A twelve-week training a few years ago ran me into something funny. In that choir, like many others this part of the world, there was a craze for titles rather than a care for essence. Have you ever seen a choir with a choirmaster who is different from a choir leader who is not the same person as the choir coordinator who again is separate from the choir director who holds a different office from the music director? Of course, there was no choir in a sense; otherwise my services would not have been required. Yet they had many other titles: secretary, treasurer, financial secretary, assistant this, assistant that, and so on.

Now, you and I know that you don’t need to have all that to run an effective choir. And if you must have so many offices where the choir is large, why don’t you rather have functional music offices? What did I do? Exactly that! I dissolved all their offices, chose one of the few dedicated choristers as secretary to assist me with paper work, and I directed the music.

Till now, when I look back, I still wonder why practically everyone should have a title and almost all do nothing. There were even truants who had big titles. They ran back when they heard about what we were doing. Some of them couldn’t fit in for long. Others couldn’t fit in at all.

The success or failure of a choir, I need not say, rests with its leader. It depends on how much he understands and effects the subsets of choir management: passion, knowledge and discipline.