Releasing the Badgers' Intuitive Musicianship

What is the collective noun for badgers?

I spent Saturday with Sporty Badger, Posh Badger, Scary Badger and Baby Badger, collectively known as Release the Badgers, working with them on their set for the upcoming LABBS Quartet Prelims contest. As you can imagine from their nomenclature choices, nothing silly happened at all. (Did you know that you can make any adjective more entertaining by inserting it before the word ‘badger’. You’re welcome.)

While their two songs contest songs are contrasted in mood and style, we found some common themes between them on areas that would benefit from TLC. This is useful for embedding skills: it means both that you get a good cost-per-wear on you work, since you can keep applying it in different musical contexts, and that these multiple opportunities for application give commensurately numerous opportunities for practice.

The first theme was flow and continuity of line. This is something they had already been working on (one of the copies was marked up with the instruction ‘molto swooshy-throughiness’), and it was interesting to see how they had a good grasp of some aspects of this, particularly in their approach to shaping phrases, so our work was in isolating a couple of technical refinements that would allow their musical intentions to come over more effectively.

The first of these was in developing a greater consistency of resonance between different vowels. The musical aim of this is to produce a more consistent tone quality syllable to syllable, allowing the line to join up into a more integrated perceptual unity. The technical means to achieve this is to minimise the change in shape within the mouth, so that there is a sense of overlap, or common ground between the different sounds: a Venn diagram of resonance if you like. They were already singing without excessive jaw movement, so our attention focused on reducing tongue movement.

(And talk of a placid tongue led inevitably to the consideration of Placid Badgers, and thence Flacid Badgers and Acid Badgers. I don’t really know why I’m sharing their in-jokes with you, but I like think of the look of baffled disdain it will probably put on your face.)

We approached this task via singing without consonants. This is a cognitively challenging task, but very productive. It really allowed us to identify which vowels were popping out of the line (mostly ee), which ones needed to maintain greater tonal focus (mostly schwahs in linguistically and/or rhythmically unaccented places), and where the resonant space as a whole could be enhanced by elevating the soft palate (interestingly, the up-tempo song rather than the ballad). For this last one, singing the vowels while holding the nose is a good exercise.

For each song, we spent quite a long time on a relatively short passage of music, digging deep into this technical work. You couldn’t cover a whole song in that depth, but you don’t need to: once you have put in the graft to develop the technical control, you can build upon it in longer passages of music. In quite a lot of what followed the quartet were able to apply the principles of what we’d worked on already, and the few places that needed individual attention for spot-cleaning made themselves readily apparent.

Part of Project Flow was also about managing accent and emphasis. It was a more continuously fundamental issue in their up-tune, in which establishing a back-beats at the levels of groove, hypermetre, and phrase structure did a lot of the heavy lifting for us. Delivery of lyric, effectiveness of embellishment and musical line all came better into focus as a result. But it also came up in their ballad, where taking the heat out of the downbeat (especially when articulated by the harmony parts around a rest in the melody) allowed the rest of the phrase to reveal a much more natural arc.

Another of our main themes was to attend to phrase boundaries, being as mindful of the transition from music to silence as of that from silence to music. This again was a transferable concept that, once established, could be applied to every breath point. It was interesting how in some contexts this cross-application was more readily achieved than others. When first working on it, one tends to attribute this to intermittent control of the skill and/or intermittent attention given to something still operating at the level of conscious competence. But when a spot resists improvement over two or three tries, it is time to stop and analyse what the obstacle is. This process invariably generates more insight into how the music is shaped at these moments.

One of the things that is rewarding about what appears on the face of it to be quite deep technical work is the way that it allows people’s intuitive musicianship to shine. We did some work on specifically musical questions (the work on hierarchical rhythmic structures in particular), but a lot of the improvements in the musical shaping and delivery were effected by the quartet without my input once we'd cleaned up aspects of execution that hat hitherto been hiding them.

Even when we were focused on specific questions of expressive shape and colour, the process was mostly about me asking what was going on in the emotional arc of the song, and – because they had spent a lot more time thinking about it than I had – eliciting nuanced and insightful analyses. All I had to do then was to invite them to think about that and trust that their voices would reflect their understanding.