Choral

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.

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.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about how people go about learning music: within Rainbow Voices, with other conductors I’ve been mentoring, and then just chatting with friends at the recent LABBS Convention. One of the latter conversations brought a key theme into focus in a way that helpfully organises various other interesting ideas people had shared.

My friend Mick Dargan was commenting on a previous blog post of mine where I made the point that people aren’t just empty vessels that you can pour the learning tracks into and then they know the music. He said that he could have the tracks on in the background for hours and still not know his part: he can’t learn by just passively listening, that is, he has to do.

I recently returned to Gary C. Thomas’s classic essay ‘Was George Frederic Handel Gay?’ in the context of preparing to conduct an LGBT+ choir in the Hallelujah Chorus. For those who haven’t read it, the answer to the title’s question is: it is significantly more likely that he was gay than that he was straight. There’s a nice summary the reasons for that conclusion, including reference to research done by others since the original publication here.

Thomas writes not just about Handel’s homosocial social circle and activities, but also about how those have been discursively closeted off from his role as celebrated composer. Both in his own lifetime and since, there has been a general attempt to ‘normalise’ him as a properly manly (heterosexual) man, based largely on assertion, along with some invented evidence of ostensible female love interest.

In my previous post about the insights emerging from the Association of British Choral Directors Discovery Day on female composers, I promised to develop a wider point that emerges from a number of themes, but only after I’d discussed some more detailed thoughts shared by Louise Stewart of Multitude of Voyces.

If you’ve not come across this charity before, you should investigate their work, especially if you have any involvement in Christian liturgical music. They’re most famous for publishing collections of music by women for church use – some historical, some newly commissioned - although this is just the headline output of their more general charitable objects, which are about amplifying the voices of those who have been marginalised.

The abcd Discovery Day on choral music by women earlier this month provided not only the chance to explore a cornucopia of repertoire, but also generated some interesting insights into the processes by which music gets created and into the repertoire – or not.

The tale of the London Oriana Choir’s Five15 Project, as told by Tara Mack, provided some of these insights. Tara started out by giving a description of the project, which included a programme of sustained commissioning of new music along with programming of existing music by women, and a variety of workshops, over a 5-year period. One thing that struck me about this project was its depth and breadth. It’s hard to get unfamiliar names into the regular performing repertoire because they are, well, unfamiliar, and thus less easy to remember than the big names we hear all the time. Both singers and audiences have a much greater chance of remembering whose music they have experienced if they get repeated exposure.

One of my projects as I settle in with Rainbow Voices is setting up processes to involve choir members in choosing our repertoire. The plan is to harvest ideas from choir members and our audiences, and then have small working groups to compile programmes from these ideas for our main performances each year. As part of that process I was writing some guidance notes for the working groups, and realised that they may be useful to other folk too, so am publishing them here. Indeed, a lot of what follows is drawn from materials I have written for conductor training and/or conversations I have had with conductors I have been mentoring, so some of you may have seen parts of this in other contexts already!

1. Sourcing material

• Assume you’ll be considering at least 3 times as many pieces as you’ll actually sing, better up to 5 times as many
• Crowd-source ideas from within the ensemble
• Keep an ‘ideas bucket’ on the go all the time
• Look both for song ideas (and then investigate choral arrangements), and for original choral music and existing arrangements (what choirs are already singing)
• Youtube is your friend

Selfie or it didn't happen...

I spent a richly rewarding day on Saturday sight-singing through choral music by women. The day, hosted by the Association of British Choral Directors, was the brainchild of Amy Bebbington, who led us through the repertoire with clarity of gesture and purpose, and shared insights into the pieces’ backgrounds and musical detail. We also had the pleasure of the company of three of the composers whose music we sang, along with several publishers and agents. One of the things abcd has always been good at is connecting people who want to supply choral music with people who want to sing it.