Choral

One of the ways for a director to learn about their choir is to go out for eats/drinks with them after a performance and listen intently. Other occasions can offer some insight, but something about the post-performance social brings out a reflective and celebratory spirit in an ensemble. It’s partly because you get a bigger turn-out, of course – though this in turn is a symptom of the bond that is forged in through the culmination of group endeavour.

I’m thinking about this particularly right now as a working majority of the singers in Magenta had a visit to the pub after our last evening gig before Christmas, and I learned something interesting about the choir. One of our members said it was the first single-sex organisation she had been involved with that had no bitching.

This time last year I was complaining misanthropically about the clichéd nature of so many Christmas songs – both in their musical profiles and the imagery of their lyrics. This year I seem to be in less of a bah-humbug mood, and have been delighting in the way the Christmas season can provide a never-ending fund of imagery to help the rehearsal process.

I’ve written before about the usefulness of metaphors as a means to encapsulate complex, multi-dimensional (indeed, artistic) ideas about how music needs to be performed. And the more concrete and vivid the imagery it is, the more memorable it becomes. It turns out that the festive imagery we use to represent the season to ourselves can serve this purpose effeciently, effectively, and cheers everyone up in the process. People like to feel Christmassy, especially when rehearsing Christmas music.

I’ve written before about the pitfalls of ‘note-bashing’, but I thought it might be useful to think of the same issue from a positive perspective: the value of working on artistry from the get-go. This is something I learned from my first conducting teacher, Alan Rump, and like many of the useful things he said, it was some years after I left university before I noticed how useful it really was.

The rationale for the idea of ‘first learning the notes, and then putting in the interpretation’ is that - in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy -cognitive needs are more fundamental than aesthetic ones. So people won’t have any attention to spare for artistic questions if they’re concerned about what they should be singing. This is true as far as it goes, but doesn’t mean we need abandon all hope of expressive development until the notes are in – just that we need to be sensitive to the note-learning needs as we work on expression, and vice versa.

I recently had an interesting conversation with my friend Sarra about different approaches to sight-singing – how some people think more in terms of key and others in terms of the intervals between notes. It turns out that we both use some of both, though possibly with rather different emphasis. I commented on how I am always surprised when I see how much of an emphasis some really quite distinguished colleagues in the choral profession seem to place on thinking in intervals in rehearsal and audition compared to thinking in keys.

Later that day, Sarra sent me an email in which she had these further thoughts:

There are comments going back nearly 100 years in the literature on choral music about differences in vocal sound between British and American choirs. Back in 1914, Henry Coward was making the following comments:

There is no doubt that, generally speaking, the English choral singer favours a backward voice-production (p. 39).

Of course one must always be careful to avoid excess of nasality, or more harm than good will result; but I must say that, except in two cases in the United States, where the people have an excess of nasality in speaking, I never yet heard a choir go beyond the limits of good tone in the way of nasal resonance, whereas one often hears excess of throatiness in England (p. 44).

I have a lot of conversations with choir directors, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that there is a strong correlation between how happy or unhappy the director is with progress and how much they refer to the choir as ‘we’ or ‘they’. Choral leaders face myriad potential difficulties: do the singers turn up regularly and on time?; do they retain what they’ve learned one week to the next?; do they pay attention during rehearsal?; do they watch the conductor?

Every choir faces variants of these challenges at their own particular level. But directors seem to feel more frustrated about them if they are framing them as problems with the behaviour of the (implicitly errant) singers rather than problems with the culture of the choir as a whole, including the director.

A recent comment on a post from last year asked the following question:

I have tried twice without success to join choirs that do 3 and 4 part harmony. I get rejected after a few sessions as i am told my voice does not blend. I know I have a good singing voice and i am very motivated, although I do not understand very much about music theory

The last attempt did not lead to any criticism from the coach but from the other singers near me. I am puzzled as to the possible cause of non blending. Any advice?

I felt it was one of those questions that deserves a post (or possibly a book) in its own right.

Just doesn't look like a singer, does he?I had an email earlier this week from an erstwhile student who is now doing a masters degree in musicology. He’s contemplating doing a study on (I quote) ‘the poor quality of Beethoven’s choral writing’ as something that seems under-discussed in the literature. He was asking for recommendations on literature that would articulate a consensus of what constitutes good choral writing against which to measure Beethoven’s work. My first instinct was to reply grumpily that I wasn’t going to do his bibliographical work for him, since the identification and evaluation of sources is a pretty major part of a musicology student’s job description. I was always mean like that when I was teaching musicology, and old habits die hard (but I’d probably also suggest having a furtle around on Choralnet.)

My second instinct, though, was to question his premise. (And if he’s still like I remember him, I think he’ll enjoy this more than a list of books.)