Crowd Out: The people running the biggest Birmingham choir ever

I've decided to participate in a HUGE event: Crowd Out. It's a new piece from New York composer David Lang. I will be one of a thousand voices singing and declaiming my head off. 

It's a world première. It's twenty groups of fifty people singing and shouting and giving out, arranged across four levels in Millennium point in Birmingham. It's insane, it's demanding, it's an adventure. It's going to happen in June this year. 

It's free to watch. Anyone can join in, including you. But you've got to do some rehearsing. 

I'm going to post closer to the date with something detailed about the process and the involvement. How are the rehearsals going to work? In the meantime I've got two of the people involved who are building all this: Simon Halsey and Clare Edwards. They both run choirs. 

Arts Funding: it's DIFFERENT in Germany. A chat with Simon Halsey, CBSO Chorus Master

I first met Simon Halsey 32 years ago, when he joined the team at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Now, he is the CBSO Chorus Master. This summer, he leads an extravagant public participation project, Crowd Out, taking over Millennium Point with a thousand, count 'em, a thousand, singers. I'm in: there's a blog post to come on this later this year. 

Halsey at TEDx, Berlin 2010. Photo Sebastian Gabsch

At rehearsals, he flipped from English to German with ease, the result of working in Berlin for the past 15 years. He is ferociously busy, about to swap the Berlin Philharmonic Chorus, Germany's top choir, for the London Symphony equivalent. His job is Chorus Master, but in reality it's a lot more. He has deep knowledge of funding, and, critically, of how organisations can survive and prosper, re-inventing themselves, burrowing deep into in the communities they serve, with humility and practical intent. 

So, he is an interesting and political man, as well as a committed musician with a unique perspective.UK Arts and Media institutions could do well to study how the CBSO, with his help, has played its hand over the past three decades. There are profound lessons to learn.