Read Tessa’s recent interview for Interlude.hk discussing all things MIO in our 10th anniversary year. 

http://www.cityam.com/article/1395279438/all-s-well-ends-pharrell

Before they moved to the south bank of the Thames six years ago, staff at the law firm Norton Rose were asked what features they would like in their new headquarters. They plumped for a music room.

Now other law firms, as well as banks and management consultants, are following suit.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/id-like-to-teach-the-office-to-sing-vrzspvfkf32

Listen to Music in Offices founder, Tessa Marchington, talk about the formation of the company, Office Choir of the Year and why everyone should be part of a workplace choir.

Music in Offices are delighted to announce that they have been shortlisted for a prestigious RPS Music Award (Learning and Participation Category).

Presented in association with BBC Radio 3, this year’s RPS Music Awards shortlists, for outstanding achievement in 2011, are drawn from across the UK and feature major international names, the first ever shortlised visual artist, and music from former clay pits to offices, galleries, churches and schools.

The announcements of prizes will take place at The Dorchester hotel in London on May 8th 2012.  The full press release from RPS can be found by clicking here.

Move over book clubs and artisan baking, Stylist investigates the melodious rise of the choir…

For many of us, singing in a group is mostly limited to inebriated karaoke, Girls Aloud concerts (we know you went), or awkward office-based renditions of Happy Birthday. At least that was the case until a new trend started taking over our lives – and lungs.

https://www.stylist.co.uk/life/the-rise-of-the-choir-and-ensemble-singing-groups/53619

Music in offices: sing it loud and proud

Moving into new offices can be a boost to a firm in a lot of different ways.

For Norton Rose, it brought music. At the suggestion of an associate, the firm’s London riverside offices, which it has occupied since 2007, feature a music room complete with piano. In collaboration with Music in Offices (MIO) Norton Rose has been offering subsidised music lessons.
“It’s something we’ve enjoyed doing,” says litigation head Deirdre Walker, who confesses to having just passed Grade 2 in singing. “When we moved here, the people who were interested in music began to emerge.”

But the music lessons also gave rise to something bigger: the Norton Rose choir. With the encouragement of MIO, the ensemble was born in June 2009. Once the choir was up and running, one of the firm’s trainees, Andrew James, took over as conductor.

The first challenge for the ­fledgling choir was MIO’s 2010 Choir of the Year competition. Walker says this became a “real focal point” and word of mouth soon drew around 20 singers to the Norton Rose music room. The group meets every Thursday morning before work, with extra rehearsals on Tuesdays if a ­concert is approaching.
“There’s no hierarchy,” adds Walker. “Basically, it’s can you sing or not? Most of us don’t read music; we do it for fun.”

Trainee Lale Kemal agrees: “I joined the choir in my first seat as a trainee. It has been a great ­experience as it has helped me ­settle into firm life and I’ve got to know people I wouldn’t usually have worked with during my training contract. It’s always something to look forward to in the mornings as everyone is friendly and Andy is an exceptional teacher.” James, who qualified into the tax department last October, says he “kind of fell into” conducting the choir. Having been a music scholar throughout his education, he says singing has always been something he enjoys and he was happy to take over the choir once MIO had got it started.
“It’s conducting in the loosest sense of the word,” he adds. “It’s just me being enthusiastic in front of everyone and trying to bring them together. I try to deflect any feelings of self-consciousness that people may have by being silly myself.”

The choir sings a wide variety of music. Walker says one of the first pieces was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, a set piece for the choral competition. “As somebody who doesn’t read or speak Latin it was a challenge,” she says.

But that piece was followed by the Kaiser Chiefs’ hit I Predict A Riot, which was equally challenging in a different way. “I’d never heard of the Kaiser Chiefs,” admits Walker. “I had to get my son to record it on his iPod.”

James picks the music to ­provide a balanced programme that suits the mixed abilities of the choir. He says getting to grips with the Mozart was particularly ­satisfying, especially when its performance took Norton Rose to second place in the Beginners’ Choir category in the MIO competition.
Walker says the whole firm can be proud of the group and its achievements. Other members agree that singing in the choir has helped them get to know other lawyers and staff that they might not otherwise have met.

As litigation senior associate Jane Park-Weir says: “It’s a time we look forward to every week and it lifts you for the whole day ­afterwards. We don’t profess to be outstanding, but we have a lot of fun and have improved massively.”

In the lead-up to a concert and for fundraising efforts, the choir sings in Norton Rose’s cathedral-like atrium, which has “cracking” acoustics, according to James.
So visitors should not be ­surprised to hear the strains of music wafting upwards, bringing a whole new meaning to the ­concept of a firm in harmony.

Do hard-nosed news hacks have a soul? Certainly, if the combined musical efforts of Channel 4’s Jon Snow and Guardian editor Alan Rus-bridger are anything to go by. Before an invited audience in the splendidly restored Christ Church Spitalfields the other evening, their poignant rendition of two Flanders and Swann favourites, ‘The
Slow Train’ and ‘I’m a Gnu’

brought tears to the Old Un’s jaded eyes. And not just be-cause Snow’s emotive singing never quite managed to keep up with Rusbridger’s effort¬less adding of the ivories.
The occasion was the launch of London’s first ever Office Choir of the Year com-petition, and among the other talents revealed were closet office choristers from the likes of international law firm Norton Rose, Willis Insur¬ance and the Guardian News & Media Group – these last three aptly named “Guardian’s

Angels’. Other star turns included the humorous singing doctors Instant Sunshine (oldies all three) and singer-songwriter Mara Carlyle, whose plaintive voice stunned the audience.
According to co-organisers Tessa Grobel and Jessie Maryon Davies of Music in Offices, there’s a huge enthusiasm for office choirs as a way of boosting staff morale, and they’re convinced the competition will help London sing through the Crunch. The Old Un can’t wait until the grand finale next spring.

I’ve never been a fan of singing, but watching the Debenhams office choir almost converted me. Singing in a choir makes you a better citizen, according to Chorus America, who found that singers have greater civic involvement, discipline and teamwork.

Coming from a musical family, Tessa Marchington realised when she graduated from The Royal Academy of Music that people like her brother who works in a law firm, would benefit from music in the workplace to relieve stress. Since she founded Music in Offices three years ago, she has established eight new choirs in London workplaces, including Goldman Sachs, Great Ormond Street Hospital and Debenhams.

“Singing opens up new channels of communication, people see another side to their colleagues and choirs are great levelers with managers singing alongside their secretaries and IT staff” says Tessa. At the law firm Norton Rose, she has managing partners playing piano duets with young colleagues they wouldn’t usually haw anything to do with.
I went to watch the Debenhams choir practise at their head office. Chiggidy chiggidy. umcha umcha/ they sang to warm up before turning sideways to form three long massage trains for a group shoulder-rubbing exercise. The choir seemed to be made up of three distinct types: young girls (sopranos), middle-aged women (altos), arid camp men in their thirties (tenors, but only just). They were preparing for their Christmas concert: ‘looking a bit vacant but sounding good’ joked their teacher.

Bizarrely they were surrounded by a series of ladies’ outfits- dresses, jackets, scarves, shoes, dressing-gowns and saucy underwear, which had been set out in preparation for a TV advert. Pinned up beside the underwear a sign in large font read, ‘Vignette 6, Sadie comes out of Die bathroom to greet her husband and climbs onto the bed.

This choir, like many others, sprang up last year in time to compete in the Office Choir of the Year competition organised by Tessa, who is only 27 I can imagine it turning into the neat TV reality series.
Rachel Staunton is trying to get the HR team of sopranos to sing louder, but will they be good enough to win the competition?

One of the guiding principles of Music in Offices is that singing makes for happy workers, releasing endorphins, and this was certainly true of the Debenhams workers. They were a sea of smiles, and their conductor Rachel Staunton, who provides light relief after work teaching the choir gospel, religious, and pop songs, had more enthusiasm than a 5 year old

When I spoke to the singers afterwards. Alison, an HR Business Partner, said, “It’s an opportunity to completely switch off. No matter how busy a day, it helps release the tension”. We discussed team bonding and Alison told me in her own HR speak that it ‘gives that cross-functional element.’ A bubbly young girl Kirsty, who works in stock distribu¬tion, said. “I like performing and singing and it’s a nice way to meet new people in the company”. I asked her if she was usually this happy and she said. This is me at the choir. Outside of the choir I’m nothing. Others told me it gives them a buzz and that it has even improved their posture.

Tessa’s next project is to bring individual guitar tuition to the Debenhams workers. She has already set up one-to-one lessons for many of the London offices she works with, either in their premises or in nearby churches, cutting out long journey times.

Few topics divide a workplace as strongly as that of the office choir. It is not a simple two-way split between can and can’t sing, but raises all sorts of issues around self-regard, camaraderie and general wellbeing. On Tuesday night, in the glorious setting of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, four choirs gave a taste of the rewards on offer, at the launch of a new competition to find the Office Choir of the Year. In the age of The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent, choral singing appears to be a bit of anomaly: it doesn’t lead to fame, or record deals or public humiliation. The best choirs unfashionably subsume the individual into the group. Yet, paradoxically, they can also give immense personal satisfaction. The reasons for this are many and varied. There is evidence that singing in groups releases pheromones, creating a buzz that is anecdotally familiar to any lunchtime chorister. Then there is the satisfaction of meeting up with your colleagues for an activity more creative than a gossip over the watercooler. The high drop-out rate among aspiring musicians means that the geek in accounts may well turn out once to have been a choral scholar or lead vocalist in a band. So both socially and physically the benefits are clear, but ultimately singing is a performance art. As anyone who has ever done it will vouch, there is nothing quite so life-affirming, so out-of-the box exhilarating, as knowing that you have hit the top of your form in front of an appreciative audience.