Choral

I had an email last week from a director who is grappling with two interrelated issues that I am sure will resonate with a lot of my readers:

• Singers who have signed up to perform at an event dropping out as the event gets closer
• Singers texting him before rehearsals with apologies during the time he is trying to get 'into the zone'

In both cases, the problem he identified - rather perceptively I thought - was the effect on his mood. He feels frustrated by these actions, and demotivated. He recognises that this response doesn't help his chorus, and so is looking for ways to manage his own emotions.

To-do list for discussionOn the recent abcd Midlands Conductors' Day, our final activity was a trouble-shooting session. We compiled a list of the top two or three things that each director felt would most help their choir to get sorted out, and then spent some time on each discussing different approaches to them. This kind of session works on the principle that it's much easier to solve other people's problems than your own, and even with your own, just talking them through with people who understand but aren't involved can open up all kinds of new ideas.

One item on our list gave a wonderful demonstration of how so many dimensions of leading a choir are related to one another. We can divide the craft up into all kinds of areas for convenience of training and development - musical, technical, leadership, organisational - but when dealing with the practical questions of how to get things done, we'll find ourselves moving through all these areas in turn.

I just want to be a winner...The local competitive festival has been part of the infrastructure of the amateur arts in the UK since the 1880s. Supported by the British and International Federation of Festivals, dedicated volunteers put immense amounts of care and effort into maintaining these annual events around the country. I want to start by saying that these are a force for good in the universe, and I am very grateful to everyone who makes them happen.

As a participant, however, I can't help but notice that they can often feel like very small occasions. I'm talking here primarily about the choral days, as - you'll be astonished to hear - those are the bits of festivals I mostly experience. There are often only one or two choirs in each class, and very few people in the audience.

Two of our delegates with our to-do list for the final session (of which more another day)If over the winter you had spotted the trailer for a Conductors' Day organised by the Association of British Choral Directors in January, you may have wondered why January came and went without my mentioning it and how it went. It was scheduled for January 19th, but if you live in the UK you may remember that the day before was the day we all woke up to several inches of snow.

It is one of our national sports to criticise ourselves roundly about how everyone just stops when we see a snowflake. But on the other hand, people were booked to come from quite a wide radius, and the chances of everyone making it there on time without difficulty were sufficiently slim to make it worth rescheduling. We ended up with two replacement dates for both the conducting and Sing Up streams, 16th Feb and 20th April, to try and accommodate as many delegates as possible.

I recently received a letter from one of my city's fabulous arts organisations about a major musical event planned for 2014. I am going to have a grump in a minute, but it's not about the general wonderfulness of this organisation or the specific value of this project, which looks genuinely artistically exciting. The letter was inviting me to a meeting to learn how choirs from across the city could participate.

Now, maybe I am just feeling jaded because I live in a city that has a lot of great arts organisations, and so I get a lot of these invitations, but they are starting to irritate me, and I have taken a little time to work out why. On the face of it, what could be wrong with the chance to join up with other people with whom we have artistic interests in common to make a special event happen? Massed voice events are inherently exciting, and it's good for our sense of civic community to do stuff together.

But the thing is this: these are high-profile events, run by funded organisations, but effectively subsidised by the unfunded community groups upon which they rely for participants.

Years ago, Jonathan and I took some ballroom dancing classes. It was fun it its way, but the classes weren't very good because we were simply taught a set sequence of steps for each dance without any guidance on how you would vary them in different circumstances. So we could never quick-step in a room smaller than the one we learned in, for instance, because we'd have hit the wall before we got to the turn.

I am reminded of this sometimes when working with amateur singers who have learned their music by a rote method such as learning tracks. They may have a strong and accurate grasp of the notes (the big benefit of this approach), but they lack the mental flexibility to hold the music in their heads and change their performance of it at the same time.

There is a rehearsal technique that emerged during the early months of Magenta’s existence that we have continued to use because it is rather effective, and I have been finding it useful to reflect on why it works. Its primary purpose is for memory work - for getting a piece that is basically learned off the page and securely into our brains - but it seems to have all kinds of benign unintended consequences.

The technique works like this. We sing the whole piece through with the music two or three times in succession (two if we’ve already run through it during the rehearsal, three if we’ve only looked at patches so far) very quietly and very fast, then drop the music and sing it at the correct volume and tempo from memory.

The pertinent elements of the technique are, I think:

Comedian Jo Brand used to talk of an agony aunt who had received a letter from a man whose girlfriend considered him inadequately endowed. (Bear with me, this metaphor becomes relevant shortly...um, no pun intended...) She wondered who these women were making such comments - surely they should realise that if you observe that it's small, it just gets smaller...and smaller…

This sequence comes to mind whenever I'm working with singers and someone gives the remark that something sounds tentative or lacking in confidence. They may be right (they usually are), but it is the kind of observation that will elicit exactly the opposite response than the one needed.