Directing the flow of popular and world musics in community choirs : a learning choral director's perspective

![CDATA[The number of community choirs in Australia has expanded rapidly over the past few decades (Rickwood, 2010). As a result of the "everyone can sing" (Rickwood, 2010, p. 218) philosophy of the a cappella scene from which the community singing movement evolved, many community choirs do not have an audition requirement. These groups have tended to steer away from the Western art music choral tradition and have explored a range of popular styles, both Western and non-Western. The community choir tradition of drawing on repertoire from other cultures has become part of the transnational flow of popular music (Rickwood, 1998). This paper will discuss my experience as a community choir director 'in training', introducing a community choir to two songs - one from the popular music repertoire, and one from world music repertoire. In doing so, the paper outlines my approach and experiences, through practice-led data collection, and discusses these in relation to relevant literature, responding to the question: 'how can I introduce popular and world music repertoire to a community choir?' The paper will begin with definitions of popular music in relation to the community choir, the methodology is outlined, and then my practice-led observation and experience will be combined with relevant literature. Finally, I will respond to the research question.]]