2017 ‘Sing outside the Box’ Tallinn Estonia 6-8th October

‘Sing outside the Box’ Conference organised by ECA European Choral Association Europa Cantat.

Report by EVTA President Susan Yarnall Monks

“I have had a stimulating 48 hours at this conference which explored how we can attract new audiences to vocal concerts, in particular Choral Singing, and how we can be more creative in performance and choice of repertoire. The Song festivals in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania attract many thousands of singers and audience members. Estonian Singing is famous and we were fortunate to hear a wonderful children’s choir and a highly accomplished chamber choir in the evenings.

The theme of ‘Sing outside the Box’ funded by Creative Europe was discussed with people from the management of festivals, choral conductors, venue managers and myself as the invited singing teacher. I contributed as the voice of 4,500 singing teacher members, and I stressed how important our expertise in singing could help and support the work of all choirs from community groups with no budget to professional choirs with funding.

This conference was very similar in feel to our LeoSings project and I was able to speak about that and also our future plans for Singing Roadshow and for holding ‘Drop-in’ places where choral singers could talk to experienced singing teachers about vocal health and vocal problems. EVTA plans to be in Tallinn 27.07-05.08 2018 and we will need YOU, our Singing Teacher members to participate for an afternoon, giving advice and wisdom on singing to the many singers who will attend this international Festival. This is the first time EVTA has been involved in something like this and as EVTA passionately believes in healthy safe singing we hope you will consider volunteering!  Tallinn is well worth a visit, especially in the summer.

Please write to me president@evta-online.eu for more details.

I was able to meet with voice professionals, but not necessarily singers, from 20 countries and I did my best to persuade Estonia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Russia, Turkey and others to passing EVTA links to any singing teachers they knew. Many have cultural organisations rather than specific Vocal Teacher organisations. My hope is that we can increase our country members as there are some wonderful singers in Europe who still do not know the work we do.

I was also able to meet up and discuss with Stéphane Grosclaude our initial thoughts regarding application to Erasmus Plus for funding. More on that soon.”