In fine voice
Stephen Bell is musical director of the award-winning Northampton Male Voice Choir. He talks to Julia Thorley about why he has such high expectations of all his singers.
Stephen Bell has been making and directing music in and around Northamptonshire for over 35 years, not only with choirs, but also working with brass and symphonic wind bands and orchestras. He says there is nothing to beat live music.
“Live music creates a sound in a room that you can’t replicate through headphones,” he says.
Northampton Male Voice Choir (NMVC) performs over 30 concerts a year under Stephen’s direction, often supporting local fundraising ventures. It has a varied repertoire of 50 to 60 songs to draw from.
“We perform traditional music but also songs that people might not expect from a male voice choir, including works by living composers and new music. We are an entertainment choir, and consciously cultivate a modern look that we hope is attractive to audiences. I work on our programme months ahead, but I don’t tell the choir what we’re performing until the show. It’s a real challenge; they hear the opening notes and have to work out on the spot what the song is!”
This sounds incredibly demanding, so is Stephen a hard taskmaster?
“I’m very clear in my expectations and I don’t let anyone off the hook. It’s important not to dumb down, but to set your standards high and work up to what you want from people. There is value in striving for a high standard, something that imparts the thrill of participation and acknowledgement that we’ve achieved something worthwhile. Diction is very important, for instance. Pronunciation needs to be ‘posh’, with the work on the vowel sounds rather than the ‘knitting’ in between them.
“The more I work with different groups, the more I develop, too. I’ve picked up skills along the way, and am a people-orientated motivator. Sometimes I pull, but sometimes I give a strong push. I can be a bit grumpy! I expect choir members to do twenty minutes’ work a day on the songs in between rehearsals. You see, we don’t rehearse to get it right, we rehearse so we can’t get it wrong. Once the choir has learned the music, we get a whole new level of performance.”
Given that many mixed choirs struggle to find enough tenors and bases, it is perhaps surprising that there are so many members of the NMVC, but Stephen says it isn’t a problem to find new recruits.
“There’s no shortage of men who want to join. In fact, I’ve recently started a new choir in Oundle, where I live. I wonder now why I never did this before! I ran a taster session and over 30 people came along, and we now have a group of regulars in a mixed choir.
“Getting a good vocal range is a whole other issue. It’s not that unusual, for instance, to have a female voice sing baritone. To be inclusive, there is a move towards calling them upper and lower voices. The combination can produce a beautiful sound.”
Stephen selects the programme of music to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. They perform quite a lot of church and fundraising concerts, which tend to bring their own audiences, although the choir has a core of regular followers, too. They also do joint concerts and the other musical groups bring some audience members with them. For instance, the choir joined with the GUS Championship Brass Band in 2019 for a ‘Last Night of the Proms’ concert. A more recent collaboration was ‘Collide: A Choirfest Experience!’ during which NMVC joined the Queen Eleanor Choir and Northants Sings Out (West) for an ambitious celebration of a mix of musical genres and styles.
“People often approach me after a concert and say they’d like to join on the strength of what they’ve seen and heard. We don’t audition as such, but I will do what I call a voice check, because not everyone is a good fit. I always feed back face to face to applicants if I have to explain I don’t think this choir is for them. Members don’t necessarily have to read music, though it helps.”
Alongside the main choir is NMVC Lite, an invitation-only group of singers chosen for the blend of their voices who perform a different repertoire and can sing in smaller venues where perhaps the main choir wouldn’t be appropriate. Another of Stephen’s success stories is being involved in Men United In Song 2024, part of a national programme funded by Arts Council England to raise money in support of Prostate Cancer UK. Twenty-seven NMVC men took part, but the majority were new to choral singing and performing in public.
“I set the group the challenge of learning 10 songs in 10 weeks, which they did – plus an extra one – and they were all off copy by the end. We did our first concert in Higham Ferrers in May to a sell-out audience, which was an amazing experience. We were astounded, too, by the emotions that were stirred up at the end of this shared musical journey. People really opened up to each other.”
The strapline of the choir is United in friendship and harmony.
Stephen says:
“It’s a social group that sings, but I’ll turn that around and say it’s a choir who happen to be friends.”
More information and a list of forthcoming concerts is available on the choir’s website
The number of times I've name checked Stephen, very disappointed not to be mentioned, but despite that an accurate account of the talented Stephen Bell