Choral

Last time I looked at this subject, I was considering the vocal issues that need addressing to smooth out a choppy line – namely continuity of airflow and getting the vowels in line. But I’ve also been thinking that an overly wordy delivery is also a symptom of an overly wordy way of thinking about music.

Maybe I should put that more positively. When you see a performance that you could criticise as choppy or over-articulated, you can usually also congratulate it for its energetic commitment to the message in the lyric. You never doubt that the singers know what the song means, and you can tell very clearly which bits they like best. They have nailed comprehensibility and communication – though seemingly at the expense of choral tone.

This post is a follow-up to my last one about the question whether there are choirs that don’t audition but nonetheless achieve a high standard of performance. We have established that such choirs exist, and the question is, what are they doing that other non-audition choirs which don’t achieve such high standards aren’t?

This is something dear to my heart; indeed, I’d almost say it’s part of my primary life-project to work out how not to have to choose between excellence and inclusion. I’m greedy, I want both – and I think it is possible to have both, though I recognise that it takes longer to achieve than picking one or the other.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but a collection of observations about choirs which appear to out-perform the skills their members first turned up with:

I had a letter recently from someone who has returned to singing since retirement, telling me about his musical journey, and asking some specific questions about choral life. I’m answering here because I know the issues he is grappling with are ones that many other people in the choral blogosphere care about deeply too. I’ll start with a few (edited and anonymised) extracts from his letter so you can get a feel for where he’s coming from:

You remember the slogan “Sport for All”? My abiding passion is “Music for All” or specifically “Choirs for All”… I spent a lifetime in comprehensive education, a lot of it in the inner city, so the issue of social inclusion was important to me and [the cathedral choir] seemed to me to be about choral apartheid. … I don’t think that “Music for All” needs to preclude choral ambition.

Well, yes, directors don’t get a choice about this – we’re either male or female, and even if you go for re-assignment, you’re still one or the other. It’s like whether or not to play repeats in Mozart sonatas – not something you can fudge. You do get a choice about how much you make a feature or downplay your gender identity in your interactions with your choir, but even here the choice isn’t only in your own hands. As some of our past discussions about conducting and gender showed, even those conductors who wish to ‘leave their gender at the door’ may still be ‘read’ in gendered terms by their singers.

Today’s subject isn’t the general question of gender and directing, however, but the specific question of the dynamics between a director and a single-sex choral group.

Several times over the last few months, I’ve found myself helping singers overcome a tendency to chew their words as they enunciate them. So I’ve been thinking not only about techniques to help smooth the lines out, but also what underlies the habit in the first place. Over-articulation is an endearing feature of Nick Park animations, after all, but less helpful in choral contexts.

One origin of the habit, I suspect, is the way that the practices of the British cathedral tradition infiltrate so widely into the rest of our musical life. And while there is much that is wonderful about that, not all its habits necessarily translate directly into other contexts. The statement ‘You can never have too much consonant!’ is a valid statement when you’re working in an acoustic that is better for atmospheric effects than intelligibility of text, but in a small, dry room produces a result that is rather over-mannered.

But this is not the whole story, of course.

Some choral directors take the warm-up at the start of the rehearsal, while others delegate the task to an assistant director or vocal coach. And there are some quite dogmatic views in either direction that one or the other approach is better than the other. It would be quite easy to find a wishy-washy, it-depends kind of position on the matter, but actually I find that once you have identified what it depends on, I become somewhat opinionated once again!

So, the situation in which it is absolutely right for the director to take the warm-up is when the director is using it as part of the unfreezing process that sets up the choir’s capacity to effect change during the rehearsal. If the vision for the warm-up is that it is not merely about the physical readiness to sing but also about building the shared ethos of the ensemble, having the director there setting the agenda from the get-go gives a clear message that the warm-up is an integral part of the process.

One of the conversations I had several times during my recent visits to the London City Singers was about the challenge of dealing with a high turnover of membership. This is something that all choirs face to some extent, but LCS are particularly affected by it because of the demographic of their membership: young professionals working in an international industry.

So, having a significant change of membership from one year to the next presents difficulties with maintaining both skills and repertoire.

As an addendum to my post on word sounds from a couple of months back, I had a lovely little light-bulb moment from John Grant when working with him with Heartbeat Chorus last week. It was about the vowel ‘Oo’.

Now, I have observed over the years that Oos can sound a bit muted compared to other vowels. This is sometimes an advantage of course: as an arranger you can manipulate both relative loudness of different parts and overall dynamic shape of an arrangement by your choice of neutral vowels. But it can also be a problem, reducing the sense of projection.