Rehearsing

One of the things that teaching, and in particular preparing to teach, does for you is to bring implicit knowledge into conversant awareness. I mentioned in my previous post reflecting on the session I ran for LABBS on Principles for Remote Rehearsing that two observations rose to the top in preparing and presenting it. I talked about the first there; it is now time to consider the second.

I have for many years used a quick and dirty rubric for describing the effects of rehearsal pacing on singer experience. As I discuss in the blog post that introduces it, there are nuances beneath the surface that lead to richer refinements of rehearsal technique, but it remains a really useful starting point for analysis.

A similar kind of rubric is starting to emerge for me that articulates quality of experience for singers in online rehearsing. The key question it asks is:

For what proportion of the rehearsal does each singer have the opportunity to hear other people’s voices in real time?

A few weeks ago I led a session for The Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers on Principles for Remote Rehearsing. It was a good opportunity to bring together a lot of what people have shared over the last 4-5 months and extract some common themes from the various successes and failures. In the process, two more over-arching observations emerged. Edit: the first of these apparently is enough to fill the rest of this post, so the other will come another day.

The first observation is how varied the approaches to remote rehearsal have been. In normal choral rehearsals, you mostly know what you’re going to see. There are variations between choral traditions to an extent, and between the approaches needed for different skill levels, but these are variations on a common theme. Having visited a lot of choral rehearsals both in the course of research for my second book, and in my decade of freelance coaching, I feel quite safe in this generalisation.

The Telfordaires at our first live meet since March: We sing outdoors, distanced, masked, in smaller groups, and for limited durations. Main rehearsals for everyone together remain online for now.

Back in the depths of lockdown, when the only shops that were open were grocery stores, I was walking home along a weirdly empty high street with a bag of shopping, singing to myself absent-mindedly. After a while I noticed that (a) I had never sung in a mask before* and it was so easy that it had taken me a while to realise I was even doing it, and (b) I had no idea if I normally sing absent-mindedly to myself on the way home from the shops, or whether it was some combination of empty streets and the illusion of privacy behind a mask that had freed me up to do so.

This was still at the time when the general public were being exhorted not to buy medical masks but to leave them for those in health and care services. I had friends in East Asia telling me that masks were the norm for infection control in their countries, but it would be another 3 months before face coverings were made mandatory for indoor public settings in the UK. So my mask was home-made, in three layers of cotton; I later added a nose-wire to improve the fit around the top.

Since then, of course, we have learned from the work at the University of Colorado and colleagues what a tremendous difference masks make to the emission of aerosols by singers, and thus to enhancing the safety of choral music-making. Look at the graphics on pages 18,19 & 27 of this document to see what a dramatic difference they make.

I know, the metaphors don’t get less random, do they?

I’m writing this post to work through a thought that has gradually been coming into focus as we get used to remote rehearsing and exchange ideas about how we go about it. The starting point was how some ideas made me think, ‘ooh great, we can try that!’ while my response to others was much less enthusiastic. As I remarked recently, this is in many ways just a reflection of the fact that we all have different profiles of skills and approaches.

Still, interrogating why I react so differently to different proposals has led me to a specific observation. As I reflect on the kind of choices I’ve been making when devising online activities for choral groups I realise that I’m starting to approach it in much the way I approach cooking. For context, I’ve been vegetarian since 1987, and that’s when I really started to learn how to cook.

I’m interrupting the series on the Myth of the Power of Singing for a quick pep talk to my choral colleagues. I’ve had a number of conversations in the last week or so which have featured caring, hard-working choral directors expressing a sense of overwhelm and inadequacy in the face of the technological challenges of remote rehearsing. If several my personal friends and acquaintances are feeling this way, I bet there are other choral leaders out there suffering similar doubts.

I’m going to start by stating the obvious. The situation we find ourselves in is wildly beyond what we thought we were signing up to do when we chose to become directors. We have no training for it, and those of us starting to offer training for it are really no more than a couple of weeks ahead than anyone else. And yet we have stepped up to keep the music going.

It feels strange writing about the intimate real-time contact between conductor gesture and choral sounds at a time when I have been unable to experience it for three months and will likely have to wait many more before I can experience it again. But there are some interesting notes sitting in my thinking book from earlier in the year and now is as good a time as any to reflect on them.

Sometimes when I’m visiting a chorus to coach, the director might ask me to take the warm-up. I’ll always oblige because I too enjoy watching other people lead warm-ups, seeing what they do and how they do them. Part of what they’re paying for when getting an outsider in is approaches they may not have thought of (the other part of course being validation of good things they do already).

This is possibly not the metaphor you were expecting, but bear with me, I have found it a useful one for thinking about our current choral predicament.

If you’ve seen windows being fitted, you’ll know that the frames are installed first, and then the double-glazed units are inserted, and wedged into place with a strip of rubber seal all round the edge. If you’ve ever had problems with your double glazing, you may have learned that the seal will keep most of the rain out, but is unlikely to (and indeed not intended to) keep it all out. Instead, the frames are designed to drain the water that gets in back outside. (If the installers drill the holes out on the wrong side, they drain into your house instead of outside; DAMHIK.)

Likewise, whilst the installers will squeeze mastic all round the join between frames and wall, this is also not intended to be the primary means to keep the water out. The structure should be designed so that rain doesn’t get in, and the mastic serves as draught-proofing and to repel any minor seepage.

When I asked the Telfordaires Music Team what we’d look back on this period and see as something we gained from it, our bass section leader Eddie identified increased levels of trust within the chorus. This not only warmed my heart, but offered some interesting thoughts to reflect on about the structure of activities and how they shape relationships within a group.

When he talked about trust, Eddie was thinking primarily about the way the practicalities of remote rehearsing mean people spend much more time singing to each other than singing together. It makes you feel more vulnerable to do this, but by the same token your fellow singers are moved to be more supportive in recognition of this. We do much of this in smaller groupings – sections, pairs/threes – so that it’s a more personal and private environment in which to put yourself on the line. This also allows reciprocity – if everyone is taking it in turn to do this, everyone is in the same boat.