Someone recently told me that their community choir doesn’t do a group warm up at the beginning of their rehearsal. Instead, they are expected to come ready to sing, and will just get right into the repertoire.

Although everyone is entitled to run their choir how they see fit, I have a couple issues with this.

I’ve come to view the warmup as having more than one purpose:

It gets our voices and bodies ready to sing so that we don’t tire or injure ourselves.
It gets everyone in the same room, metaphorically.

That first one should be obvious, but let me expand on the second.

When we arrive at choir, we are coming from all over. Our pathways to get to choir that day could have been easy, or they could have been really challenging, but we’ve all made it there [hopefully] on time.

Our bodies may have made it to the room, but often our minds haven’t quite caught up. Instead, they are stuck on the emails we haven’t sent, or the thing we said to that person this afternoon, or the eight million things we think we could be doing other than being mentally present at choir.

Taking a few intentional minutes to do simple and familiar exercises at the beginning of a rehearsal gives our minds a chance to catch up and figure out how to be present in the rehearsal space. And then we can get to work.

I’ve tried to skip warm-ups in situations when we are pressed for time and are in some chaotic circumstance. But then, I take a breath and realize that this is exactly the best time to do a few warm-up exercises. Going through familiar exercises and notes (and being intentional about my breathing because of it) is exactly the kind of grounding that I/we often need in those kind of chaotic moments.

And I think this is important, regardless of the level of the choir. When I was working with the University of Manitoba Singers last year, it was a good assumption that they were all vocally warmed-up. But it was essential to the effectiveness of the rehearsal that we do a quick warm-up together. Otherwise, we were never going to be in the ‘same’ room. In that case, I wasn’t prepping their voices to sing, but I was inviting them all to be present in the room for the next two hours.

Again, everyone is entitled to run their rehearsals how they want, but if you don’t take a few minutes to get everyone in the room, perhaps consider trying it — you may be surprised at the difference it makes.