March 2018

On Friday night I finally got to have the coaching session with The Venus Effect that we had had to cancel for snow three weeks earlier. It was the first time I’d heard them since our session just before I disappeared to Australia and I was looking forward to hearing what they’d done with the techniques for unit sound we’d worked on then.

It turns out that regular technical work makes a difference. Who knew?

We spent part of the session extending this work. In exercises we played with alternating adjacent vowels on a unison to hear the shifting overtones. This translates in repertoire to the experience of harmonically static passages where the colours shift with the different vowels sounds of the lyric. It was notable both that it was very clear which songs had already been subject to this kind of close-listening and which hadn’t, and how much more fluently the quartet achieved good results when applying them to new repertoire than four months ago.

One of the many useful bits of advice in Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch was, to use their terminology, ‘find the bright spots’. Rather than focusing on the problem we need to solve, they suggest, it can be much more effective to identify where things are going well and replicate that behaviour.

It is a simple idea, and thus easy to implement immediately, but it also has depth to it – the more you think about it, the more it offers. Which is why I’m writing about it – to tease out some of its ramifications, and to work out how they can help us in the choral rehearsal.

The morning after I read this bit of the book, I saw Mareike Buck use the technique beautifully in her warm-up with The Rhubarbs in Bonn. She remarked that one particular chorus member was using a gestural technique they were clearly familiar with to aid vocal production. That person looked pleased to have the compliment, and everyone else joined in the gesture.

As an arranger, for most of the time you spend with a piece it doesn’t sound any good. When asked how I’m getting on with a chart, I have two regular responses: at an early stage, ‘Just at the wtf do I do with this then? stage – so, making good progress,’ and, later on, ‘It sounds terrible – so, going to plan.’

The first of these stages is where you make the big strategic decisions about how the music is going to go. And often it’s in solving the intractable technical or artistic problems a particular project presents that you make your most unexpected creative decisions. So whilst this bit can be daunting, it doesn’t yet sound bad because you’ve not put enough music together to sound really poor yet.