I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

This is a post I have been procrastinating writing for some time, as I wanted to have some useful conclusions about outcomes to report before doing so. But stability seems some way away yet and I have been prompted to write it anyway in anticipation of seeing a lot of my singing friends at the end of this month. It would be tiresome to say this 1500 times when people ask how things are going, so I’ll say it once here in the interests of having more varied conversations in Harrogate.

We all know that that hormonal changes affect the voice. We went through it in adolescence, the boys more dramatically than the girls, but everyone affected to some extent. And it is becoming more widely recognised that hormonal changes at other life stages also affect the voice: when I read Singing Through Change back in 2020, it came conveniently at a moment when I could relate quite directly to its themes.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.

Every so often, it seems that everyone I talk to is grappling with the same challenges. Well, maybe not everyone, but enough to feel that we have something of a theme going on, and thus an opportunity to try to be helpful to multiple ensembles at once.

A conductor recently messaged me with the following clear summary of the problem:

a couple of our sections are having real trouble getting into singing off the beat. A good number of our songs have crotchet notes aligned on the half beat and they're often getting pulled into alignment with the beat instead. I wonder if you have any good ideas for how we can encourage off-beat singing?

This is kind of a niche post, as it’s about a specific challenge that we don’t come across very often. I have been arranging recently for a barbershop quartet which has a lead who more usually sings bass, which brings the melody into a rather lower tessitura than one usually uses in TTBB barbershop. This is a distinct challenge from arranging with the bass on the melody, which we do fairly frequently, although some of the things learned doing that turn out to be relevant.

Interestingly, the singer specified reference performances of the songs in the keys he wanted to sing them in, so we’re working with an established performance history of the songs in a lower tessitura. Also interesting was that a casual listen to these recordings gave me an impression of richness and warmth, but not particularly low pitch. I found myself surprised when I actually checked what keys the songs were in – and realised that particularly in one case that I had therefore a rather more challenging task than I had first imagined!

In the character of robots...

Wednesday took me back to Coulsdon for another visit to Surrey Harmony. Two months on from my previous visit, they had had time to work with the ideas we explored in June, and we could see what was working, what needed further support, and what could usefully be added. And once again, we were working both to support the development of their director’s rehearsal and conducting skills and to build the skills of the singers.

Indeed, these two things often work hand in hand. Their MD Penny had a clear idea of the challenges she was facing: things that she knew she wanted to improve but was struggling to get the results she wanted. Hence, the coaching processes of diagnosis and intervention served both to help solve the problems and to model ways to go about solving them.

My second post on this subject tackled the ‘well what do I actually do?’ part of the question about how to deepen our interpretations. And whilst it came up with a bunch of things that I know to be useful and effective in developing imaginative and expressive musical performance, taken together they don’t add up to a total of ‘deep interpretation’. It’s like if someone asks you why you love your life’s companion, you can list lots of things about them that you adore, but the fact of your love is always more than the sum of those parts.

[Looks across the room at Jonathan, smiles fondly, but decides not to interrupt him just now to tell him about the examples I considered including but decided were unnecessary for the argument. I’ll tell him over dinner tonight instead. If you know him you can probably guess anyway.]

Having explored in my last post the question of what it means to develop our interpretation of a piece of music, it is time to turn our attention to what we actually do to make this happen. Using the distinction between ‘interpretation’ as meaning our imaginative understanding of a piece, and as meaning our concrete performance actions to make it audible, I am going to divide this up into to categories: things we do with our brains and things we do with our bodies. Of course, the two are only ever notionally separable, but when you’re thinking about something that keeps throwing up more tangents you need some kind of organising principle to hold the ideas together.

I’m also focusing on activities that can work either as individual study or as group activities. The relationship between a conductor’s understanding of a piece and the overall insight in performance is a whole other interesting set of questions that I am not going to get into today.