Introduction

Here is the Crescendo Music Education Podcast – Episode 99. In this episode I speak to Ruth McCall. Now Ruth McCall musician, singer, composer, amazing person.
I can’t wait to talk to her about other things. But in this episode we’re talking about SingScore, singscore.com.au, an amazing website that she started where you can purchase Australian choral music. We find out how it started and talk about some of the composers and the things within it. It is wonderful. It’s a great episode. And if you have not yet checked out singscore.com.au do so now, you will find some amazing repertoire. And if you are overseas listening to this, if you are not Australian, you get in there and have a listen to some of the beautiful colours of our Australian choral compositions. SingScore with Ruth McCall. Enjoy.

This podcast is being recorded on the lands of the Turrbal people. I acknowledge them as the traditional owners of the land and pay my respects to elder’s past, present and emerging. They were the first music makers on this land.

About ‘Read the Episode’: Sometimes, we would rather skim visually than listen to a podcast! That’s a great way to learn too!
The transcript of episode 099 of The Crescendo Music Education Podcast is below.

Accompaniment in Children’s Choirs

Debbie O’Shea
Hello and welcome to the Crescendo Music Education Podcast. Today I have a very special guest from down south Ruth McCall. Hello, Ruth.

Ruth McCall
Hello, everybody. Good morning or whenever the time is.

Debbie O’Shea
Whenever it’s aired, who knows and whenever people are listening. I’m going to start by reading your brief bio. And then we’re going to talk about, this whole episode is going to be about SingScore. And if you don’t know about SingScore prepare to have your life changed.

Ruth McCall’s Bio

Debbie O’Shea
Alright. So bio first, Ruth McCall graduated with first class honours in voice from the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide where she also completed an Associate Diploma in Piano Performance. She joined The Song Company in 1996, as first soprano until 2010. Hey, that’s a bit of a long run, Ruth. Wow.

Ruth McCall
It was 14 years or so? Yeah.

Debbie O’Shea
Within that role she toured over 17 countries, including those in Europe, China, the US and Asia. Ruth has performed in all the major classical arts festivals in Australia, as well as collaborating with performing artists of other disciplines. Through The Song Company she has featured in many recordings, ABC broadcasts and music theater productions. Ruth has performed in hundreds of concerts for primary school children with Music Aviva in schools. She has been involved with the Sydney Children’s Choir, where she was composer in residence in 2011. Ruth currently composes, teaches piano and voice and works as an accompanist. In 2018 Ruth launched publishing website SingScore which sells downloadable choral sheet music exclusively by Australian composers. And
that’s what’s exciting.

There is so much from your bio Ruth that I want to talk about, but we’re gonna park that I’m gonna get you back. And I want to hear about we’ve sort of moved in the music world
together, but in different spaces. So I just want to hear all about what you’ve done. And I know that my listeners will as well. But we’re going to park that. Let’s just park that over there. And let’s talk about SingScore.

The Origin of SingScore

Debbie O’Shea
It says on the website, find the perfect score for you, your school or your choir, SingScore gives the world access to our amazing Australian composers. This excites me because I’ll just share my little thoughts on Australian composers. I think we’re a little bit unique. We have a different flavour. I think we’re storytellers. I just love Australian composers and I think we should be promoting them all over the world. So those people who are listening from the US, England, wherever you are in the world, you should check out SingScore. But tell us, Ruth- I will shut up now for a little while. How did it all come about?

Ruth McCall
Well, I think you’re right, Debbie. I think there’s a lot going on in the Australian music scene. So it’s kind of a rich scene and it also seems to be an interconnected scene so I can be aware of you in your state and there’s connections between people who are composers and conductors and teachers particularly across eastern states where there are relationships between these people. So we’re quite connected, Australia is kind of small.

There are people who are multidisciplinary in their music making, they might be conductors and composers and play an instrument and teach on the side. So people are not necessarily boxed into just being a composer. And that’s where I find SingScore can be good for representing composers who might just have four good songs, but they haven’t made a whole career out of it. They’ve just found that as they’ve been in choirs, and as they’ve developed in confidence, they’ve finally decided, Well, why don’t I write a song? Because they have a lot of experience in music, or maybe a lot of experience in choirs and singing, they know what will be good for the voice. So those sort of people are maybe getting missed out if they aren’t a full time composer who might get picked up by a large publishing house and be locked into a deal with them or something. So I’m really interested in finding good songs regardless of where they come from, whether the person is a full time composer or not.

One of your questions you’ve asked me in the past was about how it came about, I’d resigned from The Song Company because I had a baby and it was time to stop and do other things. And I’d been doing that for a while. And there’s a lot of really great music in that scene. And some of it was just written just for The Song Company, lots of commissions, several commissions a year of varying difficulties. And this music is just written on different types of paper in different formats, different fonts, and handwritten sometimes even, there’s even one that was on printed on tissue paper, where you had to tear it up, every time you got to the end of a page, you tear it up or blow your nose on it or let it go to the ground or shove it in your clothing. So this music would be literally destroyed. Every performance.

Debbie O’Shea
That was part of the performance?

Ruth McCall
Yeah, it was great. It was about tears and you had all these tissues falling to the ground. These scores were all, I don’t know where you’d find them. I mean you might find some on the Australian Music
Center website if the composer had logged them but they’re also kind of one off wonders that might disappear. I realised I knew quite a few of these composers personally, because we’d met and worked with them over several years and they were really nice people. And then I started working for Sydney Children’s Choir, doing different things with them and I realised there’s another whole realm of
commissioned music and interesting music by young, maybe younger composers going on there. And sometimes people would come up to me afterwards, parents would say, Oh, I really liked that song,
where can I buy that song for my school? Or my choir? Or where can I buy that song so we can sing it at home? And I wouldn’t know the answer to that. And composers were often busy, because they’re
doing other things as well, they’re not making a full time career of their own compositions. Like composing doesn’t necessarily make that much money unless you are really good and doing it all the
time and getting big commissions and things. Otherwise, it’s not really enough to live on or anything like that.

Debbie O’Shea
I think it’s very hard to make a living as a composer in Australia.

Ruth McCall
I think so yes, yeah. But I’m interested in the wealth of information and experience that people have when they’re not full time composers, they still have a lot to offer. And I found myself sort of smack
bang in the middle of these two groups. And I thought, Oh, gee, I know a lot of the younger repertoire and the more advanced repertoire in the scene, I didn’t know a lot. And I still don’t know a lot about the community choir level. And I do find that community choirs are often singing gospel type of American songs and popular songs.

And sometimes people don’t read music as much. So I’m not as kind of across that middle section. But I did know a lot about great children’s writing and more advanced things. And I thought, I need to publish my own music too. So that’s where SingScore started as a place where hopefully people can have a great shop that’s easy to use, and they can get their music.

Debbie O’Shea
That’s a great mission, really, to keep this music alive and to have somewhere where people who are part time composers can sell their music or have their music discovered.

Ruth McCall
Yeah. A lot of people just want, they just would love some people to sing their pieces. The financial rewards aren’t always huge, but they’re just really happy to find that schools are out there singing their pieces, or this choir is going to take their song overseas for a competition or something like that.

Debbie O’Shea
Yeah, amazing. So how is the site structured? First of all we should just quickly tell people the web
address is singscore.com.au. All right. So yes, how is it structured?

SingScore’s Structure

Ruth McCall
Well, my aim was and I guess this was five years ago and I was thinking about it a bit before that, but at the time it wasn’t as easy to see the score if you wanted to buy it. So you might see the first page might be watermarked. Now there’s better technology where people can even play as you as you flip across. And it’s better now than it used to be. But at the time, you just couldn’t know how long a piece was going to be. What the poem was, how hard it would get in the middle, because the first page is not the most sparse, first and last pages are the least musing on them. And it’s just the Altos coming in.

In the third system after the piano’s done an introduction like this doesn’t tell you much about how hard it’s going to get. And if there’s divisies they’ll happen later. So I wanted a person to see the whole score, to see the poem on the first page. So they can just read through the poem, make sure it says what they want it to say. And to hear some sort of demo, hopefully a live one, or if not a midi track or something just to know that within three and a half minutes they know all they need to know about the whole score. So that’s what I really was aiming for. And you can search by composer in our composers list, or you can search by theme or by part. But basically, we have categories of sacred and young children and advanced children.

Debbie O’Shea
Yes, and it’s so important because it was so difficult to choose music, when like you said, you just got the first page or a watermarked two pages you’d go; It’s not enough, I need to know.

Getting Music The Right Way

Ruth McCall
Yeah, so I’m thinking just like with streaming services, we used to all kind of find ways to try and tape things on our VCRs or people would try and find ways to illegally downloading things and watch things with streaming services they’ve have made it a lot easier to do the right thing. So it’s a lot easier just to pay your subscription to your favourite channel and watch all the movies you want. And by making things easily available and not too expensive, it means that people are more likely to do the right thing.

It’s always been an issue with music of people illegally photocopying music. And when the music’s very expensive and you have to send away to Europe to get your $60, which was a lot of money in my day, $60 to buy your Schubert songs. You were precious about that. And you had to save a lot to buy it. So I think nowadays things are easier. They’re easier, more convenient, a bit cheaper to get just the songs you want not a whole book necessarily. And that’s the aim to make things easier.

Most people I think do the right thing. They want to buy music for their school and they’ve got a budget for it, or they’ve got a
budget for their choir. And they’re happy to pay for Australian content.

Debbie O’Shea
Yes, absolutely. And we want to do the right thing. And we want to support the composers and the publishers. But it does have to be affordable. So this is perfect. And it looks like it’s quite big. Like I hadn’t popped into SingScore for a long time because we have a professional conductor at my school because I’m really lucky. And it’s gorgeous Kath Ruhle, who’s been on the podcast, so I don’t often now go searching for choral music because I don’t have the need at the moment. And it just looks like it’s much bigger than last time I looked in. What’s the size now?

Ruth McCall
There’s several hundred, 300 products you could buy. Some of them are backing tracks. I’ve also had a few new composers join us. We’ve got Abigail Lui who’s probably the youngest composer, she’s in her 20s she’s from Queensland. Just joining me really recently is Lachlan Massey, who is a very talented young man, who also was involved in Sydney Children’s Choir and is now working with Sydney Children’s Choir as well. And he’s been writing, he’s one of those people that’s been singing a long time since he was a child, playing the piano since he was a child and now suddenly thinks, well, maybe I could write songs as well. He’s got a really enthusiastic kind of fabulous kind of flavour to his pieces.

I’ve got Katy Abbott, just recently we’ve got some of her songs. I’ve got Lachlan Skipworth coming on board too. So there’s a whole bunch coming on who present different aspects of Australian writing. And so I just sort of plod along and people sometimes approach me now rather than me begging them. So that’s good. They realise that they’re probably not going to get around to selling their scores in the same way that maybe you’d hope to because life does get in the way and they need somebody else to help distribute their pieces.

Differences In Music Around The Globe

Debbie O’Shea
They’re all people I haven’t heard of. So that’s amazing that they can use your platform and have their songs sung all over, hopefully all over the world. Do you get many people purchase from overseas?

Ruth McCall
Some are from Asia but mostly from Australia? So of course I’m really interested in the American market because they take their singing so seriously. Like they love, they’re really committed and really
excellent. All the colleges have great music, choirs and of a high professional level. So really they take their singing seriously in a way that perhaps Australian education systems don’t necessarily.

Well we’ve got a way to go, the excellence there and that the writing there and the creativity, I agree with you that the Australian sound is different. Not that every song is the same but there is a freshness about the quality and the landscape does influence us. And the desire to be kind of spiky and humorous and to create sound worlds is part of what I notice coming through in people’s music.

Debbie O’Shea
Oh, that was a great description. Yeah, that is what we’re like. I do think a lot of the American composers who, of course I love, and there’s so many more of them. And as you said their whole school system, when they’re in high school you’re either in choir or band, they don’t tend to have classroom music the way that we do at some of our high schools. So choir is a lot bigger and there tends to be more of, I don’t want to get in trouble. But there’s almost a formulaic element to some of the popular American choral works. There is a modulation on the second last page.

Ruth McCall
Yeah, yep.

Debbie O’Shea
Whereas I don’t find anything formulaic about the way Australian people write.

Ruth McCall
Yes, that’s right. And I want to keep it away from that, as well. Because if somebody wants to get a song for their choir that isn’t a pop song arranged by an American composer, they can find that somewhere else. And they can find that quite easily.

Debbie O’Shea
Easily, J.W. Pepper. Get on J.W. Pepper and order. Yep, done.

Ruth McCall
There are some arrangements on SingScore as well as original compositions. But I’m trying to, and I’m probably inconsistent with this, but I try and make sure if there’s an arrangement on the site, that it says something different about the music, it’s a reinterpretation by the composer, or it has enough of the composer in it, that makes it an arrangement. That’s my aim. So I don’t want just a folk song arranged for three parts with some piano and flute.

I want original content or else an arrangement that really reinvents that folk song or that tune, because that’s not something that we, there’s something we need, I guess we need originality, and songs with enough of Australia in it that you can send it overseas, you can do it in an overseas competition, or you can do it for an Australia Day thing, or that really represents us.

Debbie O’Shea
Yes. I love that. And the patriotic part of me goes, Yes! Because we have such amazing talent here. And I love, love, love our choral music. So tell me, sorry us, sorry. Sorry, listeners. It’s all about me. I’m learning here. No tell our listeners, some of your other fabulous composers, like hearing about those new young ones. That’s exciting. Get in there and have a listen, everyone. But tell us about some more of your favourites.

Ruth’s Favorite Songs

Ruth McCall
Favourites. Yeah, well, there are some songs that have been around for a while, but just do really well. I’m thinking of things like Benjamin van Tienen’s Some Days, which is quite well known in the choral community. But it’s a song that children can sing. It’s really basically about being in a train. And when you’re in a train, the movement of the train sort of takes your troubles away from you. And I’ve seen young children who are about 10 or 11 sing this song, but with such heart and they’ve never worked a desk job in their life, but when they talk about being on the train or the train taking the their workday cares away they mean it as well. And so there are a couple of songs which because adults and children can sing it which is quite rare in a way that a song fits both categories.

That one is sort of a great piece, a simple tune, great piano part. Annie Kwok’s songs always do really well. She writes a lot. Her songs are very emotive, they’re about the identity of the singer. They’re quite emotional words as well. They’re about finding yourself or having a place where you belong or where you exist, I’m thinking of something like Migaloo, which is the name for the humpback, the albino humpback whale, that used to visit the coast of Australia every year or so for quite a long time. And how you could look quite different, but that differentness is not necessarily a bad thing, because everyone’s looking out for this whale, even though it’s so different to the rest of the other whales. So she has all lot of stuff which kids sort of like long, massive long lyric lines with a lot of piano things underneath.

I mean, my version of Waltzing Matilda is really a fun song because it represents a whole bunch of different types of Australian and Australiana, I guess, packed into the song, but I’m excited. Hopefully we get Katy Abbott’s Words of Wisdom, which has some Leunig texts and other things. Joseph Twist’s just released his Australian Song Cycle, which has some Banjo Patterson texts, Leunig texts, Les Murray. So a whole bunch of writers, even his own father, Joseph Twist’s father, contributes to the final song about a bushfire. So again, we’re getting very distinctive Australian texts through that as well.

SingScore’s Popular Choices

Debbie O’Shea
Wow there’s so much to check out. I’ve just opened it over here on my screen. And you’ve got some little banners over some of it saying popular choice. So you pop them on if they’ve sold a lot? I’m
assuming?

Ruth McCall
Basically, yes, I think that maybe some people might just not want to have to trawl through everything. And they might just want to say are there some songs that everybody tends to like, and maybe I can narrow my search down, I’m aware, I may have to work harder on narrowing the search down for people as the site gets bigger, but I’m also very happy if someone wants to email me and say, I’ve got a choir of this particular capacity. Is there anything new you’d recommend on this theme, or with these instruments? I tend to mainly have things with small amounts of instruments like piano or a couple of other instruments?

I’m not really selling pieces with orchestration, because no one buys them. And if they do buy them, they can buy them from the composer themselves. So I’m looking for pieces that people want to put on with a few people accompanying them. Yes.

Debbie O’Shea
And honestly, as a choral person, it’s what you’re looking for most of the time, the voice is XXXXX.

Ruth McCall
Yes.

Debbie O’Shea
We can add a little bit of tone colour. I mean we love our components, of course, a little bit of tone colour, like that’s the way I look at it, maybe a piece will have a little something added that contributes
to the feel of the piece. But apart from that little bit of tone colour, we’re looking here, because we work with voices, so that’s what we want. And you’ve got to control the octopus. Don’t let it keep going all those directions.

Talking Accompanists

Ruth McCall
Although I must say that some of my composers are really, really good piano players and that’s the problem. So Ben van Tienen, Joseph Twist, Annie Kwok, Matthew Minter’s got a great piano playing
wife. So actually, some of them are really hard to play. You need a great pianist, if you’re gonna do a reasonably difficult song, you need a great pianist for some of this stuff. Yes.

Debbie O’Shea
And that’s a problem. A lot of my audience are primary school music teachers with a budget of I don’t know, zero to $400 a year. I mean, I’ve actually worked in a school where I said, What’s my budget? And they went, well, there isn’t one. If there’s something you need urgently, talk to me. That was it.

Yeah, that’s reality of working in state schools. So you know, we can’t say, oh, my accompanist can play this. I mean, you can’t afford an accompanist, you’ve got to beg to get an accompanist for a competition, then beg again, to have the accompanist come and play with you for one rehearsal before the competition. Like that’s the reality for many of the people I work with. I happen to be in a privileged position with magnificent accompanists that are paid. Every rehearsal we have a professional accompanist at our school and I’m just in a government school, but we are a school that values music and what we do, but that’s honestly not the norm.

Or you might get a parent that volunteers which can be even worse. Can I say shout out to the beautiful accompanists out there. We love you. Because honestly, if you get a “bad accompanist” or if you get someone with some piano skills, who has no accompanying skills, working with you and your choir. In my opinion, it’s not worth it. You just rehearse unaccompanied.

Ruth McCall
You’re in a lot of trouble then aren’t you.

Debbie O’Shea
Yeah you are. And that’s what our reality is like. So, I love like you said the Annie Kwok pieces and Annie is the most beautiful person isn’t she, Hi Annie, we love you. But you can’t always have those accompanists at your fingertips. That’s a little bit of a problem.

Ruth McCall
If the song is straightforward enough, there’s quite often backing tracks on the site, piano backing tracks or live backing tracks. So that can help certainly with the younger kids, we don’t do backing tracks for the pieces that are more difficult because you probably do you need that interaction between an accompanist in live time to tell you how long the pauses are going to be or how fast it’s going to be. But a lot of the simple songs have backing tracks, which are not that expensive. They’re six and a half dollars. And that’ll do, it means we have something to play and pop on for assemblies and that kind of thing.

Debbie O’Shea
Really in real life that’s what we need. So that’s amazing. The backing track is a production of that composer’s notes on a page, aren’t they. So it’s certainly better than nothing. If I was at a school with my zero budget, I would be happy to buy that track myself, to work with my kids, and then beg for a real accompanist for a competition. But at least we know what it’s like, because we’ve rehearsed with the backing track. So I think it provides a solution for those people who don’t have the budget. So that’s amazing.

What else? I was going to ask you about your favourite composers but you’ve sort of covered that when you talked about your favourite pieces and composers all at once. What would be the most purchased works do you think? And then just any other messages you’ve got, and we’ll link to the website in the show notes?

Ruth McCall
Sure. Well, I think that there are pieces that people want to do for competitions. So a competition piece has to be quite showy, and quite difficult to do. So you would try and practice it for quite a while. So I say that my most purchased compositions would be the middle to easy primary school ones, the ones for two parts, or one part, that’s the most copies sold. But the most investment would be the high schools that have the capacity to sing in three or more parts, and you want to go for more challenging pieces. So I think that there’s two groups, there’s a committed high school, which may or may not be a private school, often it is a private school, who wants to do difficult repertoire and is seeking out the Australian content. And then primary school teachers who are really keen on just getting a lot of songs through, getting good quality songs out through their children.

The thing that SingScore hasn’t done so well on is the really advanced repertoire. Because when something’s been written for a group like The Song Company, there aren’t many other groups out there who are six part and who could potentially do it. But there are a whole bunch of new choirs coming onto the scene, who are very good. Small groups and chamber groups that actually do have that capacity to sing difficult music. I’ve noticed a big surge in the semi professional level choir, certainly from my contacts that I’ve had, I’ve thought, Wow that’s a good choir. There are great pieces by people like Andrew Schultz, really kind of epic works and Raffaele Marcellino, who has really fine kind of details.

And I’d love to see some of these pieces get back into the Australian repertoire because they are harder and they do require six parts and they do require a bit of extra work. The colour ranges though, of those types of pieces are worth it. So even though the more advanced songs don’t sell so well, because there aren’t that many groups, I’d really love to see people getting their teeth stuck into some challenging six part acapella Australian repertoire.

Debbie O’Shea
That sounds amazing.

Ruth McCall
That’s my challenge.

Debbie O’Shea
Yeah. And maybe that’s where you could really expand using overseas groups, some of the really advanced choirs in other places. So we need to get SingScore known about our news overseas as well.

Ruth McCall
Indeed.

Debbie O’Shea
We’ll do that. Let’s hope I can help you do that. That would be so cool.

Saying Goodbye to Ruth McCall

Ruth McCall
Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to you. I really appreciate it.

Debbie O’Shea
Look it has been amazing. And I did mean it when I said we’ll do another podcast and we can talk about all sorts of things from in your bio and connections, that would be so good. But for now, the call to action for everyone is to get onto singscore.com.au. Of course we’ll put the link in the show notes too. And to get in there and have a look and just thank you so much for telling us all about how it came about and thank you for supporting and promoting Australian composers Ruth.

Ruth McCall
You’re very welcome. Feel free to any of your listeners if they want to ask me for some suggestions to narrow it down, because it can be a bit overwhelming looking through hundreds of pieces, you don’t have much time. If you want me to help narrow it down and recommend my top five for your age group or your choir or your theme, then I’m very happy to do that as well.

Debbie O’Shea
Okay so how do they contact you? Just through the website?

Ruth McCall
Through the website or it’s ruth@singscore.com.au.

Debbie O’Shea
Wonderful, well expect a flurry of emails and purchases and support for our great Australian composers, including you.

Ruth McCall
Yes, I really, really appreciate that. I really like the connections that people have in this industry and the relationships that they have. It’s a strong community.

Debbie O’Shea
It really is and I love it. I love every bit of it. So thank you, Ruth. Until next time, I’ll say bye.

Ruth McCall
Bye then.

Debbie O’Shea
Thank you for joining me for this podcast. Don’t forget that you’ll find the show notes on crescendo.com.au/99. Also, you can find the transcripts there. So you’ve got all of the detail that you
need. If you’ve found this podcast useful I’d really love it if you share the link with a colleague. Remember all I can be is the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. We’ll meet again. I hope we will. Bye.

Sign-Off

I appreciate you and all of my colleagues, and hope this episode has been enjoyable and useful. Don’t forget, you’ll find the show notes on crescendo.com.au. I’d love a share, rate or review to help other music educators find this podcast. All I can be as the best version of me. All you can do is be the best you. Until next time, bye.

Just for Laughs

As we know, laughter relieves stress, don’t lose sight of the funny side of life.

I was going to make myself a belt out of old watches.

But then I realised it would just be a waist of time.

Links Mentioned in the Episode:

📕 Books 

• SingScore by Ruth McCall

🎙️ Episode 99: Choral Series: A Guide to Selecting Music for School Choirs

Where to find me:

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