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I have been thinking a lot recently about repertoire choice in terms of an ensemble’s (or for that matter a solo performer’s) relationship with themselves and with their audience. This is in part a response to a point in Blair Brown’s keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, and in part with the way it both resonated and dissonated with a conversation I had just been having with a member of Rainbow Voices. I find myself with two imperatives in play, each valid, but on the face of it in direct opposition to each other.

Blair’s comments on repertoire choice were couched in terms of personal authenticity. She recommended choosing songs with which you feel a personal connection, so that you can sing them honestly. This isn’t just about you and your comfort, however, but about your obligations to your listeners. If they are vouchsafing their attention to you, they deserve a genuine experience of human connection. Don’t put yourself in the position where you have to bullshit your audience, is how she memorably (and indeed quotably) put it.

Just a few days earlier I had been chatting with a member of Rainbow Voices about the eclecticism of our repertoire. This year we are preparing for a concert themed around music from our region, which allows us to build a programme that includes a wide stylistic range – that evening we were learning music by both Felix Mendelssohn* and Ozzy Osbourne. This range is not just about the musical interest of a varied programme (valuable as that is): for a choir that believes in encouraging and supporting diversity, diversity of repertoire signals openness to a wide range of people, whether as members or as audiences.

But by definition, the more varied our music is in style (and thereby in its aesthetics, cultural associations, and established communities of affiliation), the greater the chance that at least some of it will feel foreign to any one individual in the choir or the audience. By choosing diversity, that is, it would seem that we are placing ourselves in a position where we are not always singing from the heart.

Philosophy terms this kind of dilemma a dialectic and helpfully uses it as a means to generate deeper insight. Two true but contradictory statements (thesis and antithesis) force us to think more imaginatively about our truisms and to form a synthesis that allows us to get the benefit of both.

Blair approached the problem of how you can sing music honestly that speaks of things from outside of your direct experience as a process of finding universal truths that underlie both the music’s expression and your own life. Everyone has lived though love, loss, friendship, celebration, adversity, or triumph in their way; finding these basic human experiences within unfamiliar music gives you a route to connect with it.

I have usually thought about this in terms of empathy. One of the points of the arts is that it allows us to vicariously experience the world from others’ viewpoints. They speak of particular human experiences in a particular times and places and invite us to enter into those worlds imaginatively (i.e. both cognitively and emotionally), to walk in the footsteps of others. Sometimes a story or a film or a song reflects our own experience directly back to us, which is a powerful affirmative experience. Other times it gives us a startling insight into the fabric of lives we had no idea about.

The arts, that is, give us a means to experience, and to practice, empathy, the capacity to seek to understand others and see the world from their perspective. When we encounter unfamiliar music as performers, we can choose to say, ‘Oh this isn’t my kind of thing,’ or we can try to find the value in it. Where does it come from? Why was it created? What did it mean to the people who originally wrote it, played or sang it, and listened to it? We may still come to critique its values or commitments when we have lived with it and got inside it, but we’ll be doing so in the context of understanding why those who care about it see in it.

Engaging with repertoire beyond our own experience thus does two things. First, it acts on us as performers, challenging us to extend ourselves imaginatively to embrace multiple viewpoints. It thereby develops our capacity for compassion. It also signals to others that we are willing to extend ourselves in this way. There is the potential direct benefit that the wider the diversity of repertoire we share, the greater chance that any one piece will give somebody in the ensemble or the audience that experience of direct connection: yes, this speaks of and to me.

But beyond this is the message that we are willing to make the effort to understand others, that we don’t require uniformity of feeling or personal style or belief system to validate people. We can have a community of value without enforcing a rigid conformity.

I’m undecided whether Blair and I are saying basically the same thing in different words; there’s certainly a clear sense of common ground. I think the difference is that her framing places the performer and their quest for authenticity at the centre, whereas my framing centres the other and our process of extending our understanding to them. And by reaching out to others, we can help them feel like they are fundamentally welcome as one of us.

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Obvs Mendelssohn himself isn’t from the West Midlands of the UK, but we are singing a chorus from Elijah which was commissioned by the Birmingham Festival Choral Society and premiered in our Town Hall.