Learning

Usually my first blog post of November is about LABBS Convention, but this year it has been queue-jumped by a question from a conductor I’ve been working with, namely the use of members of the music team to lead short spots in rehearsals. This post is partly for him, to help him work with his team, partly for his team to help them understand what this would entail and why, and partly for anyone else in the world who has rehearsals to run.

There are two things to clarify here: why it is valuable to have different people lead short spots in rehearsal, and what you might do in them.

In my title I’ve termed them ‘refresher’ spots; in other contexts I’ve called them Music Team spots, or ‘wildcard’ slots. All three titles capture elements of what they do: refreshing attention, making use of the team, and – by giving someone other than the MD the decision about what to do in them – bringing a little spritz of unpredictability to things.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.

Every so often, it seems that everyone I talk to is grappling with the same challenges. Well, maybe not everyone, but enough to feel that we have something of a theme going on, and thus an opportunity to try to be helpful to multiple ensembles at once.

A conductor recently messaged me with the following clear summary of the problem:

a couple of our sections are having real trouble getting into singing off the beat. A good number of our songs have crotchet notes aligned on the half beat and they're often getting pulled into alignment with the beat instead. I wonder if you have any good ideas for how we can encourage off-beat singing?

In the character of robots...

Wednesday took me back to Coulsdon for another visit to Surrey Harmony. Two months on from my previous visit, they had had time to work with the ideas we explored in June, and we could see what was working, what needed further support, and what could usefully be added. And once again, we were working both to support the development of their director’s rehearsal and conducting skills and to build the skills of the singers.

Indeed, these two things often work hand in hand. Their MD Penny had a clear idea of the challenges she was facing: things that she knew she wanted to improve but was struggling to get the results she wanted. Hence, the coaching processes of diagnosis and intervention served both to help solve the problems and to model ways to go about solving them.

My second post on this subject tackled the ‘well what do I actually do?’ part of the question about how to deepen our interpretations. And whilst it came up with a bunch of things that I know to be useful and effective in developing imaginative and expressive musical performance, taken together they don’t add up to a total of ‘deep interpretation’. It’s like if someone asks you why you love your life’s companion, you can list lots of things about them that you adore, but the fact of your love is always more than the sum of those parts.

[Looks across the room at Jonathan, smiles fondly, but decides not to interrupt him just now to tell him about the examples I considered including but decided were unnecessary for the argument. I’ll tell him over dinner tonight instead. If you know him you can probably guess anyway.]

Having explored in my last post the question of what it means to develop our interpretation of a piece of music, it is time to turn our attention to what we actually do to make this happen. Using the distinction between ‘interpretation’ as meaning our imaginative understanding of a piece, and as meaning our concrete performance actions to make it audible, I am going to divide this up into to categories: things we do with our brains and things we do with our bodies. Of course, the two are only ever notionally separable, but when you’re thinking about something that keeps throwing up more tangents you need some kind of organising principle to hold the ideas together.

I’m also focusing on activities that can work either as individual study or as group activities. The relationship between a conductor’s understanding of a piece and the overall insight in performance is a whole other interesting set of questions that I am not going to get into today.

I had an interesting question by email recently from a barbershop director about how to go about deepening her chorus’s interpretation of a song. It came out of some feedback from Convention judges, who had considered their interpretation to be somewhat simplistic at times, and advising them to develop it by exploring the song’s layers. The director was finding it hard to know exactly what to do in response, saying:

As a song we'd sung for so long, we'd got to a point where we were all confident in our own interp, so I'm not sure any of us will have any new ideas as we felt our interp was appropriate. Yes we can get a coach into work on it and breathe new life into it, but I do worry that will simply upset the chorus that we have a version we like.