Learning

One of the delightful by-products of being a tutor on courses such as the British Kodály Academy’s is that when you’re not delivering sessions, you get to sit in on other people’s. Indeed, I had the honour of teaching László Nemes the term ‘gatecrash’ to describe my attendance at his conducting class one afternoon. (His English is excellent, so one can only assume he is too polite to have needed this word before.)

There were three specific details in the work he did with the course participants that caught my attention.

The Hayes Conference Centre: resplendent in the spring sunshineEarlier this week I had the pleasure of delivering some sessions at the Britsh Kodály Academy’s Spring Course. I was there straddling my two worlds: delivering to singers and choral conductors from a largely classical barckground (several of whom I already knew, indeed, through the Association of British Choral Directors), but there as an expert in barbershop music.

My contributions included a lecture on the history and culture of barbershop - with the aim of helping people who had probably happened across the genre but knew little about the detail of either its craft or ethos make sense of what they heard - and two practical workshops on expanded sound. For these I stole Gage Averill’s rather wonderful turn of phrase ‘Romancing the Tone’ as my title, and focused on the lessons in practical acoustics and the kinaesthetic pleasures of harmony that barbershop has taught me and that I use with musicians from any and all backgrounds.

Here is a paradox for you. Both these statements are, as generalisations, true:

1. People need to have sung something at least five times for it to get properly embedded in memory
2. After the third time through it, people's attention quality drops of significantly

This is one of the central challenges of choral rehearsal. It is not just that, whilst we need repetition to learn, repetition degrades attention. It's that this waning starts before we have done enough to cement learning. So it's not just a matter of not repeating things too much - as this will mean we are not repeating them enough.

Do you see what I mean?

In my recent post on goal-setting for the year, I mentioned 'doing things that expand my boundaries'. This is one of those ideas that is very clear in my mind, but turns out to be quite abstract when I try to articulate it. It is related to going out of your comfort zone, or that wonderful notion developed in Saki's short story of an 'unrest cure'.

The point is to extend oneself - in both the sense of to make an effort and to enlarge. The idea emerged over some years from observing the contraction of older relatives - how as they reduced their spheres of activity, capacities and interests reduced too. Of course the slowing with age is ultimately inevitable, but it seemed to me that the quality of lived experience is different when people choose to live safely within their limits all the time as opposed to when they challenge those limits periodically.

I first encountered the concept of legato as a young pianist. Which is of course, the least literal medium to engage with it. Every note a pianist plays immediately starts to die; there is no way actually to join the sound up into a line. So legato as a concept was glossed as ‘smooth’ rather than the literal ‘linked’ or ‘joined-up’ of the Italian term, and was achieved by a sleight of hand by which you manage the attacks and releases of notes to create the illusion of continuity.

So when I met ‘legato’ as a concept in singing, I was used to it as an essentially musical, even metaphorical concept. It came as something of a surprise, therefore, to discover how it operates in singing as a central element of technique. ‘Line’ is something that is achieved through a consistency of airflow, placement, and vowel shape.

My recent workshop on voice and movement with Zemel Choir and their workshop guests have given me lots of food for reflection. I am very accustomed to using movement and gesture as rehearsal tools, as well as working with groups that use choreographic presentations as a matter of course. I am less accustomed to introducing these elements to a choir that does not have an established history of them, though.

This means that I have had the opportunity to learn lots about people’s reactions and modes of learning when starting from scratch. (There are echoes here of my session with Cleeve Harmony back in October - it is one thing to teach something when people know what they’re after and just want to learn how to do it, it is quite another when you have to help them imagine as well as execute the vision.)

This post started out as a paragraph in my account of the Zemel workshop on singing and movement, but grew into a post in its own right. It concerns an insight I had during the workshop that - as these things so often do - feels a bit obvious now I write it down, but felt like quite a penny-drop moment at the time.

It concerns the cognitive challenge of fitting gestures to lyrics when your part of a choral texture is singing something other than those lyrics. Lyric-based gestures, when designed to fit naturalistically to the concepts in the narrative (i.e. paced like natural speech in their frequency and not unduly pantomimic or literal in form) actually help you remember the words, once you have got over the shock to the system of operating hands and voice at the same time.

But choral arrangements don’t always give everybody all the words. Sometimes you have oohs or ahs or individual words picked out of the longer narrative. Singing these while doing gestures designed to go with the lyrics is a rather more demanding task.

I recently spent a morning working with the director and assistant director of a choir on a variety of elements of both vocal and conducting techniques. It was an interesting session for all kinds of reasons, not least the resonances between the work on their own voices and the work on how they will help others’ voices with their gestures.

We spent the first part of the conducting work using the principle that you can hear what kind of effect your gestures will have on a choir by listening to how they affect your own voice. Singing a simple 5-note scale to a conducted 4-pattern, for example, gives a very immediate and clear indication of where that pattern facilitates legato and where it is bumping. Down-beats in particular are a challenge to combine the clarity needed for accurate rhythm and a synchronised performance with the continuity that voices need to flow at their best.