Rehearsing

Moments from the LABBS event

Saturday saw the best weather we’ve had round here all year, so of course I ended up on Zoom for hours instead of sitting out in the sunshine. The afternoon was taken up by the LABBS Directors Education day, on the theme of returning to live rehearsals. We’d set this theme months ago, before the roadmap was published with no idea that our date would actually fall two days before a major announcement about the next step. One of our guest speakers, Prof Martin Ashley, quoted my email to invite him from back in February:

…we don't know of course exactly where we'll be by June, but some kind of live musicking will almost certainly be allowed by then, although not yet back to what one might call 'normal'

Which as predictions go is about as spot-on as I’m ever likely to achieve again!

Our second full-chorus rehearsal: this week it didn't rain!

Whilst choirs in England are still out in the cold (we are only allowed to rehearse outside as yet), we are at last able to emerge from the Zoom Wilderness. The Telfordaires have now had two full-chorus rehearsals on our regular chorus night, and are rediscovering how to do this ‘singing all together’ lark. This weekend I’m participating in two events at which the return to live rehearsal is a key theme, and this post comes out of my preparation for the experience-sharing I’ll be doing at them.

So, for background, whilst The Telfordaires have had nearly 15 months of weekly rehearsals on Zoom, we have also had a considerable quantity of live rehearsing in small groups since last summer, in 1-hour ‘weekend supplement’ sessions. We got in 14 sessions between August and December (with a month off for November’s lockdown) and were able to restart in quintets + MD in April. So, we’ve had a bit of a run-up to the full-chorus live rehearsals, and have thus been through the process of resumption a number of times.

Saturday morning saw me presenting another in the series of webinars hosted by the Association of British Choral Directors, this time in collaboration with Kate Shipway, who had proposed the idea of exploring how people might respond emotionally to the return to live choral rehearsals.

Kate took our minds back to this time last year, when the discourse within choirs was framed in terms of ‘I can’t wait to get back to this, how happy we will be!’ A year on, and people’s attitudes are more mixed – along with the anticipation (and possibly unrealistic expectations), come the anxiety and trepidation associated with re-entry syndrome. And in the time since we last met regularly in person, we’ve all been through some degree of trauma: nature and extent of it varies a lot depending on our individual circumstances, but nobody remains untouched by the experiences of the last year.

I spent Tuesday evening with my friends up at Granite City Chorus, as guest director for an evening’s rehearsal. Their MD Peter is currently on paternity leave, so they got this date with me in the diary some months ago so the Music Team who are running the rest of their rehearsals could look forward to having a break and the chance to be chorus members rather than leaders. Peter did pop in for a few minutes, but I didn’t get a screen-shot until after he had gone, so you’ll have to take my word for it that his baby looks adorable.

One of the things I reflected on afterwards was how in some ways it is an easier task to deputise for a rehearsal in an online mode compared to working in-person. Well, to start with, I wouldn’t pop up top Aberdeen for 90 mins from Birmingham in the normal run of things!

‘Wait! What?’ I hear you cry on reading that title. ‘Why do we want to stop the music?’ Then you remember that this blog talks quite a lot about the choral rehearsal and in that context actually you need to stop the music quite regularly so you can work on stuff. It’s very inefficient to carry on to the end every time, especially when the bit the singers need help with happens in bar 3.

The question arose in a Music Team training session about leading singers in small groups. We had discussed the two modes of leading the singing available, as a conductor, or as a member of the ensemble, and the parallels and differences between them. (Actually that could merit a blog post of its own one of these days.) We’d covered the process of starting the music in each mode, but hadn’t specifically addressed how to stop it.

Last Thursday took me zooming over to Portugal to lead a seminar on ‘Working with Human Beings’ with the students of the Atlantic Coast International Conducting Academy. Every time I work with a group of conductors I remark on the dedication and insight they collectively bring to the discussion, and this time I was also struck by their sense of shared ethos and values.

This is clearly in part a function of the course itself: course leader Luis Clemente spoke to me before we started about the goal to produce ‘responsible’ conductors. The contributions the participants made to discussions bore this out, showing not only a high level of thoughtfulness and care in how they were articulated, but also a shared philosophy that saw the ensemble as active artistic participants in the production of music, not just the conductor’s ‘instrument’.

On Thursday I attended a session for Association of British Choral Directors members on a new app called PandeMusic. They’ve not done a major launch yet because it is taking a while to get it into the Apple Store, but it is already available for Android – indeed I downloaded and had it up and running during the session, submitting my first report in less time than it took the presenters to explain it. So I don’t think it’s premature to tell everyone else about it.

The app is a collaboration between abcd and Making Music. It is the brainchild of Martin Ashley, who gave a presentation on what it does, and why, and was developed by John Willetts, who gave a demo of how to use it.

A recurrent theme in the 3rd and 4th books of the Hitchhiker Trilogy is the technique of how to fly: you throw yourself at the ground, and miss. Obviously, the throwing bit is easy enough; the knack is to get sufficiently distracted during the brief moment before you hit the ground that you forget to finish the process. This leaves you suspended in the air, and the then trick for staying there, and indeed for swooping around and travelling about the place by flight, is not to think too hard about what you are doing.

Like many of Douglas Adams’s whimsies, this is both absurd and weirdly wise. Its very absurdity makes it a vivid metaphor for getting into that state where you can get on with stuff without crippling yourself with over-thinking or self-criticism. In Inner Game terms, it’s about silencing Self 1.