Login

Enter your username and password

Forgotten your username or password?

Your Shopping Cart

There are no items in your shopping cart.

25 February 2025

Hester Wright: Championing Country Choirs


Hester Wright Image: Hester Wright  

A trio of kookaburras sit on Hester Wright's washing line in Armidale, NSW, warbling their hearts out as she gives a private singing lesson inside.

Promoting rural choirs gets Hester out of bed in the morning. As a choral conductor, music educator and former Brandenberg Choir soprano, Hester is about to begin tertiary research into Australian choral rehearsal techniques:

"I'm fascinated to interview teachers around Armidale and the New England to see what their training is like and how have they developed their choir style, how they rehearse their kids, and how they conduct their performances, culminating in a PhD in the field."

Hester, 40, has music in the blood. She grew up on a sheep and cattle farm an hour out of Armidale, into a very musical family.

"Weirdly, it was early baroque music that captured my soul from a young age. There was always music in the house. We all had our style. Dad loved his Triple J, and Mum her classical as she studied cello at the Sydney Conservatorium, where her father was the Bursar. My maternal grandmother would always play Bach, Handel and Vivaldi at their house," she recalls.

"I remember singing with the class in our one room school house and the teacher looked at me and said, 'there's a nice little voice.' Those few words helped set me on this path.

"To prove it, I have two conductor's batons, but I prefer to use my hands when conducting choirs," she says. "You get better engagement using your hands. I bought my batons in this shop in London which was like stepping into a Harry Potter wand shop - wingardium leviosa!"

For Hester, singing is always a full body experience. Her students bend and stretch in a lesson with her, crouch in a squat to feel their diaphragm and she instructs them to bend their knees at the top note.

"Your whole body is an instrument, not just the larynx," she says. "Singing and humming makes us feel good, stimulating the vagus nerve, which calms you down when you feel stressed or disregulated. You can't sing well if you're tense or stressed. Many schools offer wellbeing classes with guided meditation or yoga, equally, we should offer them the option to do some singing.

"I don't believe in necessarily forcing kids to sing something posh and classical. We can teach them to sing 'Kookaburra sits in the Old Gum Tree' or First Nations lullabies. Culturally responsive pedagogy means that Australian choral music needs to be informed by our landscape and how we live."

She remembers conducting her friend Luke Byrne's composition about Lake Eyre (Kati Thanda) called Desert Sea in the Elgar Hall in Birmingham, England, and the audience being transfixed by his whistles and bird calls.

"People in the audience said it was like being transported to this other place," Hester says, "And I felt very homesick!"

Hester has sung in many of Australia's best choirs including the Brandenburg Choir, the Choir of Cantillation, the Sydney Chamber Choir and internationally in the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus. She has then translated this experience into developing young people's voices through conducting the Darwin Singchronicity Choir, the Gondwana choirs with Lyn Williams AM and also the Sydney Children's Choir, which give her the skills to nurture even more rural voices.

Hester added to her qualification of a BA in Music by being the only Australian currently to have a Master of Arts in Choral Conducting from the University of Birmingham, which is the highest conducting qualification in the UK. She completed her final recital in 2020, a week before the university and then the entire country shut down and only zoom choirs were left.

She is honest about her trajectory to artistic success to inspire her own students to persevere.

"I was not good enough [at singing] for a long time," she says bluntly, "but I kept pushing and pushing. The turning point was losing an audition for a baroque music choir in 2009. Through that intense disappointment of not being able to share my passion, I could pinpoint the exact moment when I decided to throw everything at improving my technique. Previously, I hated to practise, but an American teacher, Nancy Long, who had a career in the UK singing early baroque music, gave me so much feedback and encouragement that I knuckled down.

"I became truly obsessed with singing," she says, which coincided with leaving a corporate job at Universal Music and picking up a Graduate Diploma in Education at the University of New England. She followed a strict routine of singing practice and study in the mornings, and working in childcare in the afternoons.

"Paul Dye, a bass from the Brandenburg Choir, heard me and vouched for my voice. But on the day of the audition I lost it! I still asked to come in anyway. They employed me and I sang with them for eight years.

"There were all these little snowbally things that show that you need to be ready for your big break. After a Brandenberg concert, another singer said they didn't have time to do a film score recording and I put my hand up. That's how I landed a singing role on Happy Feet 2 which led to work on Gods of Egypt and the 'Lego' movies, which impresses my junior students no end."

Hester's determination to serve rural communities was expressed during the Australian Bushfire Benefit London in 2020 where she conducted a choir of Australian and local singers, including preparing a piece for Simone Young.

"I realised how pushy you have to be to make good things happen. It was January 2020 and I was on holidays in Tenerife, while back in Australia, my Dad was fighting bushfires. I felt so powerless. An Australian friend in London told me about someone who wanted to put together some musos for a charity concert. I messaged her that I was a choir conductor in Birmingham and within days I was a part of conducting this amazing choir in the Royal Academy alongside Simone Young and soprano Miriam Alan. We did Australian works such as Kondalilla by Stephen Leek and an arrangement of Home, Sweet Home.

"'Do I warm up this choir?' I messaged in a panic to my teacher Simon Halsey at Birmingham Uni. He helped me with the etiquette of managing those major London choirs," she smiles.

"'No! Get straight into it!' he yelled down the phone.

"On the train home after the concert, I told myself, 'you can play with the big kids' and it scared me. Everyone has to start somewhere. I was in the right place at the right time to raise nearly 100 thousand dollars for the firefighters, whilst working with world class musicians."

This charity experience was instrumental in whetting Hester's appetite to move into leadership roles.

"I like looking at the overall performing culture of a school and seeing the big picture of the progressive, sequential structure that can get every student in a school performing to their fullest."

In 2024 Hester was made the artistic director of the Junior State Music Camp after tutoring the junior choir at the camp for ten years.

"Every year, for a week I am surrounded by music. It is musically satisfying, socially satisfyng and professionally satisfying," she says with a wide grin. "It's a big catch-up for music people and there is so much creativity and very little grumbling despite being on the go from seven in the morning till ten thirty at night."

It was also a chance to hone her management style of open communication and positivity.

"I said to the team of tutors, 'I'm treating you as competent. You have every reason to be here.' This belief gives them a lot of freedom. There is so much opportunity to do great music outside of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and my calling is to be teaching more music educators to conduct choirs at a grassroots level.

"I have just come out of conducting a musical and a Fiori Musicali concert in December using some of the music that I brought back from the Masters in Birmingham. I have some wonderful Norwegian music and extraordinary American Gospel that would suit the voices in Australian country towns."

Hester continues to pass on her hard-won wisdom to women who hope to walk her path in music education.

"I mentor Music Education students at the Women's College at Sydney University, where I lived while at uni. They might want to tap into my networking contacts or need advice on how to navigate performance challenges. I have learnt to take myself out of the situation as the mentees really do have the answers within themselves, as I myself had."

When she has a moment to breathe from her hectic schedule of conducting and teaching, in the rural tradition of women who bake, Hester makes a rainbow of pastel hued macarons for her students.

These trays of airy mouthfuls are as colourful as this inspiring conductor and the rural choirs she will nurture.


Philipa Tlaskal is an educator and freelance writer who loves writing about her fellow educators and creatives and their often unsung work in classrooms and studios in rural Australia. She lives in Armidale where she takes horseriding lessons, writes and walks her whippet. 


Comments

Be the first to share add your thoughts and opinions in response to this article.

You must login to post a comment.