SWITCHing it Up

Just 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.

The re-discovery was most vivid in encountering chord choices that I must have known I had made at the time: some quite dramatic moments in particular were clearly deliberate but hadn’t remained with me, though now we’ve worked on them they probably will going forward.

The sense of discovery came in working through the overall shape of the song through the lens of the emotional trajectory of its narrative. I had a clear sense of the musical form and its general relationship with the lyric, but the experience of it feels different when working through it dynamically for the purposes of performance. Identifying at exactly which moments the turning-points arrive (where the persona makes a decision, where the relationship with the addressee changes) is what, from the perspective of the performer, motivates the different stages in the musical journey.

A central theme of the evening was to enhance expression by reducing emphasis. The song has a deep, throbbing pulse that the quartet clearly felt as inherent to its mode of expression. But if you hold that front and centre it can come to dominate the overall impression and reduce your opportunities to paint on a bigger canvas.

Instead we thought about the phrases in longer arcs. What is the key word that holds the central meaning of this sentence? This will usually also reveal the melodic focal point of the phrase – and, given the way I like to arrange – this melodic focal point applies not just to the lead but to all the parts. Then we aimed to shape the phrase to this point of arrival, which gave us both greater clarity of meaning and more musical momentum.

Key to this was reducing emphasis on initial consonants, particularly on the first word of a phrase and the first beat of a bar. It is fairly rare that the most salient moment, either lyrically or melodically, occurs in these places, and by integrating them more into the overall line, they stopped overshadowing the actual key moments. Indeed, as we worked on this it became increasingly clear that you rarely need to accent even the key word of a phrase: if you have shaped the line to that point of arrival, its importance is inherently clear without adding extra muscle to it.

The tendency to over-emphasis usually comes from a place of commitment. The quartet had a deep understanding of the song’s message and a clear sense of what they wanted to do with it. The instinct to channel this emotional energy into the articulation of word sounds and rhythm, however, meant that surface features of the music were coming over more prominently than this deeper understanding. Even in speech, while we do invest occasional words with considerably energy when in states of emotional duress, it would sound very odd to stress every other syllable in the way that musical structures sometimes tempt us to.

Alongside this redirection of energy away from individual word sounds and into longer arcs of meaning, a related theme emerged of letting the music happen, rather than pushing at it. Again, our musical commitment often leads us into wanting to do a lot to it. But when you’re singing from a place of understanding, as SWITCH were, you can trust the music to come through and bring its meanings vividly to life. It becomes easier to sing that way, and also easier for a listener to understand.