The Musical Education You Didn’t Know You Were Missing: why everything you wish you learned at school is waiting for you in the choir rehearsal room.

Many adults assume that if they didn’t learn music properly at school, the window has closed. In reality, the most practical, applicable, and confidence-building musical education you could ask for is still waiting for you - in a choir.

1. Practical Musical Skills (You Didn’t Know You Needed)

Choir teaches the kind of musical awareness that, for whatever reason, you may have missed out on in school.

Most adults don’t realise that active listening is 50% of being a musician.

We spend years listening passively to radio, Spotify, or background music without noticing

timing, structure, or entrances.

Karaoke doesn’t help much either — you rely on the screen to tell you when to start. When

those singers join a choir for the first time (often with live accompaniment), they suddenly

discover just how much listening and timing is involved.

• Counting beats

• Listening for your cue

• Staying aware of the people singing around you

Choir offers a whole new opportunity, a second chance to learn all of these.

.2. Harmony: The Skill Everyone Wants

One of the most common questions my private students ask is:

“How do you sing harmony?”

My answer is always the same:

“Join a choir”

Harmony is best learned as a team sport. Professional backing singers often learned or refined their craft in choirs. My own first experience of singing harmony, at around thirteen, was mind-blowing. Standing inside the sound - hearing the blend, feeling the chord settle -was the moment I truly understood music in a practical, emotional way.

3. Pitching: Finding Your Note with Confidence

Pitching isn’t only about singing in tune.

It’s about learning how to:

• Find your starting note from the accompaniment

• Pick up your entry from another voice part

• Hold your musical line even when others are singing something different

Many adults have these skills lying dormant. Choir wakes them up.

4. Dynamics and Expression

Choir also teaches expressive skills that transform your singing:

• Singing louder or softer for emotional effect

• Creating crescendos and diminuendos

• Shaping a phrase so the audience experiences the music more deeply

These are things most of us never even noticed in primary school, which is very often the only experience adults have of choral singing.

5. Understanding Genre and Tone

Different styles of music require different vocal tone, energy, and articulation.

In choir, you learn this naturally and gently, just by taking part.

6. The Team Experience (Like a Band or Orchestra, But More Accessible)

Singing in a choir mirrors the musical teamwork of bands and orchestras. In fact, traditional

stage placement reflects orchestral layout:

• Lower voices on the conductor’s right

• Higher voices on their left

How many of us can look at those colourful classroom posters and still recall where the

trombones sit? But when you’re in a choir - especially a mixed-voice group - you’re living that musical structure every week.

7. Understanding Performance From the Inside

Creating a performance under an experienced director reveals musical subtleties that likely

passed you by in childhood:

• how crescendos work

• where a phrase should land

• how sections lock together

• how the music “breathes”

This is musical education with sleeves rolled up. It's fun and it sticks.

8. “I Want to Do Greater Things Than Choir...”

Some singers avoid choirs because they aspire to solo careers. But here’s the truth:

If you become one of the tiny percentage of singers who go professional, you will perform with a band or orchestra.

You will sing with backing singers.

And without foundational skills - timing, harmony, structure, listening - you’ll soon feel out of

your depth.

Singing is a language.

Choir helps you speak it.

9. My Own Early Training (and Why It Mattered)

As a young working singer, even my modest early training earned me respect from professional musicians. They saw I was trying to “speak the language,” and many generously added to my education - sometimes at the oddest hours of the day!

Everything I learned then, I still use now.

How will you count in an orchestra if you’ve never counted beats?

How will you know the rhythm structure if you’ve never moved inside it?

How will you communicate a musical idea for an arrangement if you don't have the “vocabulary” at hand?

10. Choir as a Musical Melting Pot

Just as ballroom dancers must understand different groove patterns and interpret them

appropriately, singers need to grasp the rhythmic and stylistic “feel” of different genres. There is no more inclusive cultural melting pot than a choir for learning this.

So don’t let reverse snobbery - the idea that choir isn’t “serious” enough - stop you from

discovering one of the most accessible and affordable music educations out there.

Besides... you never know.

Your future bandmates or collaborators might be sitting right next to you in the alto section.

Interested in joining us at Women Rockin' Harmony Choirs? Click here to sign up to our mailing list to find out more.

Members of Women Rockin' Harmony Choirs perform at their Summer Show 2025.