sheet music

Reading sheet music in a choir: a beginner’s guide

Many choirs use sheet music as a tool to learn their repertoire, but needing to read sheet music is a barrier to many people looking to join a choir. This resource will help choirs support new and potential members learning to read sheet music.

Written music is a symbolic language that provides a lot of information in a small space, but this can make it confusing if you haven’t come across it before. However, it is a skill that can be learnt, especially with the encouragement and structure of a music group. 

Discounted sheet music and learning tracks from ChoirCommunity

ChoirCommunity is offering Making Music members a 15% discount of sheet music and learning tracks.  

What is ChoirCommunity? 

ChoirCommunity is a digital marketplace for choirs, providing high quality choral arrangements and compositions of many types of music, created by choir leaders and composers from around the UK and the rest of the world.

The role of the librarian

The role of the librarian is important for the smooth running of your group and doing it well can make a big difference.  You need systems to keep track of all the music whilst being flexible enough to cope with unexpected schedule changes, and the more disorganised members of your group who may forget or lose their music.  

The main responsibilities and challenges are: 

How and where to source music

Sourcing music is vital to the efficient running of a music group. It normally falls to the librarian to do this and can involving obtaining music from a variety of sources.

In this resource, we’ll look at how and where you can find the music you need, and the things you need to think about when dealing with publishers and music libraries. 

Hiring or buying music from publishers

Obtaining music from publishers is vital for leisure-time music groups. Whilst it can be a big and sometimes difficult task, it doesn’t have to be. We have worked with various publishers and the Music Publishers Association (MPA) on this guidance to ensure our groups can access the music they want and receive the best possible service in doing so.

Choral music: The voice of the soul

On a recent trip to the USA composer Patrick Hawes did a series of interviews with the sheet music retailer 

Guest blog: Singing belongs to everyone

When I was trying to justify my existence as a music student I often suffered from crises of confidence.