Choral

Once we have persuaded people to let go of their previous habits, and changed the way they are performing something, we need to make sure that they will retain the change as a regular part of how they perform. There are two elements to this part of the process:

• Consolidate and keep moving
• Anchor the changes in the organisational culture

This is the third in a series of posts about using Kotter’s model of organisational change as a way to conceptualise the rehearsal process. Once we have unfrozen people from their entrenched ways, we are ready to make the change. Like the unfreezing process, Kotter breaks this down into three constituent elements:

• Communicate your vision
• Empower people to clear obstacles
• Secure short-term wins

In my last post, I looked at how Kotter’s model of organisational change might relate to rehearsal processes in the broad scale. Today and in my next two posts, I’m going to dig a bit deeper into the detail to garner some clues about not just what needs to happen, but how we can make it happen.

One of the interesting things that happens when amateur musicians build themselves a training infrastructure is that they bring an incredible breadth of skills and knowledge from different walks of professional life and apply them to improving the ways they make music. Thus it was that in the early years of the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Directors College that Chris Davidson introduced me to John Kotter’s model of how to effect institutional change.

Chris was presenting the ideas in the context of how a director can change a chorus’s culture, working habits and skill levels over periods of weeks and months – and indeed that is the most direct parallel to the changes in businesses that the model was derived from.

But I have been fascinated over the years with how the model might work on the micro-level – to the myriad changes we make each week in rehearsal.

Okay, so I’m sure nobody ever chooses to breathe noisily on purpose, but it’s still irritating when you hear an otherwise reasonably enjoyable performance preceded and punctuated by the sounds like Davros from Dr Who.

There are multiple reasons why it is irritating.

Put twenty choral practitioners in a room and ask them about vibrato and choral singing, and you will hear twenty different opinions. And if choral singers’ voices were as inflexible as these opinions can be, nobody would ever achieve a blended section. So I approach this question from a section leader in a barbershop chorus with some trepidation:

I have a Lead who has some vibrato in her voice. Do I put her in the middle of the section or is there some way I can help her to reduce this?

I had an email this week from the Lead section leader of a ladies barbershop chorus, asking the following questions:

Hi Liz
I wonder if you can help me. Our M.D. has asked me to get my Leads to sing with warm air. Can you tell me how to do this? Also, I have a Lead who has some vibrato in her voice. Do I put her in the middle of the section or is there some way I can help her to reduce this?

Now, these weren’t questions that could be answered in just a word or two, and besides my guess is that my correspondent is not the only person in the world who’ll ever want to know the answers to them. So, I’m answering them here – warm air today, and vibrato in a couple of days when I’ve worked up the courage to tackle it. (Is there any more contentious subject in the world of choral singing?!)

The idea of singing with ‘warm air’ is really a metaphor, rather than a direct instruction.

‘Backing off’ is a standard metaphor for asking people to sing a bit quieter. In fact, it is so standard that we mostly don’t notice that it is a metaphor. But when you think about it, we don’t usually want people actually to move further away from us, we simply want them to sing in a way that gives that impression – i.e. with less volume.

But in real life of course, ‘backing off’ is also not just a spatial thing, it is also about attitude and behaviour.