Choral

I’ve been thinking a lot about melodic shape recently in the context of a couple of pieces Rainbow Voices are working on. Specifically, I’ve been wanting to catalogue a handful of features that are often found in melodies, that, once identified, offer clues to help make the most of the tune’s expressive potential. They’re all features that you may well respond to by feel, but by bringing them to conscious awareness, you can be more purposeful in how you approach them. The point is not to replace your intuition, that is, but to understand and thus enhance it.

I’ve written about some of these principles from an arranger’s perspective in the past; this post is following through to what the implications are for singers.

• Long notes are there to feature the beauty of your voice. When you have a long note, there is nothing to do except be glorious, so use these opportunities to take the note on a journey of beauty and meaning. The most interesting moment in a long note is just before it finishes.

A singer recently asked me if I had any tips to help improve sight-singing skills (‘apart from just practising’, he added, so that’s the easy answer gone). My reply was that that sounded like a blog post waiting to happen and I have spent the intervening time realising that I’d now have to do some thinking about it.

Because of course, practising is the key thing. You only get good at doing a thing by doing that thing. But the question remains as to what activities to include in your practice. Are there ways we can leverage the time to usefully hone specific aspects of the skill in ways that produce a more useful improvement than just ploughing through lots of music?

The two big challenges that sight-singing presents are, in my experience, keeping a handle on pitch, and staying with the tempo. For both, climbing back into the music when you fall out of it is central to success. Because we are all likely to make mistakes (see under ‘human beings’, and especially subcategory ‘human beings who want to get better at something’). The key differentiator between successful and unsuccessful sight-reading is less about the mistakes themselves than about the recovery from them.

Course participants with their certificates

I spent the weekend teaching the Association of British Choral Directors’ Initial Conducting course, in its new two-day format. I wrote in the past about the educational value of the previous structure of four one-day sessions a month apart. The practical downside of it was that it was hard for people to attend to the whole course, and the whole-weekend format was devised in response.

When preparing for the weekend it felt at first like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, but as there is the expectation that people will typically do the course more than once before being ready to progress to the Intermediate course, it turned out to be actually quite manageable. And the core practical work has always been strongly tailored to individual needs, with people at somewhat different stages learning together, so in that sense it hasn’t really changed.

Usually my first blog post of November is about LABBS Convention, but this year it has been queue-jumped by a question from a conductor I’ve been working with, namely the use of members of the music team to lead short spots in rehearsals. This post is partly for him, to help him work with his team, partly for his team to help them understand what this would entail and why, and partly for anyone else in the world who has rehearsals to run.

There are two things to clarify here: why it is valuable to have different people lead short spots in rehearsal, and what you might do in them.

In my title I’ve termed them ‘refresher’ spots; in other contexts I’ve called them Music Team spots, or ‘wildcard’ slots. All three titles capture elements of what they do: refreshing attention, making use of the team, and – by giving someone other than the MD the decision about what to do in them – bringing a little spritz of unpredictability to things.

This is a post I have been procrastinating writing for some time, as I wanted to have some useful conclusions about outcomes to report before doing so. But stability seems some way away yet and I have been prompted to write it anyway in anticipation of seeing a lot of my singing friends at the end of this month. It would be tiresome to say this 1500 times when people ask how things are going, so I’ll say it once here in the interests of having more varied conversations in Harrogate.

We all know that that hormonal changes affect the voice. We went through it in adolescence, the boys more dramatically than the girls, but everyone affected to some extent. And it is becoming more widely recognised that hormonal changes at other life stages also affect the voice: when I read Singing Through Change back in 2020, it came conveniently at a moment when I could relate quite directly to its themes.

Friday night at Birmingham Pride

Well over half the Spring bank holiday weekends in my entire life have been spent at the British Association of Barbershop Singers Annual Convention. This year was the first of a new shape to the weekend, as it is also the weekend of Birmingham Pride which is a major fixture in Rainbow Voices’ calendar. Hence I spent the Friday night with them performing on the big stage at Pride, before heading down to Bournemouth to catch just the final day of the Convention.

Borrowed from their facebook page

Wednesday evening saw me virtually heading across to the Netherlands to coach my friends RouteSixteen in preparation for the Holland Harmony Convention this spring. As with last time I worked with them on contest prep, I had intended to take a screen shot to share with you, but they turned up in costume so I didn’t so as not to give any spoilers.

Much of our work focused on the theme of continuity of sound. This is of course both a function of voice-technical and a musical matters, and I find it helpful to triangulate between the two dimensions as we work, connecting up what we are want to achieve with how, practically, to achieve it.

I have on multiple occasions had conversations, when musicking in Germany, that went:

German person: Is there an English phrase equivalent to ‘Ohrwurm’?
Me: We say, ‘The Germans have a phrase that translates as ‘ear worm’
Everyone: chuckles

(It is only on looking it up to check my spelling that I discover that this is also what Germans call the insect the English call an earwig. Maybe everyone else knew that already.)

Anyway, I am thinking about earworms because I’m writing this the day after Rainbow Voices’ Winter Concert. As is so often the case, it is the day after a performance when the music I’ve spent the previous weeks preparing for it is particularly vivid in my head. I have a similar experience when delivering an arrangement: just at the point when I no longer need to process the music is exactly when it rings loudly in my inner ear.