One of the goals of the Ottawa Bach Choir is to provide an opportunity to children of different backgrounds to hear classical choral music. With many cutbacks to the arts in today’s education system, this initiative becomes even more important. In these concerts we endeavor not simply to present our music, but to engage the students and provide them with an educational experience as well as entertainment. To this end, we have a dialogue with the students, using a question and answer format to teach them about classical music and its composers, and to introduce them to choral music and how it is performed. We invite their participation, and show them how to respond to the demands of the conductor.
We demonstrate how not to sing – to their great delight – and also bring a large variety of percussion instruments with us to be distributed among the audience to the lucky ones, the others being asked to clap along. This participation is great fun for the students and draws them into the learning experience, through which we are able to lead the students into a discussion of the instruments used in the classical music sphere.
In addition, we provide a historical context to more traditional music, linking it with music of today, and have students begin listening to the multi-layers of vocal lines, voices, instruments and motives found in the music of Bach and his contemporaries. Finally, we include either a well-known carol or round and ask them to begin “using their voices” as they realize the uniqueness of their own voices in the context of a new, artistic idiom. Sometimes, students have music or their own compositions on which they're working and this gives us a chance to help them in the learning and performance process.
The choir also has a program to reach frail seniors and makes an annual visit to the Perley Rideau Veterans' Health Centre to perform a concert of music told in the context of the life of Bach. This is very well received, and the concert hall is filled with mobile, wheel-chair and bed-ridden patients, their care givers and families.
