Learning

Saturday saw choral directors from around the UK brave the winds the floods of the previous few days to come to Birmingham for the second iteration of my Conduct with Charisma workshop. As I remarked after the last one, this kind of event brings with it that wonderful ensemble quality that you learn things together that you wouldn't learn exploring the subject by yourself. Filtering the material through the different perspectives, backgrounds and assumptions that the different participants bring with them gives everyone a rounder and more nuanced understanding than would otherwise be available. The social dimension of learning is about what you can learn as well as how

I spent Saturday in Peterborough with Rhapsody Chorus for what turned out to be an intensive coaching session. Part of the challenge was from working on music that was as yet very fresh in preparation, so the singers were working harder all day than they would with more familiar repertoire. At the same time, the very freshness meant we weren't having to try and move beyond any particularly ingrained habits, so the distance travelled was commensurately greater.

A theme that emerged several times during the day, and then reappeared in our debrief session at the end was that the place where effective work takes place is at the edge of your current ability. If you can do something comfortably, it's having a nice time singing (which isn't itself a band thing to do!) but you're not particularly learning anything. The things you need to spend rehearsal times on are the things that you can't quite do yet, but you can get close enough that you know a few more tries will get you there.

Wednesday took me back to Windsor for a second visit to the Royal Harmonics. In some ways it feel like no time at all since I was last with them, but I couldn't help but notice that it was light when I arrived for my previous visit, but this time night had already fallen.

It was a pleasingly productive evening's work, with focused attention on several different pieces covering a wide range of musical and vocal issues. Their director, John Palmer, had some very clear agenda items for the songs he had picked to work on, but at the same time balanced his areas of interest with an openness for my diagnoses of a song's highest priorities for work. Sometimes the areas I picked up as the most important for attention were the same as the ones he had ear-marked to work on, whilst sometimes I brought up things that had not particularly been on his radar; either case was useful and interesting.

My Irish tour continued with a weekend’s work with Ireland Unlimited, the country’s premier barbershop chorus. Drawn from across the country, they meet for one day a month, and the skills developed centrally have also been significant in supporting and developing the skills in local choruses. I suspect Ireland Unlimited of having a significant hand in the improvement in performances I noticed when judging the IABS Convention this time last year.

The invitation to Ireland Unlimited’s retreat was the kernel around which my mini-tour had grown. I was working alongside Jon Conway, who has been working with IU on singing for some time, and as ever it was both stimulating and relaxing to cox-and-box with another coach. Having different faces in front of them keeps the chorus fresher, and we each get more chances to catch our breath and collect our thoughts, so our coaching is that much more focused and to the point. And of course it is always a joy and delight to see experienced colleagues in action and learn from them.

Thursday evening saw final episode of my trio of visits to Bristol, this time to work Avon Harmony and their new director Alex de Bruin. It must be at least six years since I last coached the chorus, but I was still greeted like a long-lost friend. And the club chair had baked a cake; I like her leadership style.

We covered a varied range of both vocal and musical areas during the evening, making it one of those sessions that feels hard to summarise. One theme that emerged in more than one context, though, was the idea that it's okay to be not-yet-skilled at something - in fact, better to dive on in an achieve it only intermittently than use a work-around that produces a competent half-way version.

Do you ever have one of those penny-drop moments when you suddenly realise that something you have learned recently might actually explain something else that you know from experience to be true but had never previously really understood?

I had one of these recently about the way that it takes performing a piece to cement it. It is a robust generalisation based in observed experience that however much you might practise a piece of music, it is the act of performance that moves it up to the next level. I have tended to think of the cycle of rehearsal and performance in terms of the metaphor of tempering steel: repeated heating and quenching is what makes it strong.

Thursday saw me out East to coach Norwich Harmony at the start of the convention preparation season. They have been making significant strides in recent years in their consistency of control over matters of vocal production and unit sound, and it was interesting to hear how these efforts played out working on different parts of their repertoire.

To start with, there was a clear difference in technical control between a piece they have only recently learned and one that has been in their repertoire for a couple of years. It’s one of the endless dilemmas in developing a chorus that, while keeping songs in the repertoire for longer gives opportunities for depth of learning as familiarity with content frees up attention for other matters, at the same time, each song tends to act as a snap-shot of the skill level the singers had when it was first introduced.

I recently received an email with the subject line 'Please help me to harmonise', and I thought: well, yes, that's what I do! I'll let my correspondent say in her own words what in particular she'd like help with:

In January I took up singing in an A Cappella group. I find singing in a harmony group difficult at present and I am sure that it is all in my head.

I am singing baritone and have no problem at all learning my part, I sing well when I am grouped with the other baris in my group and we sound great as a unit. It's when we are split up and I end up having the lead part sung loudly in my ear, I just can't cope because all I can hear is the lead part... I would love to be able to hear the chord that all the parts make up to help me gel in this chorus.

Now my first thought is: don't be down-hearted, this is a perfectly normal experience in the first few months of singing a cappella harmony. One of the reasons I wanted to respond publicly was because there will be loads of other people saying either, 'Yes, that's me too!' or 'Yes, that was me when I first started!' So message number 1: hang on in there, this is something you do get better at over time.