While I was writing the songs for ‘Fuzz Universe,’ I was immersing myself in Bulgarian Female Choir music, Baroque lute and violin pieces, Johnny Cash songs about trains, cows, mules, and mining coal, the Bee Gees, and Ronnie James Dio.
I got in the school band and the school choir. It all hit me like a ton of bricks, everything just came out. I played percussion for a while, and stayed after school forever just tinkering around with different things, the clarinets and the violins.
I’ve been singing since I was like 7 years old in the choir at church, so I do have a little bit of a voice.
I got along with mostly everyone, but music school does that to you. We had to sing in a choir all the time, so we had to get along with everyone.
I was in a show choir. I can’t sing or dance to save my life, but I was very passionate. People said my parents paid the choir director to let me in. It was actually the parents who started that one!
At ‘GQ,’ there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.
My grandad was an opera singer, my uncle a jazz musician; I was a boy soprano in the church choir. But the first performance with Deep Purple was something I’ll never forget. All elements were working brilliantly.
What I’ve picked up from working with the women in the Gori choir is that they don’t have egos. All that matters is the music.
To have a live choir there on the stage and then these singers from different countries signing with us in real time through Skype, it’s as if there aren’t borders anymore.
I guess as a kid, I was always creative, and I was involved in music, like piano and violin and choir, so I always knew – I always knew that I wanted to do something that would allow me to be who I am. Generally, that was creatively, imaginatively.
I was born in New York, but I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut – that’s where I went to school. I remember begging my way into choir in the 3rd grade, because you’re not supposed to get in until 4th grade.
Gospel music was very prevalent in my house. My mother also loved Nat King Cole. That was some of the first music that I heard. Mahalia Jackson, Nat King Cole and the Mississippi Mass Choir.
By high school, I was telling everyone, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up,’ because my dad was always saying to me, ‘Pick a career path where you’re always going to be necessary.’ But by junior year, I was president of choir, I was the lead in the school play, and I just loved being onstage performing.
I sang in the choir for years, even though my family belonged to another church.
Members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir are not superhuman. They are ordinary people with ordinary frailties. But therein lies the power of their example.
‘Bell Choir Coast’ is about a fictional land where I was able to start over, discover myself, and learn to take life a lot less seriously.
The Christianity of the St Stephen’s College I remember was atmospheric (how we loved the chapel, the choir and the Cross), cultural and entirely subtle.
I didn’t like to be restricted, because when you’re in a choir, you have a part to sing and you sing it. I always liked singing on my own.
I started playing piano age six. I was also singing in the choir, so my mum put me into music school. I went to study there for seven years, but it was not my passion. I quit because I wanted to study marketing. But I can still play piano.
A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
My father’s a deacon, my mother’s a choir director, so I grew up in the church and singing in the choir, begging my mom if I could have a solo.
I was the editor of the school newspaper and in drama club and choir, so I was not a popular girl in the traditional sense, but I think I was known for being relatively scathing.
I studied voice when I was at school, and I was in the chamber choir, and I studied music theory as well, so I guess a lot of it came from being taught at school.
I’ve never had a very quiet voice. I tried in choir to make it smaller, and it just didn’t work out. And I listened to a lot of soul music when I was growing up on my own accord. But I was mostly into Mama Cass and Gladys Knight, and they all had big voices too; just different than mine.
My high-school a cappella teacher would embarrass me in front of the choir. ‘Mavis, you’re in the basement. Mavis, you’re singing with the boys.’ I said, ‘Mr. Finch, my voice isn’t soprano. I can’t sing up there with the girls.’ So I just got out of the choir.
I used to sing in the church choir. People would say it was unusual for such a small girl to have such a big voice. They would say, ‘She sounds like she’s grown.’
All my life, I had loved music and been in choir, and I have a degree in music, but I never planned on doing it as a job. I had a realistic perspective on that. I thought maybe work at a church or be a teacher if you wanted to work in music.
I trained as a singer before I was an actor. I was a kid singer, I went to theater and choir school, and then I got music scholarships throughout my education. And that’s what I was going to do. And then I took a left turn and went to drama school and became an actor.
Make a list of the people in your ‘choir’… If you’re not on your own list, then you’re doing something wrong.
My means of entry to ‘Christianity was singing in a choir. As a boy chorister, I grew up with Ancient and Modern, the evening canticles, versicles and responses, and carols.
I think that the pivotal point of me in terms of the choral stuff is that I was involved in this provincial choir at 16 or 17. We went and played in churches and convention centres. The music we got to do was so inspiring for me.
I love singing. You know, my mother always used to encourage me, ‘Sing, sing,’ and I was in a choir in church, yes.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist-style church with a choir, a band, and music, but I’ve been asking myself my whole life, ‘Why is my own church, my own community, rejecting me because of my sexuality?’
I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant.
The first time I sang in the church choir; two hundred people changed their religion.
I was president of the show choir, I was kind of a geek, whatever.
While musical experts of the world focus on what choir members can do, I would like to focus on what choir members can be.
If you join a choir, it’s a wonderful outlet.
I did choir in high school, but I didn’t sing professionally anywhere ever.
You can do a lot worse than spend an hour a week singing. We should prescribe choirs on the NHS for anxiety and stress.
I was always super, super musical. So my parents recognized that and put me in choirs, piano lessons, and all that.
Before ‘Music and Lyrics,’ I was just doing high school plays and singing in my church choir and my school choir.
Chris Kirkpatrick and I were in college in choir together; we sang at our community college. I’m partially the reason why Chris even got into being in a boy band with *NSYNC.
When I went to college at the University of Nevada back in Las Vegas, I got tricked into singing in choir. The first thing we did was the Mozart ‘Requiem.’ That was the piece that changed my life overnight.
I always enjoyed singing but I was never convinced that I had a big voice like that, that was distinctive, I just thought I can sing in the choir.
I made my own fictional land, which is ‘Bell Choir Coast.’ It was a response to feeling really, really lost, and it was what I was looking for.
I don’t really sing… I just hear notes so I know what it’s supposed to sound like, if that makes sense. You ever hear someone try to teach a choir how to sing, but they can’t sing? That’s me.
As a child, I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.
I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
I grew up spending a lot of time in church, almost every day, whether in choir rehearsal or praise team or Bible study – there was always a reason.
I was a choir boy for 3 years in high school at St. George’s in Newport, Rhode Island.
