Choir Baton Podcast Episode 1. Meet Choir Baton Founder and Conductor, Beth Philemon

 The first Choir Baton episode gives a behind-the-scenes look at your host, Beth Philemon, and her history with choir, passion of the art form, and her idea(s) behind #choirbaton. As a passionate people person, Beth shares the top responses from people when they learn what she does and why she wants to change the conversation about singing in today’s society through the lens of choirs.

Choir Baton Host: Beth Philemon @bethphilemon | www.bethphilemon.com

Visit Choir Baton Online: @choirbaton | www.choirbaton.com

Choir Baton Theme Song by Scott Holmes

Beth Philemon: Welcome to the Choir Baton, a podcast designed to engage with people and stories, ideas and inspirations stemming from choir. No other art form, no sport, no hobby, no business requires a group of people to execute a communal goal with just their voices. Join me, your host, Beth Philemon, as I interview guests who are singers, teachers, conductors, instrumentalists, and community members. Together, we'll ask questions, seek understanding, and share insight from our experiences in life and in choir. You're listening to the Choir Baton podcast where we want to know-- what's your story?

Hi, my name is Beth and I am going to be your Choir Baton podcast host and before we jump into the interviews with our Choir Baton guests, I just wanted to take a moment in this episode to tell you a little bit about me and a little bit about my backstory and why I'm passionate about choir. What Choir Baton was intended to be, what it's evolving into and just how this podcast came to be. 

A little bit about me, I grew up singing, but I really grew up singing in church, and in a traditional setting-- but when I say traditional, I don't mean Catholic or Lutheran, or even Methodist, it was along a Baptist sort of childhood of singing in the hymnals and specials and song and things like that when I was a kid. And I didn't fully understand what traditional choral music was, really until high school, even though I had sung in church choirs-- I even had a nine week stint in middle school choir. I was really insecure about joining this professional entity as a choir. 

And I think what really drives me today was that as a nervous freshman, I was signing up for choir without feeling like I had any real experience, even though I had taken piano since I was five. Now, trust me, I was not very good, because I didn't practice like I should have. But nonetheless, I knew how to read music and I knew how to sing. But still, this concept of choir felt incredibly lofty to me, something that I wasn't really sure I could do. So when I changed schools going into high school, I luckily had a friend at my church. And at this point, we changed churches and I was actually involved in a more contemporary style of music at church. This friend really encouraged me to sing in choir and so I signed up and I still remember entering that choir room on a “meet the teacher day”. And four years later, the years that I spent in that room truly changed my life. 

And when I look back over the lessons that I learned in those years in high school choir that ultimately gave me experiences to sing in choirs in undergraduate and graduate school, and then when I've been in the workplace as well, so much of what I've learned in choirs is about music, but it's also about self and about teamwork. It's about history, camaraderie, and community. 

And so, that's where, as passionate as I am about choir and choral singing, I'm also so passionate about the skills that it teaches and today, we are in a community-seeking world-- I believe that's why social media is as riveting as it is and time consuming as it is. I believe that's why podcasts have been so special is because of the stories and the information they tell. And I truly think that as we move towards this kind of individualized approach to society of recognizing our uniqueness, and even down to individualized learning, there's such a greater importance for this art form that isn't based on individuality. You know, choir singing or singing in a choir, choral singing, however you want to say it, and quite honestly, however you want to define it, because I'm hoping to really discuss what defines a choir and what defines a good choir, bad choir. And ultimately what defines good and bad singing and who says that we are one or the other or that one decision that we have made ourselves, “we are a good singer, we are a bad singer” is also a static thing with which we have for our entire life. 

But something I want to really continue to address in this podcast is how we can take tenants of choral music, of a choir rehearsal, of a choir performance, and see how the threads of this art form are now more important than ever in the 21st century. Whenever you sing in a choir, you are not only singing, hopefully, the right notes and rhythms with the people beside you. But you're also thinking about the level of which you're singing the dynamics, how loud or soft, the vowels which you are saying, the expression and the meaning behind what you are saying. And so much more in an effort to not only make music amongst yourselves but also communicate a message to an audience. And again, while I value individuality so much, and I personally am seeking to become more comfortable in myself and the individual that I'm becoming, I also think it's really fascinating that I work in this realm that is ultimately demanding the opposite, while also seeking to recognize the individual within a choir as well. 

So I have had a lot of different experiences in choirs from singing in them to helping organize to being assistant conductors and conductors, I’ve taught at the elementary, middle and high school level as well as in the collegiate and community level as well. And the one thing that really fascinates me about choirs and choral music is that you have such an opportunity to-- in a teacher’s world they might say beg, borrow and steal-- but to take ideas from the choir in which you are participating in, whether you're a director, whether you're an assistant director, whether you're a choir member, and ultimately, whether or not you're an audience member, you know-- I partake in choir music and all of these different realms. And so I'm always stealing ideas, I'm always thinking through, “Oh, this is how they programmed this” and in this performance, if I'm an audience goer, if I'm a singer in a choir maybe I'm thinking, “Oh, I love how did they did this, and I want to emulate this and to this context”, or, “Oh, I don't love this.” 

But it's just an art form that I'm able to engage with at so many different levels. And ultimately, I think that a lot of my colleagues would say the same, a lot of them are directors, assistant directors, audience members, and choir members themselves. And then there's also other people within the community that are simply choir members. They have professional jobs as IT officers or doctors or teachers or so many different other fields that this art form also brings together and they bring those skills and they bring these passions and sometimes, the people that I'm singing in a choir with, or if I'm directing the choir, these people that don't have careers like I do built in this art form, sometimes approach it so much more passionately than I do at certain rehearsals because it's a creative outlet. It's a creative break for them. And all of these different roles within this art truly fascinate me. 

So I had the idea, several years ago to be honest, upon following an Instagram account in the Raleigh area, and in Raleigh, there's something called the RDU baton, or the Raleigh Durham International, the RDU baton, and it's a way that different community members within this triangle area sign up to show the day in the life of their little community. And Raleigh is a really big area from Durham to Chapel Hill to Apex to Fuquay-Varina and even farther on out, and I started following this account and following people's daily posts, about maybe their favorite coffee shop, maybe their favorite place to eat, favorite park, and I began to learn so much more about this city that I had just moved back to. 

So the idea began brewing, we need something like this for choirs. How awesome would that be to feature different choirs from all over the country and ultimately all over the world and ultimately all different levels, that's something else I didn't truly broach earlier and talking about choir is that it's such a lifelong skill. I mean, I think basketball is the greatest sport ever, but at some point, you just can't dribble a ball and run up and down a court like you used to be able to. But choir and singing is something that, quite honestly, people are doing on their deathbeds; it truly is a lifelong activity. 

So I began to think, what if there was a social media account similar to the RDU Baton, thinking baton as in a relay race, but for choirs, and it took me several months to really get the idea off the ground, to be perfectly honest. I probably talked about it for six months to a year before I finally said, “okay, I'm gonna do this.” And really it was several things that really got me motivated, but one was I got the chance to hold the RDU baton. And through that I posted about my work as a choir director and met another choir director 45 minutes northeast of me, and ended up making, not just a really cool professional meet up through that, but also gained a friend. And so I knew that if I could make connections with people that were passionate about choir, and I don't mean just another choir director, but just again, someone else who’s passionate about choir, I, in my little bitty circle, that is where I live here in North Carolina, that this really could be something that we could connect people with from all over the world. 

So I started the Choir Baton as a little Instagram account for Instagram takeovers and due to my travels and studies, I had met people that were spread out all over the United States, from Alaska to Louisiana to New York and all over and began reaching out to them and really promoting it. And I'd posted some on different choir director pages because I thought, you know, the first way to get some buy-in is through choir directors. And then I would love to have people that are community members within choirs show us a day in their life of, what does it mean to be involved with choirs, and it got off to a pretty decent start. 

But then, as I began to talk more and more about this concept of being open about what is happening in your choir room, and honestly, especially in a high school choral setting, but in a community setting as well, I began to-- once I breezed past that top layer of choir directors that I knew and that were in different places across the United States, I began to go to some other choir directors and I was met with this, this mindset of fear, I think, or uncertainty or the list goes on and on. But people say, “Oh, I can't show what goes on in my classroom”, “Oh, well, I'm not ready for that”, and so on and so forth. And I was road blocked. Other people weren't really signing up like I kind of expected them to. And maybe that was just ignorance on my part, but I thought, “man, this is a really cool idea”, I'm getting something just as a choir director watching these other people take over the accounts and we probably had 20 or so takeovers, but then all these other people begin telling me “no, not right now”, “I'm too afraid to put myself out there”, “no one wants to see my stuff.” And these are amazing choir directors that are not sure about putting themselves out there within this social media context. 

And while I understand it to a certain extent, and you could list the concerns, as to student privacy, composer royalties, adding in time, unfamiliar with the platform, etc, etc, etc. I could see the benefits just far outweighed these fears, but what was ultimately standing in front of these fears or standing in front of people really jumping into something like this and jumping into this mindset of sharing about what we do through social media were these limiting beliefs that we are not good enough that-- What is good enough? What can you share? It's this product over process mindset that especially, I think high school choral directors, probably collegiate choral directors, community professionals, I'm not sure, but that's the space I'm in right now and kind of observing, are so wary of. 

And I really began to notice it more and more and more, not just in my colleagues, but also then of myself as well. As I began to seek to post more things about what I was doing on social media, there was this twinge of like, what are people going to say, people aren't going to necessarily hear student A sing this and know where they started from, and just hear where they're at now. And ultimately, perhaps judge that. And I could see these limiting beliefs that my peers were really engaging with on a grander scale because they weren't putting out as much content-- and content is such a fancy social media word-- but ultimately, when I say content, I mean just sharing about what we're doing in this choral space as I was. 

And so this is just something that I've really been marinating on for the past several months when I began to feel a bit of stalling in getting different people to sign up for this Instagram takeover. And I knew, I still know, that it’s a successful thing and a successful idea and I'm still going to continue to push it, but I needed an outlet with which to begin to discuss some of these ideas and struggles that we have as choir directors when it pertains to putting ourselves out there and seeking to shift the mindset of, we're no longer product based, but more process based in how we approach sharing our art form. 

And so I began to consider well, maybe a podcast would be a really cool forum with which to talk about this in. I know, in my personal life, I've been listening to podcasts on a range of different topics and have been entertained by some of the stories and then also have been motivated and taught through the sharings of others. And I thought, man, if I could engage with people in conversations about who they are, why they are involved in choir, and really encourage them to be able to consider what a unique opportunity we have to share about this art form in the context of social media, then hopefully this will encourage others to begin to not just post more about what we're doing and singing about in social media, but then that ultimately will help promote Choir Baton as a collaborative Instagram project in which it was designed. 

Because I ultimately see Choir Baton, be it the podcast or be it the Instagram project or anything like that, is really not for just choir directors, because that's boring. Ya’ll, choir is-- it goes back to what I talked about at the beginning. It is an opportunity for us to join together with people that are not the same age as we are, that don't look the same as us, that come from different financial backgrounds, socioeconomic backgrounds, so many different things. Choir is the one activity that can really bring us together and unite us in creating a singular goal. 

Now, I think the other fascinating thing about choirs is that the goals are different depending on the choir, you know, if you're the LA master chorale, your goal is musical excellence and innovation, I believe. Then there are some choirs that I would venture to say, their main goal is camaraderie. There are really cool choir programs I'm just seeing about on Instagram that are uniting mothers as a way for them to get together and bring their kids together and make music with each other. You know, there's beer choir that we have here in the US where people are getting together to sing in breweries and this sort of thing. And choir is so much more than the choir director, but it is the entity with the people that makes up this special thing that we all do and why-- Why do we do it? And what lessons do we bring from our outside lives as people to the choir? And what lessons do we gain, do we glean from the actual choir experience? So that's kind of where I'm at.

And I think that this podcast is also for people to-- let's talk about, what is singing? You know, so many times when I tell people what I'm involved in, the first thing they say is, well, it's one of two things, one, do you sing? I think that's such a funny question. Because, we all sing, we truly all sing. And then the second thing or sometimes the first depending, is they respond, “I can't sing.” And y'all, I have to really bite my tongue on some of these things. Because anyone can sing. Anyone can sing. And then when they tell me I can't sing or I'm a bad singer. That's my favorite. I'm a bad singer. I love to smile, depending on the person and the context and the social setting, I smile and I say, “well, what's a good singer then?” 

And I love to watch the expression because oftentimes, they're really not sure. And I don't know if you know, you are choir director and this happens to you or maybe you sing in a choir and when people hear that you sing in a choir this happens to you. Or maybe you are that person listening to this thinking, I've always been fascinated with singing and fascinated with choirs, but I'm air quoting that you can't see, “not a good singer”. 

And so I want us to really begin to talk about this because I think that also goes to a mindset that we can learn about within the choral setting, and then also take it and apply it to our own lives. I know it's something I'm working on in my life. And that is, when we say that we are not something or we say that we can't do something, is that really the case? Singing is a skill. Singing is a practiced skill. And yes, some people are born with a more innate skill level than others. But what really separates people, there's some great quote I'm sure, about talent and skill and hard work and effort separating people that go far in a certain field or people that don't. And so many times, and particularly within our society, there is this mindset of, I am good, I am bad. Because I am bad at something, I cannot get or I won't get good at it, I won't spend the time to get good at it. I can't get good at it. And that is just lies, that is such a limiting belief that they are not bad. 

How often do you spend practicing that skill each day, and I'm not talking about hours, I tell my singers, even five minutes a day, five minutes a day practicing some of these simple skills within music and literacy and building this musical ear, can really train you to be a “good singer”, whatever that means. But to be a more competent singer, perhaps and so it's something I really want us to delve into because music education is changing every single day in our schools. Singing as a part of the religious culture is changing, the music that's being sung in churches, hymnals are not being used in churches, people are not taught how to read music or understand music anymore, but then also have we ever seen an era of more singing shows online? When I say online I mean, on TV or on Hulu or Netflix or wherever you watch it, between The Voice, American Idol, America's Got Talent? All of these different ways in which people are singing and we're judging and think they're a good or they're a bad singer. We think that we have this vernacular in which we know how to approach judging a singer or not judging a singer. 

There are so many YouTube videos that we listen to for music-- we are more consumers of music than ever before. If you truly think about it, you know, 200 years ago, if you really wanted to hear music, you created it. And as we have advanced in our recording skills, and in our playback skills and awesome opportunities to listen to all different kinds of music, through Spotify and iTunes and YouTube, and so on and so forth, we have to be careful because we're beginning to, well not beginning, we have, really limited that with which we are doing to create music. 

And so I'm hoping that these are some things that we're going to talk about with people that are music makers. Maybe they're not music makers, you know, I have a list of people signed up that will be speaking on this podcast about various components within this. We're also going to be talking to new music teachers that are going to be student teaching, to people that are veteran teachers, to people that are community music members or so many different things. It's going to be awesome. 

But that is really in a very large, very, very large nutshell, what this podcast is going to be really touching on. I never imagined that my life would be so involved in something like this. When I get up in the morning, I'm not someone that goes, I've got to listen to this choral piece of music-- I don't honestly listen to choral music for fun as much as when I'm working and listening to music and studying scores and things. But the longer that I begin to study choirs and what they do and the history and where they ultimately are going to be in the future, I begin to see where we can draw parallels within our 21st century music. And we're not drawing parallels between the two right now. And I am hoping to really bridge some of these gaps through conversations with so many different people. 

So thanks for listening this long and I am so excited to begin this journey with you all. If you are interested in being a guest on Choir Baton, if you're interested in just holding the Choir Baton on Instagram, go to Instagram and do the signup link there or jump to choirbaton.com and check out “hold the baton” or “hold the Choir Baton” there. I'll send you an email with all the information or if you just want to listen along, join us.

If you have an idea or a topic or an idea for maybe a special guest or you know of someone or something that really would be pertinent to these conversations, please don't hesitate to reach out. Send me an email at [email protected], head on over to the Choir Baton Instagram and check that out or if you want to, really just direct message me. You can check out my personal Instagram account @baphilemon and reach out to me there, send me a DM. 

Regardless of how you do so I would love to hear from you. Whether it's through Instagram through email or even just to leave a review here, and let me know what you think. I have so enjoyed planning, plotting, putting all of this together, and can't wait to see what all we can learn from the guests that are going to be on this podcast. 

And with that I am signing off of my own interview. I guess that's kind of what it's been like. I really would love to connect with you though, either via email, but especially through Instagram. I would so be honored if you would sign up and let us know what your life is like in choir through signing up to hold the Choir Baton. But if that's not your scene yet, feel free to just check me out on Instagram, give me a follow there or just even a wave and say hello, that you've listened. 

My name is Beth Philemon and thanks for checking out the inaugural Choir Baton podcast.