Changing Choral Culture in a Time of Covid

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 28th November 2020
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Last week I received a message from a reader with a number of wide-ranging questions:

Have you already (that I missed) posted something about the changing culture, changing expectations of singers as a result of our individual COVID experiences? Thoughts about what new/different things that directors should do, music teams should plan, individual singer behaviors that will change, etc.? I would be interested in your thoughts in some of these areas.

Looking back over my postings over the months since March, I could see that I’d wandered near these themes a number of times (for instance here, here, and here), but there was clearly a lot more in his questions than these posts covered. So I promised to have a mull and if I had further ideas to blog about them.

On Getting Stuck, and Unstuck Again

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 23rd November 2020
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This is a theme that anyway who reflects on creative practice will need to visit and revisit periodically over the years. It’s been a while since I’ve reflected on it, and going back to see what my past self had to offer, I find it still valid, but a bit tangential to the hurdles I have been encountering this autumn. Today we are going to explore the place where stuckness intersects with apathy.

One of the things I learned early in my life as a researcher was that when writing is hard, it is usually because you’ve not yet done enough thinking (and also possibly reading). Analogously, when arranging is hard, you’ve not done enough noodling about (and also possibly listening).

When you realise that this is the issue, there’s no point beating up on yourself for having started without having fully prepared, because in fact you often need to have started to discover the exact nature of the preparation you needed. You think you know what direction you’re headed, but it’s the process of getting stuck that identifies the specificity of the groundwork you need and thus guides your return to thinking/noodling. The material needs the chance to talk back to you.

On Singing Solo Safely

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 18th November 2020
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On Saturday I led a webinar for the Association of British Choral Directors on Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code and its implications for choral rehearsals, during which we considered how they apply both in traditional face-to-face rehearsals, and in online sessions. I always find the combined wisdom and experience of a collection of choral directors a highly enriching environment, and never fail to come out with more ideas to reflect on than I went in with.

On this occasion, there were a number of related conversations about how the exigencies of remote rehearsing put people on the line for singing by themselves. On the whole, people join choirs to sing with other people, and for many, losing the envelope of sound around them has not only taken away a fundamental aural/visceral pleasure, but has stripped away their safety net.

Now, whilst pushing people out of their comfort zones is vital for learning (and indeed Coyle has written about this in his earlier work on developing advanced skill), you need to build a safe space in which to do that, or else you risk people heading straight from their comfort zones into the panic zone without finding the learning zone en route.

LABBS Chorus Day: Reflections on Style and Emotional Experience

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 13th November 2020
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One of my premieres for the weekend that exemplifies cheerful diatonicism

One of the things we saw coming with the LABBS Big Weekend was how, freed from the constraints of contest rules, choruses took the opportunity to share all kinds of repertoire we’d never hear on a contest stage. At a personal level, this gave me the opportunity to hear a bunch of arrangements I’d had commissioned last year that I might not otherwise have had the chance to hear at all. There was even one chart that was commissioned several years ago but that I had never heard before.

What I hadn’t anticipated was coming to the end of the day feeling that the musical diet we’d been treated to was less varied than I had expected. For sure there were lots of songs we wouldn’t normally get to hear at Convention, but in the event that also entailed hearing a lot more primarily diatonic music than usual.

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