. The professorship came up because around seven years ago he was asked to conduct the Royal College of Music chamber choir. At the end of the first year he asked if the college would like to start a course in choral conducting and the idea was taken up enthusiastically.

"It just needed someone to do it. It's just a typically English thing. It needs someone with a bit of enthusiasm to take something forward and put it on the table."

The masters is an intensive one-year course, and so far he has had only one or two students a year, chosen from just half a dozen applicants. "We're now trying to move to a two-year pattern because we've realised there isn't enough time to get through all the material in one year."

To apply for the course, students must submit a video of themselves rehearsing a choir so that their level can be assessed.

"By watching, you can see the kind of detail they can go into, the sorts of things they pick up or don't pick up on, their musical ideas and interpretation skills. We've had people apply who've had some rogue outfits. One can always see when someone is trying to lead horses to water and failing simply because their material isn't good enough.

"But you can usually see if someone has something going for them. We would always give someone the benefit of the doubt if we could see a spark somewhere."

The applicants are then observed conducting a choir at the college.

"We always do something that's a little demanding. They have to demonstrate that their ears are fairly sharp. We're looking to see the kind of potential they will have. We want to see obviously that they are reasonable at communicating with people, that they've got musical ideas, that their ears are accurate."

One or two trained specialist choral conductors a year is not going to make much difference. And it can do nothing to lift standards where it matters, in schools, where a bad experience with an untrained conductor can put children off choirs for life. "Anything we do is a drop in the ocean, but certainly, it's a step in the right direction," he says.

Spicer's passion for English music and particularly the works of his late teacher, Howells, on which he is a leading authority, reinforce an impression of a classic English musician. "I'm essentially a pluralist. I'm much more rounded doing the various things I do. People find it hard to pigeonhole me, and in some ways that's not been so good for my career."

The CV

Paul Spicer


Professor of choral conducting, Royal College of Music

Before that
Began teaching music in schools. Founded the Finzi Singers, 1987. Senior producer for BBC Radio 3 in the Midlands, 1990, and artistic director of the Lichfield International Arts Festival for 11 years

"To develop what I'm doing with conducting choirs"

Architecture, particularly of churches

Canned music

No children