I got hit by a social media advert on this one, but there was something about the video that raised a few diversity issue flags
So this landed and I shared it on my Cambridge Town Owl FB page which is where I often re-post city-wide community things. It was also not long after I had written about the various singing groups in and around Cambridge. Cambridge is a new location for them – interestingly they’ve booked a venue in a part of the city least served by community choirs – North East Cambridge near Cambridge North Station.
Scrolling down from the above-link, the very-well put together music clip of a very vibrant singing group and the upbeat sing-along track of Shania Twain immediately grabs your attention. And for accessible-to-all community-level choirs, that’s all you need. But the diversity-of-age challenge that so many singing groups have really stood out in this video just as it has done in so many other videos and live performances that I’ve seen (and filmed) over the past decade or so.
“Has any academic research been done on diversity of community choirs?”
The policy-adviser-trained civil serf in me always asks the bigger picture question of any issue I stumble across. Is it a personal thing? Is it a ‘Cambridge only’ thing? Or is it much more wider than that? The reason being that the answers to the questions will give some indication of where any solutions might be, from personal self-improvement or actions through to lobbying local or even central government on something.
The main piece of research seems to be Diana Parkinson’s PhD thesis from University College London from November 2020 – you can read it here. You can also read her literature review of January 2018 here. There’s an even more sobering take from Chris Rowbury from 2024 on the risk of ageing church and community choirs dying out altogether (along with some suggestions on how to mitigate for this risk). With that in mind, one of the other barriers – social class, comes out in this piece by Richards and Durrant from 2003 on the importance of the music teacher in encouraging and supporting people new to music and singing. Yet Parkinson notes the stereotype – and efforts in the 2010s to change things.
“I suggest that although previous research has generally presented adult amateur singing groups as predominately composed of white, female, well-educated individuals, changes in the popularity and availability of adult singing groups may have increased the diversity of their membership.”
Parkinson (2018) Literature Review Abstract
The one thing that Dr Parkinson could not have accounted for was the once-in-a-century pandemic that hit just as she was coming towards the end of her research.
“As the Covid-19 pandemic sweeps across the world and isolates individuals in their homes, the powerful role that group singing plays in community life has been highlighted. In Italy, we have seen spontaneous outbreaks of communal singing as neighbours join together in song from their balconies (Kearney, 2020). In the UK and elsewhere, we have seen the transformation of many adult amateur singing groups into virtual communities which connect their members through social media in order to replicate the experience of singing together (Strick, 2020; Sublet, 2020). These actions reveal a fundamental human need that making music collectively, including singing with others, fulfils. It is my hope that this research has shown how a better understanding of diversity and inclusion can enable adult amateur group singing to continue to fulfil that need.”
Parkinson (2020) Section 8.4 p285/286
What’s really sad is how social media algorithm gaming and manipulation by the big tech giants has fractured too many of the social media communities that built up via their platforms – Channel 4 earlier on asking whether the toxic output from one such chap will lead to the demise of his platform. What would have been beyond the scope of her research is the number of singing groups that effectively disbanded as a result of the lockdowns. This I hope is something that will be captured in the British Academy’s research programme into the long term societal impacts of the pandemic.
The housing crisis and the cost of living crisis – the impact on young adults
The bit that I didn’t explore in my earlier blogpost was on the socio-economic factors that affect the ability and desire of young adults to take part in community activities. Given the decade-and-a-half of austerity combined with successive government allowing if not encouraging economic activities that make things even harder for young adults to get stable accommodation, I’m not surprised that this is being reflected in community groups and voluntary action. We also see it in institutions redefining what they mean by young adults – the upper age boundary creeping ever higher beyond the big 3-0.
It’s easy to compare things to ‘the olden days’ – my grandfather’s generation didn’t really have much of a choice about ‘growing up’ – the demands of conscription and war by the time you hit your 20th birthday, and the high chance of being sent on active service abroad I can only imagine the impact that would have had on him. I on the other hand sometimes feel that the high costs of living meant I barely got the chance to be an adult before my health imploded.
Affordability ratios for Cambridge
“The ratio of lower quartile house prices to lower quartile incomes in Cambridge (based on sales and valuations) is 11.2”
Above – Housing key facts briefing by Cambridge City Council Sept 2024
That’s just for the lower quartile of house prices to incomes. Combine that with a rental market with foreign, institutional, and speculative buyers all snapping up properties, along with demand from Air BnB-type buyers and private colleges, and there’s little left for people working in the city who need somewhere to live. Successive governments have refused to implement policies that might dampen down the excess demand from sectors that contribute little to the city but whose excessive demand results in significant problems for those least able to adapt.
This also means that there’s only so much that the singing groups and their music directors can do themselves if the structural problems are so huge
You only have to compare the nightlife of most towns and cities in the UK from the late 1990s to today. The tales of boarded-up high streets have been more-than-well documented – as has the closure of night clubs across the country, most recently covered in The Guardian just before NYD 2025.
“Clubs and festivals are more important than those high-end things. The government needs to understand the importance of places where you go out, meet your friends, start relationships. It’s not just a dancefloor.”
The article itself is worth reading because it also covers the lack of disposable income for young people too. The most significant of these for me is the curse of the automated checkout. I can understand why very busy places in central London might have them for crowded lunchtimes as I saw in my Whitehall days, but the wider social impact is that they have taken away a host of working class service jobs and entry-level jobs for teenagers that otherwise involve – especially the latter, having to interact with the general public for the first time in their working lives. Take away the opportunities for the majority of older teenagers and students to work part-time and you take away their disposable incomes. See also the removal of the Educational Maintenance Allowance in England for older teenagers too.
If you then compound all of that with cuts to public transport and the lack of investment in active travel routes, you end up with the worst of all worlds. The only sort-of upside is that if/when those cuts to investment are reversed, we might see some unexpected positive side effects as people find places and venues easier and cheaper to get to. But while the economic system seems hotwired into channeling huge wealth into the already-stupendously-wealthy rather than having international co-operation to bring in radical policies like maximum pay ratios between the lowest and highest paid, that lack of disposable income for younger adults (plus also lack of provision for childcare and older people’s social care for adults with caring commitments at either/both ends) will inevitably make it harder to diversify (age-wise) the people that make up many of our singing groups.
At which point we come to realise that what we see in the world of community singing and music making isn’t the problem itself, but a symptom and a reflection of much wider inequalities in our societies. That’s not to say community music groups and those that organise them can’t do anything positive or do not have a role to play in resolving the problems. They do. What that role is, however, is not one simply restricted to what others have suggested in academic research and community action. It involves something far more difficult: getting active in politics and asking elected representatives if 1) they are aware of the issues and 2) what their political parties are doing about them.
Got any questions for your local councillors or MPs? Drop them an email https://www.writetothem.com/ – after all, in Cambridgeshire we have county council and mayoral elections coming up. And the Mayor holds the purse strings for the adult education lifelong learning budget. (Cambridge people, there’s still time to apply for community grants too)
Food for thought?
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Below – as mentioned in this blogpost, I’ve since had a catchup with Stir Cambridge’s new Cherry Hinton Road branch and have scheduled the first of what I hope will become a series of wider neighbourhood conversations on the future of our city. See details here for Sunday 12 Jan 2025.
The Cambridge Town Owl 