Building Resonance with SpecsAppeal

I’ve just spent a happy Sunday with SpecsAppeal, working with them on techniques to help them build their unit sound as a quartet. I’ve known them for some years, having arranged for them a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually coached them. I have enjoyed seeing how they have grown as an ensemble over time, and we all came into the day with a sense of alignment between what they are currently focused on and what I felt I could help them with.

Sometimes a coaching session is all about exploring a particular repertoire, and you might have thought that this might have been the case on Sunday as I had arranged both of the songs we worked on for them. But in fact, there was relatively little they needed from me in terms of concept or shape; they had picked the songs and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them, so other than helping them execute those intentions more effectively in a couple of places, there was very little we did that wouldn’t apply to any song they might have chosen to sing.

At the heart of our work was a Lock and Ring exercise that I learned from Jean Sutton with my first quartet in 1997. (I can be sure of the date, as it was the weekend of Princess Diana’s funeral – we interrupted the coaching session to watch it together.) It remains a cornerstone of my praxis and I never get bored with it. I am surprised how little I have written about it over the years!

It involves very simple musical content – first unison scales, then two-note intervals, then in the longer version moving onto a blossom exercise that opens out into four part harmony. It works in long notes, giving plenty of time to listen. For it is primarily an exercise in training the musical brain.

We normally listen with two ears each, located either side of our head, reporting directly into our individual brains. For this exercise, we suppose that we are listening from a single shared virtual ear, located either above the ensemble (if singing in box formation) or in front and above (if singing in performance configuration). That ear is listening for the moment the sound stops sounding like multiple voices and starts sound like one ensemble (that’s the Lock). Once you have found the lock, it starts listening out for the reinforced overtones floating above the sung notes (that’s the Ring). From the outside it sounds like very little is happening, but it takes constant active engagement to make it work from the inside. It’s like spinning plates, you can’t just put the sound there and leave it, you have stay with it to keep it locked and ringing.

When Jean taught us this exercise, she talked about how this approach to listening allows the brain to make lots of micro-adjustments to vowel, tone, balance, and tuning that would be time-consuming and difficult – if not impossible - to do consciously, And one of the things I have always liked about it is the efficiency of getting our holistic/intuitive musicianship in on the act. It also feels very pleasurable, there is a bit of the brain that likes harmony and I can always feel it lighting up in this exercise, whether I am participating as a singer or as a coach.

What was interesting with SpecsAppeal was the way that this mode of listening also produced a lot of changes to how they operated their voices, some of which were quite dramatic, but again enacted intuitively: their brains just figured out what was needed to find the sound they were after. Their posture changed, their inhalations became quieter and quicker, they found a much cleaner adduction between the vocal folds. These were all things I had spotted as things we could usefully work on, but in fact we ended up doing relatively little directly vocal work, because finding this mode of listening did so much of it for us.

The quartet also observed that having the focus of the virtual ear allowed them to become less self-conscious, and less busy in their self-monitoring. By giving their attention to the overall sound, they had less attention to give to micromanaging their own performances.

Once we got into the repertoire, we explored ways to use this technique in the context of a song. We’d lock and ring the first couple or three chords of a phrase, and then the chord at the phrase peak – usually the melody’s highest note, and often one of the more widely-voiced chords as a result. With those in places, they could usually keep the sound in that resonant space throughout the whole phrase.

The virtual ear was also useful in those places that felt fragile: the notes were right but the progressions just didn’t feel comfortable. Taking time to live with each chord and understand how it rings in isolation gives time to make friends with it. You can hear it in the voices when the harmonic bit of the brain says: right, yep, got that now. And once the brain understands what the musical goal is, it can operate the vocal mechanism to get there.

We also spent time duetting, which of course you knew already, because whatever problem you are trying to solve in a quartet’s development, duetting is always going to be a useful part of the solution. One of the tenets of the way I use duetting is that it is the people who are listening who get the opportunity to grow, and SpecsAppeal are poster girls for this principle. It was a delight to see the insights and analyses bouncing around between them as they explored what they had heard. From vocal tone to musical structure, and its relationship with narrative and individual singers’ roles therein: I love those times when the learning is powering ahead under its own momentum and I don’t have to do anything but stay with it.

Anyway, if you’re going to LABBS quartet prelims in June, they are on last thing on the Saturday, and have two highly entertaining songs to share with you.