How do we get people to want to get better?

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 2nd December 2024
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Today’s title is a question that emerged during an MD’s meet-up at LABBS Convention in October. It emerged partly in the context of familiar tensions within a chorus between those whose main motivation was to work hard and improve and those who were primarily interested in chorus as a source of social and emotional support. But it also existed as a stand-alone question: if singers were getting feedback from audience members that their performances were enjoyable, they felt satisfied with their achievements and rather resented being asked to develop further.

I guess the first stage in addressing the question is to step back and articulate exactly why those who do want the chorus to improve feel that way. It’s not that they don’t also value social and emotional support, but they also get a sense of reward from taking on challenges. They feel the need to aspire to something to keep engaged; maintaining (at whatever level that may be) gives them diminishing returns.

Exciting News About Medleys!

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 27th November 2024
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As anyone who has been involved in sourcing arrangements for vocal ensembles over a period of years knows, the introduction of Sheet Music Plus’s ArrangeMe programme has been a game-changer. A huge proportion of in-copyright popular songs can now be arranged and published without all the time-consuming and expensive sourcing of bespoke licenses for each ensemble who wants to sing it.

On Learning Lyrics

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 19th November 2024
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Recent conversations about learning music have identified memorising lyrics as a specific challenge. I feel this one too – the notes and rhythms stick in my head far quicker than the words do, and I have a particular talent for weird random errors in the lyrics while singing (spoonerisms, paraphrasing, malapropisms).

So it seemed like a good idea to collate some of the specific activities and tricks people use to help learning lyrics. If nothing else, having more different things to try the process more varied and thus less boring than if you just plug away at the same thing for the same amount of time. But my hunch is that varying your approach also makes the learning more effective as it means your brain has accessed the material in multiple different ways. Thus, when you have a momentary memory blank from your primary mode of learning, there are other patterns of experience available to fill in the gap.

SWITCHing it Up

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 15th November 2024
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Just remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detailJust remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detail

I spent a happy couple of hours on Monday evening coaching SWITCH quartet from the Netherlands. I realised as I came to write this post that one of the things about online coaching is that you don’t necessarily know exactly where the people you are working with are based, but as I had met one of them previously in Dordrecht, that is where I imagined them!

We were working on an arrangement I did about 7 years ago, and it was interesting to revisit it with them. I remembered a good deal about how and why I had made the bigger-picture decisions, and also found the individual lines quite easy to sight-read (which may be due to familiarity, or because I like to write lines I find sight-readable!), but there was also a sense of both discovery and re-discovery on working through it with them.

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