‘We want people to get in a room and sing’: Paul Smith on the wider world of VOCES8

When Paul Smith and his brother Barnaby travelled to Gorizia in northern Italy with a group of friends in 2005, there was no grand plan.

They had sung together on holidays, sometimes raising money for charity, sometimes simply for fun. An invitation to the festival led them to enter a pop and jazz competition as an eight-voice group. They called themselves VOCES8, went on stage – and won.

Another competition victory followed the next year. By then, Smith had made a rather bigger decision.

‘I quit my job and decided that we would actually build this into something – like a charity and a business – and try to grow,’ he recalls.

He and Barnaby moved back in with their parents and, as Smith puts it, ‘put all the chips in’.

Twenty-one years later, VOCES8 is only one part of the organisation that has grown around those original eight singers.

Alongside the ensemble itself are Apollo5 and the US-based upper-voice group Lyyra; the VOCES8 Scholars and VOCES8 Scholars Ensemble; a VOCES8 Foundation Choir and Orchestra, extensive community and education programmes; VOCES8 Records, Publishing and Studios; the VOCES8 Centre in the City of London; and charitable organisations operating in the UK, US and France.

On any given day, different parts of the organisation may be working simultaneously in several countries.

‘While I talk to you today, VOCES8 are in London at the VOCES8 Centre launching the new VOCES8 Scholars programme,’ Smith says. ‘Our VOCES8 Scholars Ensemble is performing tonight at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. I’m here in France having meetings with our French team, setting up 15 or 20 different projects this year. Apollo5 is on the way to Guernsey, and Lyyra is about to leave the US for its European tour.

‘We’ve got moving parts all over the place.’

‘We put all the chips in’

That scale was not planned from the outset. The organisation grew gradually, with each new strand emerging from what had come before.

Members of Apollo5 (l to r): Augustus Perkins Ray, Penelope Appleyard, Thomas Mottershead, Lily Robson ad Joseph Taylor

Apollo5 arrived around five or six years after VOCES8. The VOCES8 Centre followed, along with the record label, the Scholars programme and the US foundation. During the pandemic, Sing’In developed from education work that had already been taking place in France for years.

At various points, Smith says, the challenge has simply been to work out how the ‘mini-universe’ they were creating fitted together.

The purpose, though, has remained fairly consistent.

‘It’s ultimately about choral music and bringing people into a live space to experience choral music, whether that’s a workshop or a concert.

‘Published music, our record label, digital activity – it all feeds into that simple idea that we want people to get in a room and sing together because we believe it’s a good thing.’

Apollo5 emerged partly because VOCES8 had reached the practical limits of its own schedule. Once one area is working at capacity, Smith says, the question becomes what the organisation can build next.

Lyyra came from a different sort of gap.

Looking at the professional vocal scene in the US, Smith and the team felt that women had fewer opportunities to build careers in full-time professional groups.

‘There are professional groups that are full-time if you’re a guy, whatever voice part you sing,’ he says, ‘but not in the same way if you’re a female singer. We created Lyyra specifically to address what we perceived to be a problem in the US.’

Now in its third year, Lyyra has around 50 to 60 concerts scheduled across the US and internationally.

‘The sound they make is incredible,’ Smith says. ‘It’s a sound VOCES8 would never have made with singers who have grown up immersed in a different environment.

‘We’ve created this beautiful thing that sits within the universe of our global foundation but at the same time is unique to them.

‘And we’re getting feedback that it isn’t just a group singing well – it’s inspiring the next generation of singers.’

Members of Lyyra

Smith is realistic about how long such developments take.

He reckons a new project needs at least three or four years simply ‘to get its feet under the table’. VOCES8 itself, he says, did not achieve what he would regard as real success for more like a decade.

‘That grey area is so hard to navigate’

There is another difficult stage that Smith thinks is less often discussed: the gap between a genuinely freelance ensemble and something capable of supporting its singers on a much more substantial basis.

‘There’s a moment when you’re a freelancer and you’ve got five or ten concerts a year,’ he explains. ‘The singers are building portfolio careers and working with other organisations, and there’s a relatively simple freelance structure.

‘But there’s always this area in the middle between freelancer and full-time employee. That grey area is so hard to navigate.’

At 50 or 60 engagements a year, an ensemble may already be dominating a singer’s diary without yet providing enough work to constitute a full-time living.

‘How do you manage that for the singers and for the organisation? That’s where your management team has to work hard with the singers, I think, because every singer is at a different stage of life, living in a different place, with different needs and different responsibilities.

‘That human element is one of the things we have to focus on most.’

VOCES8 at the VOCES8 Centre in London

Recruitment to VOCES8 is international.

‘Anyone can apply, and if they’re the best, they get the job.’

That brings complications around visas and employment, but Smith is particularly pleased when a singer’s relationship with the Foundation continues after their time as a performing member.

Former VOCES8 singers have moved into management, education and other roles. Blake Morgan, one of their current tenors, for example, is moving from regular membership of the ensemble into an ambassadorial role.

‘For me, it’s always a hallmark that we’ve done something right if, when someone wants to step out of the group, there’s still a way to keep them connected with the wider work that we do.

‘It’s really a lovely community.’

Across its three foundations, Smith says, the organisation is delivering more than 600 concerts and workshops this year, with turnover around three times what VOCES8 alone would generate.

He describes the whole thing as something that needs constant attention rather than something that ever becomes ‘finished’.

‘It isn’t driven by any one thing. That’s the beauty of it. It’s all in balance. It’s like an ecosystem which we’re carefully nudging and noodling with to keep it working successfully – we are always adapting to the changing environment around us.

‘And it takes a great amount of care.’

Smith increasingly acts as a link between the UK, French and US operations – ‘I’m in France today, London tomorrow and America next week’ – while the management structure has grown around him.

A new COO joined the UK team last year, adding more administrative capacity.

Even then, Smith is candid about the realities of running something increasingly complicated.

‘There are always lots of spinning plates, and inevitably there are odd plates that very nearly fall over and then we have to rescue them. We are not a perfect organisation – I don’t think anyone is. We’re a constantly evolving one, working at top speed and always trying to communicate with each other as best we can.’

‘We choral musicians have a habit of taking ourselves quite seriously’

Smith cares passionately about who VOCES8 reaches.

He readily acknowledges that the traditional audience for choral music tends to skew older, but the picture changes once live audiences, education work and digital platforms are looked at together.

Over 21 years, he says, the Foundation has worked face-to-face with more than half a million people. Online, individual pieces of content can reach millions.

‘If you pick the demographics we hit on Instagram and compare that to Facebook and compare that to YouTube, they’re all different.

‘For us, that’s the game: to keep raising awareness in real life, but also in all the digital spaces, to make sure ultimately that choral music does not die.’

The issue is personal for him.

Smith and his brother were choristers at Westminster Abbey and says the experience gave him access to an education his family could never otherwise have afforded.

He worries that the existence of similar opportunities are not being communicated effectively enough today.

‘I look at the fact that chorister numbers are dwindling and I think there’s a message that is not being delivered well enough.

‘These scholarships still exist. The opportunity is still there. It’s a life-changing opportunity.’

His answer is not simply more publicity. It is also about how choral organisations present themselves.

‘We choral musicians have a habit of taking ourselves quite seriously,’ he says. ‘We make this very high art, and it’s very beautiful. Great.

‘But that can create a way of communicating which is not as open as it could be. Choral singing should be about openness, truth and honesty, and meeting people at their leve. Everyone should be able to walk into a room, be themselves and make noise.’

He argues that while some choral institutions do great work, there will always be space for more sustained engagement in local communities and schools.

‘Get in there and have fun. People have fun when they sing; they’ll want to do it. You don’t have to lecture them into doing it.’

One of the stories that has stayed with him came from a French singing project in a small village more than a decade ago.

Smith recently met one of the young people who had taken part. She had just graduated from university after training to become a professional singer.

‘These little stories are the ones that keep me going,’ he says. ‘You get into a space, and you have fun singing, and that inspires other people to want to do it too – perhaps even as a career.’

‘We probably need more than one camera’

Over the years, VOCES8 has also brought much of its production infrastructure in-house, and Smith’s brother, Barnaby, takes a lead on much of their production work.

There is the VOCES8 Centre, its recording and video facilities, publishing, a record label and the capacity to release work directly.

That does not mean everything is done internally though.

‘We’ve tried to create whatever we need to be able to do,’ Smith says. ‘We often collaborate with outside partners to help us.’

Recordings may be released with partners including Decca and Universal, while VOCES8 also runs its own release schedule. Its label is also increasingly working with artists beyond the Foundation’s own ensembles.

Publishing follows a similar pattern: alongside VOCES8 Publishing, the organisation also works with external publishers.

Then came the pandemic.

Like almost every performing organisation (and the rest of the wider world!), VOCES8 was unprepared.

Smith nevertheless regards the response as one of the periods of which he is proudest.

The ensemble immediately began broadcasting online from home, with singers leading informal sessions for an audience that quickly developed around them.

LIVE From London followed created by Paul and Barnaby with Robin Tyson their general manager and Libby Percival, who runs her own artist agency called Percius.

The virtual festival was built around a revenue-sharing model in which participating artists received an equal share of the money generated.

Smith estimates that around a quarter of a million tickets were sold across the project.

Some participants, he says, received the largest fees of their careers – it was a remarkable moment of light in the darkest of times.

VOCES8 had one important advantage. The team had already spent years developing recording, filming and production skills and had the VOCES8 Centre available as a base.

Even then, nobody initially understood the scale of what was coming.

‘We announced LIVE From London thinking we would put a camera up and sing to it,’ Smith recalls. ‘Then suddenly we sold about 2,000 tickets and thought: oh God, we probably need more than one camera.’

Years later, people still approach the group to say that they discovered VOCES8 during lockdown.

‘They say, “You saved our lives.”

‘And I say, “Actually, you saved our lives.” That’s the beauty of what happened. We all saved each other.’

The same willingness to take more steps in this self promotion direction is now beginning to influence the live model.

VOCES8 is increasingly examining whether it should self-promote performances in major venues rather than the more traditional artist fee model.

Their 20th anniversary concert at London’s Barbican offered one example.

‘We hired it, our team ran it and we sold it out,’ Smith says. ‘Obviously this was a more successful financial model for us and gave us scope to design the whole experience for our audience ourselves – we hosted a come and sing moment for people and engaged with the public in a truly immersive and interactive environment during the day’.

These sort of events would means carrying more risk, but it also allows the organisation to retain more of the value generated by its own audience and sculpt an experience for their community which feels totally authentic.

Smith says that he is working with the team to see how the model could work in parts of Europe, North America and Asia.

‘We’re slowly planting seeds’

Asia is a part of the world that the group has been slower to return to since the pandemic.

After time spent in Asia over the past couple of years, Smith says that VOCES8 will be on tour in Hong Kong, South Korea and Jakarta in November, while Smith has also been developing relationships in Malaysia, China and elsewhere in the region.

Before 2020, VOCES8 had been travelling regularly to Japan. That activity was disrupted when its Japanese agency went out of business during the pandemic, and the market has only gradually reopened.

The Foundation is now exploring whether a more permanent Asian operation might eventually follow its existing UK, US and French structures.

‘We’re slowly planting seeds,’ he says, ‘and looking at how we might grow something more significant over the next five years or so.

‘There’s such enthusiasm for the music we make out there. Working out how we can connect into that and become part of that choral family is something I’m really focused on.’

The wider organisational model continues to evolve too.

VOCES8 operates commercially in some senses: it sells concerts and recordings, publishes music, creates digital products and is increasingly willing to take direct financial risk on performances.

At the same time, the Foundation exists for charitable purposes.

Smith says the balance is something the organisation revisits regularly.

‘I’m so fortunate that we have a wonderful team of trustees and advisors around us. There are always going to be natural tensions to work through in this sort of sphere and to have guidance and support is essential for our executive team. The discussion around where we sit as a commercial entity and where we sit as a charitable one – and how that is balanced – is nuanced. We look at it every year.’

A purely commercial VOCES8 would still be a highly successful single performing group, he believes.

‘Perhaps it’s the difference between profit and turnover – VOCES8 by itself as an ensemble could probably make more profit each year than our charity does, but it would not have anything like the global impact that we are able to achieve. We are focused on building something bigger, and something that will last beyond us all.

‘We work much harder, all of us across the team, to generate a much bigger pot of funds that we can then invest into having the biggest possible positive impact on the world around us.  And with that pot we can do so much more than if we just had eight singers going about their daily business and singing concerts.’

It is a long way from eight friends entering a competition in Italy.

But Smith’s description of what the Foundation is trying to achieve is still disarmingly simple.

‘You get into a space and you have fun singing,’ he says. ‘That inspires other people to want to do it too.

‘Some of those people will go all the way and make it their life's passion.

‘That’s the game.’