Regardless of your gender and voice type, should you be even remotely serious about joining a mixed voice (SATB) choir, be sure to ask up front how long the women of the choir have had their performance gowns. Unless the gowns are quite recent, ask when they are scheduled to be replaced. If the answer is ASAP, soon or relatively soon, for reasons which the following will make clear, I would seek out another choir in possession of more recently purchased gowns. By doing so you will avoid exposure to the risk of considerable turmoil, angst, in-fighting and trouble and strife. (the latter Cockney rhyming slang for wife I just realise but I digress.)
It was my great misfortune to be the president of a large (about a hundred) mixed voice SATB choir at a time when the women needed new gowns. Not unused to impassioned and raucous democratic debate and to dissenting voices, having previously presided over a variety of organizations and events including a company staff association, a yacht club, a strata corporation (don’t do it!) and an adult basic boating class also of about a hundred people. Just as an aside regarding the latter, neither I nor the women, of which there were many, knew that women in that late 1960s male chauvinistic time, were barred from membership of the very boating organization offering the class (but they could take the exam!) As class chair, I was charged with the dubious ‘pleasure’ of telling them this. It was not well received in spite of me assuring them that this was very contrary to my own view. My involvement with this last, nor any other of the organizations flagged however came even remotely close to preparing me for the extreme stick handling challenge inherent in the selection of mixed choral ensemble performance gowns.
On the men’s side life was easy. We wore black tuxedos, shoes, socks, bow ties and cummerbunds along with a white formal shirt. We bought our own tuxes. End of story. Traditionally the women of the choir had for years worn choir owned custom made red gowns along with black shoes also end of story. Red and black is of course a widely used colour combination and for good reason. It makes both pleasing visual and strong dramatic statements. A further factor and benefit in our case, was that it echoed and enhanced the spectacular red and gold art deco design of our primary performance hall. A fact not lost on and in fact strongly promoted to the choir’s management board by, our professional public relations company. The existing spectacular if aged red gowns balanced by the men’s tuxedos were our long time performance trade mark.
For various good reasons not the least of which was the significant budget needed to fund, including extras for new singers, about seventy choir owned gowns, our board made up mostly of elected choir members, struck a gowns committee culled of course from our alto and soprano sections. That committee was charged with presenting to the board a number of alternative possibilities for the gowns’ design, fabric, pricing and suppliers.
Enter a very few, dissonant (no musical pun intended) self interest oriented altos and sopranos who had zero interest in working to help us decide which shade of red, which gown design, which type of material, which supplier and at what price. They wanted the new gowns to be black period. A single issue coterie. This with no groundswell of support whatsoever from the women of the choir in general as far as we were able to determine, for black or any colour other than a red of some description.
If fifty women dressed from head to foot in black are staged along with fifty men in black tuxedos, not with standing the mens’ white shirts, the overriding effect under stage lighting from audience left, right and centre is a sea of pale and ghostly faces. Colour publicity photographs of such, essential for dynamic and eye catching promotional material, are next to useless the impact factor being close to zero. They might just as well be in black and white and out of focus for all the attention they would muster.
To this day I am still surprised that no injuries were sustained in selecting the gowns such was the brouhaha that developed over some months of largely shall we say spirited debate. I remember in one instance stepping in like a boxing referee to separate a soprano and an alto whom it seemed were on the brink of duking it out! Luckily I and they survived unscathed.
At one of our last board meetings devoted to trying to put the gowns colour issue to bed once and for all and get them ordered, I invited one of the still tiny minority coterie’s more earnest members to the meeting and asked her if in fact there was by then perhaps a groundswell of support for black dresses from a majority of the women. “I don’t know”, she said, “I haven’t asked ANY of them”! Needless to say I had no further questions.
We ordered red gowns with a fabulous ‘WOW’ quotient. Almost without exception, the women and for that matter the men of the choir loved them as did our audiences. End of story.