Choral

In the world of consumer products, the mass-produced item is cheaper, more plentiful and generally less-respected than the hand-made, bespoke item. This is both because it is replaceable – lose it and you can buy another exactly the same – and because it requires only the ability to operate processes on the part of the people who make it, not the individual acquisition of skill.

We tend to think of artistic products as being inherently artisanal – that is individually-crafted, non-massed produced – but when you think about it there is quite a whiff of the production line about several standard aspects of rehearsal processes in barbershop choruses - and to some extent in mainstream choral societies too.

We all know that singing makes people happy, but do we know why? Is there any way that we can guarantee the singers we work with get the most out of the experience every time?

The authors of Mind Gym: Give me Time offer a useful analysis of happiness. They suggest that it operates in three dimensions, pleasure, challenge and meaning. Any activity that offers one of these will make us somewhat happy, one that offers two will feel very rewarding, and to get all three in one go leads to a state of rapture.

One of the things that distinguishes skilled from less skilled choral groups is the relationship between breath control and musical structure. To be sure, there are lots of other things that distinguish them, but I find this one interesting for the way that it allows a fundamentally imaginative function – conception of musical shape – to be audible through a physical response.

All singers seem to breathe according to their understanding of musical shape. However, more skilled singers have developed the capacity to choose where this might be. They think about the music and, through a combination of intuitive response and conscious decision, place the breath points in places that group the words and/or notes into meaningful gestalts. That is, they work in phrases.

Less skilled singers seem to experience music in two-bar chunks, and will breathe after each pair of bars whatever is going on in the music and lyrics.

The choirmaster must be, first and foremost, a singer… His ideal should be to draw out from the choir the sort of sound he would like to make if only he could sing all the parts at once (Gordon Reynolds, The Choirmaster in Action, 1972).

All that is necessary is an expressive, well-controlled voice, a kind of common denominator of amateur singing raised to the nth power, with which he is enabled to demonstrate to the chorus what he expects from them in return (Archibald Davison, Choral Conducting, 1954).

Opinions differ to the extent to which a choral conductor needs to have a good voice, though there is a general common-ground of consensus in favour of a reasonable competence.

Along with Awareness and Will, Trust makes up the trio of central principles of the Inner Game. In some ways, Trust is the most fundamental of the three: the heart of the inner game is about getting your judgemental, conscious self out the way and letting your carefully-honed skills get on with the job.

This article was first published earlier this year in Voicebox, the magazine for LABBS members. I'm reproducing it here in the wake of a conversation with a friend from Holland who was developing a similar checklist for a workshop she'll be running. It was originally written for a barbershop audience, but generalises quite well to other genres if you subsititute their classic musical features for the style-specific ones mentioned here.

When people choose music to sing in contest, they think a lot about its suitability in terms of style – is it barbershop, in the terms defined by the contest and judging system we have adopted from the Barbershop Harmony Society.

But there is an equally important dimension to suitability, and this one applies to all the music we sing, not just for contest: suitability to performer. However great a song and arrangement is in itself, it will only produce a thrilling performance if it is a good fit for your quartet or chorus.

So, how do you decide if a song/arrangement is suitable for you?

The second central Inner Game principle is Will. This is about the performer’s capacity to choose how they do something, to take control. But again, crucially, it’s not about getting it right and all the judgements that implies. Rather, it assumes that the ability to do something in one way rather than another is a more fundamental skill that is not only logically separable from, but actually precedes the decision about how it should be done.

Tone Bianca DahlOne of the sessions at the ABCD Convention at the end of August was workshop on communication between choir, conductor and audience led by Tone Bianca Dahl. Tone teaches choral conducting at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and her book on this subject has recently been translated into English. Her central question in the presentation was: what creates the magic?; and can we create it at will?