Coaching

January is one of the points in the year when I seem to spend a lot of time responding to emails enquiring when I am available for coaching and workshop bookings. And I spend a lot of it living with a mild background anxiety that, once I've told various groups which dates are free, and they've gone back to consult with their members, they're all going to come back and ask for the same day.

The obvious solution to this, and one which it has only taken me 7 years to think of, is to publish which dates are possible so people can consult amongst themselves before getting in touch to book. At the least, this will save us all a cycle of email toing and froing, and at best it will prevent disappointment when somebody snaffles your preferred date first.

Cy Wood in actionAs I reported earlier in the month, I had a stupendously enriching time with the good people of Barbershop in Germany at their Harmony College. Having done all the big-picture reflections when I first came home, I find my notebook has a pile of interesting observations, none of which is big enough to blog about in themselves, but all of which are too useful not to share.

So here is a pleasant miscellany of observations of things I found stimulating. Mostly, I see now I write them up, because they were specific instances of general principles I have been writing about over the last couple of years. Always good to see something you theorise about played out in real life.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Brunel Harmony in Saltash. They’ve seen a lot of changes since I was with them last year, and will be heading to LABBS Convention in the autumn with a rather smaller chorus than last year and a new director out front. And the changes had meant they were slightly behind themselves in terms of the preparation schedule they might have chosen.

But don’t let any of those circumstances worry you: they are in fine fettle and good voice. There is an impressiveness to the body of sound you can generate with a large chorus, but the clarity a smaller group can produce has its own exciting qualities. And notwithstanding the changes, there is still plenty of continuity of experience, which allowed us to build on last year’s work on breath and characterisation.

The post-summer-holiday coaching season leaped into action on Saturday with a return visit to Red Rock Harmony in Teignmouth. As I reported back in June, they are preparing for their first experience in national contest at the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers convention in October. It was cheering to be able to let them know how much progress they had made since my last visit.

With seven weeks to go before contest, there were a few moments where technical details needed sorting out, but our work was much more focused on integrating technical control with their imaginative understanding of the song. Tessitura and voicing are so often chosen by composer and arranger to evoke a certain emotional intensity, and a commitment to the narrative meaning will thus supply the level of bodily commitment the lines need to sound resonant and well-supported.

Royce's Very Useful ExerciseA warm and sunny Sunday afternoon took my down to Ruislip to work with my friends at Capital Connection on the new contest package they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers convention in the autumn. It’s a themed package that pairs a reasonably well-established song in the barbershop contest repertoire with a brand new arrangement by the chorus’s director Debi Cox. I had worked with her earlier in the year on the latter, as part of my arranger consultancy services, so it was rewarding to go and see the chart on the next stage of its journey.

The songs were at the stage where the technical demands and the overall concepts were well under control, so it was time to dig deeper for shape, colour, nuance. Debi had built in some wonderful opportunities for exploiting different vocal colours in the set-up to her arrangement, so we started out exploring the contrasting soundworlds those implied.

Last weekend took me down to Teignmouth in Devon to work with Red Rock Harmony as they prepare for their first outing to the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in the autumn. The chorus is about five years old, but has only recently got to a point in their development when they felt like taking the leap into contest on a national stage. Some of their number have experienced this with other choruses, but many will be new in.

I arrived at the point where their convention songs were memorised reasonably confidently, but still needed bringing into focus in places. The chorus were pretty consistently singing the right notes, but not always with a full grasp of why those particular notes were there, so the chords weren’t always locking into true.

The customary hastily-snapped warm-up pic...

Tuesday evening took me down to have a whirlwind session with my friends at Amersham A Cappella. We got through an unbelievable quantity of stuff in a little over two hours, through a combination of some virtuoso prioritising from their director Helen Lappert and me (to blow our own trumpets unashamedly) and the stupendous level of up-for-it-ness the chorus brings to everything they do. It helps that they have very secure technical skills so we were able to work on artistry confident that their voices would be able to deliver what the songs needed.

We spent the first part of the session working on my medley of ‘Hit Me With a Hot Note’ and ‘Too Darn Hot’ that they won a silver medal with at LABBS Convention last year, and then took a whistle-stop tour through their repertoire, encompassing a new barbershop ballad, a Katy Perry song, a spiritual and a madrigal. As you can imagine, this makes it quite a tricky evening to summarise!

Sunday was my third visit to Bristol A Cappella in 2016, and the last one before they sing as the first competitor in the UK’s first ever mixed barbershop chorus competition in Harrogate at the end of May. This is going to be a significant adventure for them, as whilst there is a strong core of barbershop experience in the group, the majority have no prior experience either of the specific experience of a barbershop convention, or the general experience of travelling that far and staying away from home to participate in a singing contest. But if you’re going to go on an adventure, you may as well make history while you’re at it, eh?

Our focus was thus on performance communication and mental preparation. We had a couple of technical details that needed attention, but we got them out of the way early so we could get back out of our left brains. And in the event even these turned out to be about meaning rather than technique: the notes were right but the chords weren’t locking because people were struggling to work out why they were right. Once we made sense of the progressions, the chords came into focus.