Self-Talk: A Practical Project

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 29th September 2016
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This is a post written for a particular set of people whom I’d like to help, arising out of a specific form of language I heard in their midst on a particular occasion. But it could have been written for all kinds of other people on different days - it is a very normal turn of phrase. So I’m sharing with the world to help anyone else who finds themselves using it.

Self-talk refers to the language we use to process our own experience of doing something (in our context, making music, though it applies also to all kinds of other skilled activities). It can refer to either the directed, purposeful instructions we give ourselves as we do it, or to the ways we process and frame our experience as we reflect on it. Hence, our choice of vocabulary for our self-talk has a significant impact on how we go about deploying our skills, and how we feel about ourselves as we do it.

The bit of self-talk we are going to focus on today is starting a sentence, ‘I struggle with...’ The project is to replace it with the phrase, ‘I would like to be better at...’

Choice Theory for Choral Directors

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Sunday 25th September 2016
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GlasserI recently read William Glasser’s book Choice Theory at the suggestion of a friend, and it has been a thought-provoking exercise. There is a good deal in the book that is open to critique - to the extent that if I didn’t trust the judgement of the person who recommended it, I may not have bothered to finish it - but there is also a good deal of humane and sensible advice in it.

So, I’m glad I did persist with it, and I’m prepared likewise to cautiously recommend it in turn, with the caveat that you need to be able to cope with an argument that quite often overstates its case and makes unsubstantiated (indeed, unsubstantiatable) assertions. If you’re not sure you want to cope with that kind of thing, here’s a summary of what I learned from it...

Back with Brunel

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 20th September 2016
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Brunelsep16I 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.

Performing Silence

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 15th September 2016
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butterflyI have written before about the various musical functions of silences with the flow of a piece of music, and thus why we should respect notated rests. But I thought it worth spending a little time thinking about how the performer can do this. We spend a lot of our rehearsal time focusing on how to achieve the bits of the music that sound aloud, but tend to assume that the silent bits will look after themselves.

But the not-sound of a musical silence is not necessarily the same as all the not-sounds we emit (or, rather, don't emit) all the time when we're not singing, playing and conversing with people. They carry meanings created by and within the musical contexts they appear in that make positive contributions to the audience's experience, and thus need performing positively.

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