Coaching

Tuesday night saw me back with my friends at Bristol A Cappella for a final coaching session before their performance in the BABS Mixed Chorus contest at the end of this month. Since I saw them in January they have been doing a lot of work to develop their performance package, and a video of one of their run-throughs had revealed that they had lost some quality in legato and shaping in the process, so they asked me to come along and help reintegrate their singing quality with their performance.

I always dither over devising titles that could encapsulate a whole day’s work with a chorus and their director, but rarely more than this time. Joining the Dots with Norwich Harmony? Finding the Flow? Making Life Easier? Taking the Muscle Out? All of these would be true of our musical adventures together, which were deep and satisfying.

We had two songs to work on. One was relatively new to the chorus and was basically coming into shape, having got to the point where it would benefit from refinement of the detail. The other was established in the performing repertoire, but had rather got stuck; they had a vision of the kind of flow they wanted from it, but had been struggling to achieve it in practice.

I forsook my own chorus on Wednesday evening to visit my friends at the Belles of Three Spires. They were in a new venue since last time I coached them, and there were some new faces to see as well as some long-standing friends. We had a dual focus for the evening: work on a couple of my arrangements – one they had commissioned a while back, and another they have recently picked up – and to work on refining the conductor-choir bond.

This latter theme is one that a number of directors are grappling with at the moment – myself included. When we came back to live rehearsing after covid, it was worse of course – as was everything else – but it seems that for quite a few of us it improved organically to a certain extent, but then kind of stalled at a fairly generalised level. The result is music that has an overall sense of shape and shared purpose, but lacks the clarity of detail to really come to life.

I didn't take a screenshot because I didn't want to show their costumes before their big reveal at Convention: pic from their website insteadThere are many things that you can’t achieve on Zoom, but there are also some key things that you can, such as coaching people in a different country for a couple of hours. Much as I love the city of Dordrecht from my visit there a few years ago, it’s not really a viable trip to make just for an evening!

I spent Thursday evening working with Route Sixteen, who will soon be defending their gold medal from 2019 in Holland Harmony’s national barbershop convention. They are finally getting the chance to share the concept package they had originally planned for 2021, and, whilst it has been quite hard to pace how to keep it alive through the covid era, it will be wonderful for them finally to share it.

When, as a coach, you participate in a process that sees a radical transformation, a real shift in skill level in a short time, it is tempting to feel like you are a superhero. But the real superheros on these occasions are the people who have made the leap. It is their combination of motivation, clarity about their needs, and trust in each other that sees the new skills crystalise as if out of a super-saturated solution. ‘Learning readiness’ is the key driver here, though the term itself doesn’t convey the magic of what it can achieve.

I spent last Thursday evening with Fascinating Rhythm, their director Jo Thorn having asked me to come down and work with them on refining the communication between conductor and singers. They were collectively finding themselves frustrated not to attain the clarity and precision they aspired to, and as the overall sound of the chorus improved, this need was coming more and more into focus.

Natalie Feddon addressing the chorus

It was all happening at Cleeve Harmony’s chorus night on Wednesday. They had a visit from LABBS Chair Natalie Feddon and a new member to be welcomed into the organisation, as well as two new songs to be coached on. I was there for the latter bit, but it was fun to be there for the other bits, especially as I’d not been able to join them for their 10th birthday celebrations the week before.

The two new songs we were working on were ones I’d arranged for them back in the autumn, so one was at the ‘basically learned but still finding our way round it’ stage and the other at the ‘started learning, but only the music team has sung it together yet’ stage. One of the fun things about coaching music in this very early stage of development is that you can explore global themes such as concept and groove that shape how people feel and understand the music while they’re still getting acquainted with it.

Some days you find similar concepts coming up repeatedly in different musical contexts; Saturday was such a day with my friends at Bristol A Cappella. One of the advantages of days like this is that you find people get quicker at applying the concepts on successive encounters, and indeed that after a while you no longer have to point out where they need to apply them, as they’re figuring it out for themselves.

One theme for the day was of staying with a note right to the end of the phrase. Linguistically, the brain pretty much moves on when you get to the last syllable of a sentence; in general conversation we don’t tend to elongate them, but go straight to drawing breath for the next utterance. But when singing, it is very audible when the attention has moved on, even if people are holding the note for the notated length. You have to stay interested in it for the tone to retain integrity.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella. It was my first visit since the pandemic, and it’s starting to feel like life is healing over the huge cut in our life narratives made by the covid hiatus. It wasn’t simply picking up where we left off in 2019 (though looking back there are some common themes), but having a shared history with a significant number of the group helped us find our way into working together again readily.

As a group, they specialise in arrangements of pop, rock and show songs, and our task was to work on two songs from musicals, which, while quite contrasting in mood and expressive impact, had some similar challenges. Both are very lyric-led, with the verses in particular being quite wordy, and the task was to find a way to capture the actorly approach to singing the source genre entails whilst supplying the musical flow that would be provided by the band in the original context. The words were absolutely essential to the expression, but we needed them also not to get in the way of the music.