Choral

Choral rehearsals nearly always have two sets of simultaneous agendas:

1. Repertoire preparation
2. Skills development

The two are clearly related. The skills agenda will often be driven by the needs of the repertoire (what do we need to be able to do in order to sing this music effectively?); conversely the repertoire choice may be driven by skills goals (what music will help us learn this particular technique?).

At the same time, they can fight each other. In particular, repertoire preparation is typically a time-bound activity. We need to know the whole work by the date of the concert; or, we need to know all our seasonal songs before the run-up to Christmas. And, like any activity with deadlines, they have a habit of diverting our attention away from things that could be done at any time (and as a result we never actually get round to them).

There is an interesting and subtle distinction between two statements that, at a functional level mean pretty much the same thing:

I sing soprano
I am a soprano

Both statements will have the same effect when putting together a choir, but they make quite different assumptions about the nature of voice parts: activity versus identity.

Last week I was encouraging the world to develop the capacity to start singing at any point in the music, not just the obvious section boundaries, and promised some practical hints on how to work on this. So, here they are.

The first port of call is the music itself. Part of the director’s preparation for introducing new repertoire needs to be to identify potential start points, and to categorise them as more or less obvious or challenging. The three musical dimensions that most affect this classification are harmony, rhythm and phrase structure. (Arguably the third is a product of the other two, but it is a useful analytical dimension in its own right.)

The obvious section boundaries will usually see these three working together. It’s easy to come in at the start of the verse because all musical elements are signalling the sense of ‘beginning-ness’. It’s harder to pick up from the second phrase because, whilst the phrase structure might signal it as a new beginning, it will likely have moved away from home harmonically. It’s harder still to pick up mid-phrase because both are in flux, though easier if the parts are rhythmically unified than if they are staggered.

So, the four qualities that the singers will want to hang their hats on as they develop this skill are:

There were some interesting discussions over on ChoralNet at the end of January about the use of metaphors in rehearsal, and the response they got from various types of musician. There seemed to be a consensus that metaphors are useful when working with community choirs peopled by amateur singers, but that they might be found objectionable to other performers.

Allen Simon said:

Of course, this is what instrumentalists hate about choir directors: that we use these metaphors instead of simple musical terms like loud and soft.

and was challenged by John Howell, who said:

I've never known instrumentalists to object to the use of metaphors… What instrumentalists WILL object to, with good and sufficient reason, is conducting that looks like interpretive dance and ignores the downbeats that are absolutely essential to counting rests!

Anna Dembska inflected the discussion with the comment:

In my experience, untrained singers (or those I've trained myself) have no trouble with expressive rather than dynamic directions, and it's very effective. The more professional the singers, the more they want dynamics and don't find metaphors useful.

When I was working up to my Grade 1 piano exam aged 8 or so, my piano teacher introduced me to a game of ‘lucky dip’. This involved identifying all the passages in my pieces I was stumbling over, writing each on a piece of paper, and putting the paper in pot next to the piano. During each practice session, I would then take one piece of paper out at random and work on that passage until I could do it three times in a row correctly, at which point I would throw the paper away and pick another.

At the time I kind of recognised that she was getting me to engage with difficult bits by turning it into a game. But what I didn’t realise until years later was that she was also training me to be able to pick up the musical thread anywhere in the piece without having to go back to the beginning. This is a skill that I think would benefit quite a lot of the ensembles I have been working with in recent months.

This post is most directly for the singers in Magenta, as it recaps some of the ideas we were playing with in this week’s rehearsal. But I’m sharing it with the rest of the universe as we’re not the only people to whom it’s relevant!

Word sounds can be categorised quite systematically in a hierarchical structure. The structure is useful because it makes it easier to remember the different types, and knowing the types is useful because you can then make generalisations about how to treat different types in ensemble singing.

I’ve had several conversations with choir directors over the years about the experience of coming off stage from a performance and having your singers ask you how the performance went. Apparently I’m not alone in finding this a slightly baffling question.

The immediate response is, ‘Well you were there too – what do you think?’ It feels odd to be asked to pass judgement on an experience that the questioner was also participating in. But from the singer’s perspective, of course, it makes perfect sense to ask, since their routine experience in rehearsal is to look to their director for feedback on how they’re doing.

So there’s an interesting difference here between the director’s state of mind in rehearsal and in performance. In rehearsal, you’re using your analytical, or diagnostic ears. The task is not just to perceive what’s going on within the ensemble, but also to articulate it.

In performance, though, this feedback function transmutes into a role that’s much more about regulating than reflecting.

"I hate housework! You make the beds, you do the dishes -- and six months later you have to start all over again." Joan Rivers

Whenever we talk of ‘polishing’ our performances, we’re invoking a physical metaphor that sees the rehearsal process as one of removing surface blemishes from the music to let its inherent beauty shine through. It involves close observation of its visible (audible) surfaces to notice where attention is needed and the work itself is reminiscent of the rubbing action of actual polishing in the way it repeatedly acts on these small sections.

Of course, there are many ways in which the metaphor of rehearsal as cleaning doesn’t work. The object we’re polishing isn’t actually a pre-existent thing whose level of cleanliness can be observed – it’s an evanescent, temporal thing that we conjure into being in real time. But metaphors are always like this – they bring certain dimensions of a phenomenon into focus while hiding others. And the metaphor of housework draws attention to elements of the rehearsal process we might not otherwise think about.