Learning

Whilst I write up all my full-day or full-evening coaching sessions and workshops here (for the combined purpose of reflecting on them for myself and the enesembles, and for sharing what we learned), I don't always write up shorter sessions. An hour by Skype has a different rhythm to it from a 2-hour+ intensive. It tends to be more about sorting out details and consolidating partly-grasped areas of development than breaking new ground.

But sometimes one of these sessions will throw up something that is really asking to be written about, either for the practical techniques involved, or for what it can teach us about how people think musically. Or, in this case, both.

There is a rehearsal technique that emerged during the early months of Magenta’s existence that we have continued to use because it is rather effective, and I have been finding it useful to reflect on why it works. Its primary purpose is for memory work - for getting a piece that is basically learned off the page and securely into our brains - but it seems to have all kinds of benign unintended consequences.

The technique works like this. We sing the whole piece through with the music two or three times in succession (two if we’ve already run through it during the rehearsal, three if we’ve only looked at patches so far) very quietly and very fast, then drop the music and sing it at the correct volume and tempo from memory.

The pertinent elements of the technique are, I think:

Something that all musicians have to cope with, whether in their individual practice or working with ensembles, is fixing passages that 'always go wrong' (sometimes with the addendum, 'however much we practise them'). There are two issues to deal with here, neither of which can be fixed in isolation:

• the ingrained pattern of actions that routinely pull the music off-piste
• the negative emotional response associated with this moment - what Oliver Burkeman has called the 'psychological flinch', or 'ugh response'.

I have been thinking recently about the instructions that teachers and coaches give to refine what their students are doing, and how often you see what are essentially corrective instructions getting muddled up with how-to-do-things instructions.

Commonly remarked-upon examples include:

• Tuning of major 3rds: sometimes (well, quite often), people sing major 3rds a bit flat, and so are asked to raise them a bit to bring them in tune. This gets translated into a mistaken belief that major 3rds need to be sung really high, whereas in fact the justly tuned 3rd is slightly lower than the equal tempered one.
• Posture for singing: some people tend to slump a bit forward and collapse the chest as a matter of habit in their posture, and so are asked to raise their chests for a good singing posture. This gets translated into a general instruction to ‘raise the chest’ which, for the people who weren’t particularly slumped can result in their distorting their posture, narrowing the back and adding all kinds of extra bits of unnecessary tension.

I don't do very much one-to-one coaching - my primary focus is on ensembles - but occasionally I'll do a few sessions with someone to help them along their way. Usually it is a friend of a friend who has found me by word of mouth and wants help with something that they find is getting in the way of their full enjoyment of a choral experience - typically vocal strain, tiredness or hoarseness by the end of rehearsal.

When I say yes to these requests, it's because of a combination of the personal connection, the fact they are usually able to come on a weekday afternoon when I am pretty flexible for time, and because I don't like the thought of people feeling uncomfortable in choir. It's not what choirs are for, and people should be going home feeling lit up, not hoarse.

But there's a specific pay-off I gain from these sessions: I learn a lot about how adults with some choral experience but no specific vocal training relate to their voices. A one-on-one session gives the chance for really close observation and listening as you work through vocal tasks. And this is useful because this is a profile of singer I meet all the time in my work with choirs.

Anyone else who sings something like ‘Gaudete’ from memory at Christmas will be facing Magenta’s annual memory challenge of four verses of Latin. Doesn’t sound so very much in itself, but alongside other challenges like the rest of the seasonal repertoire to commit to heart and a reasonably sprightly tempo, it feels like a bit of a stretch.

So, here’s what we did in a 20-minute blitz to kick-start the process.

First, we assigned each verse a colour: red, green, yellow and blue respectively. We then took each verse in turn, and I asked random singers to give me a number between 1 and 12, which gave an exercise from a pre-prepared list:

Sometimes you read a book, and 20 years later you find there’s a single passage or argument that has stayed with you.There is a passage in Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker that’s like this for me. It’s where he’s taking on a critic of the theory of evolution who argues that the eye is such a complex and intricate organism that it could not possibly have evolved incrementally, because it would have had to go through so many intermediate stages in which it worked only imperfectly and would therefore confer no advantage on its owner.

Dawkins answer was (in my recollection):

The odds are that you are reading this through glass lenses.

Sunday took me back down to London for the third of my quick-succession visits to Capital Connection. This time we had a little longer to spend together, so we could start and end the afternoon getting into the detail of repertoire, with a presentation/discussion session on performance psychology sandwiched in the middle.

This session was based upon the one I prepared for a LABBS education day back in April, but with a longer time-frame to play with we were able to unfold the content out into longer exercises and discussion sessions en route. For instance, instead of just introducing the distinction between outcome, process and personal goals, we could spend some time discussing what kind of goals would fit in each category for the chorus at the moment.