Rehearsing

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.

Wednesday took me down to Coulsdon to see my friends at . I last visited them just as we were coming out of covid, and I have very fond memories of the joy of being able to get back to coaching again with them. Since then they have had a change of director, and their new one, Penny, is by chance someone I had previously known through the Association of British Choral Directors.

Our remit on this occasion was to help the director with her musical leadership skills to develop her effectiveness in rehearsal. Part of this involved mediating between the classical choral experience she brings with her and the barbershop heritage of the chorus. There is a good deal of common ground in the praxis of the two genres, but there are also differences that one doesn’t always realise are there until you find yourself in the middle of a miscommunication. This was a journey I travelled myself nearly 30 years ago, and it informed the research questions of both my books, so it was a question I felt I understood well.

In my last post I gave an overview of Molly Gebrian’s excellent book on the neuroscience of practising music. Today I turn my attention to a number of specific concepts she shares that help us understand why we experience particular types of learning experience as effective or ineffective.

Contextual Interference

This is the term used to describe the extra cognitive load that comes with switching between tasks. This is why it feels comfortable to get stuck in and stay with one piece of music for extended periods during our practice. However, as we know, what is comfortable isn’t always the optimal learning experience, and Gebrian recommends using contextual interference strategically in order to make our brains work harder in practice. Finding ways to randomise what’s coming up, and using a timer to schedule regular changes of task make us dig deeper at each change-over. It will probably feel like we’re not doing so well than we feel after a long stint on one piece, but it results in better performances.

Starting with a new choir last month has had me thinking a lot about warm-ups. What does this particular group of people need?, where needs are conceived both in vocal/musical terms and social/emotional terms. And with my first few weeks with Rainbow Voices having been preceded by an audition in which they decided to have me carry on as their new MD, and then followed a few weeks into term by a New Members evening, I have also been thinking about the difference between your regular, weekly warm-up and workshop warm-ups which set up stand-alone occasions rather than forming part of an ongoing working relationships.

From a structural perspective, I approach both types of warm-up in the same way (as outlined here). The rational objectives for both are the same: to prepare body and mind for singing together. But the emotional needs of the singers in the different scenarios are distinctly different.

Valerie front and centre in blue: surrounded by some pretty awesome people

The first words Valerie Clowes said to me when I met her in person were, ‘I fucking love your blog!’, which I’d take as a compliment from anyone, but was particularly powerful coming from someone who could communicate so clearly and vividly about things that matter. A few days later, she greeted me as I ran into her on the Harmony University campus with the words: ‘Liz! We were just talking about female sexual autonomy...[in response to my ‘do go on’ face]...My Wild Irish Rose.’

Many words have been written over the past few days about Valerie, what she brought to the world, and how much she will be missed, and I’m not sure if I can add anything useful here. But even if I’m repeating what everyone else has already said, I’d like to take the space to honour her.

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about the balance between being uncompromising with one’s standards, and about when to let things slide. I’ve been having a number of conversations with people about this, and have also (possibly as a consequence) been particularly aware of it as a question in my own praxis.

Clearly, holding people (including oneself) to a level that you know they can achieve is key to maintaining and developing performance standards. Jim Clancy puts transforming good things that you do sometimes into things you do all the time at the heart of excellence; John Bertalot writes about choral rehearsing as being like pushing a man up a greasy pole.

I mentioned at the start of my recent post on Theo Hicks’s session on Philosophies of Musical Enjoyment that I had been spurred into getting it written and posted by a conversation with a director who hadn’t been there, but might, I hypothesised, find the ideas useful. That post got too long to move onto how he might do so, so I’m coming back to address his particular circumstance separately.

The particular challenge he was facing was working on a song with his chorus that is particularly poignant, and might touch some his singers a bit too closely for comfort as it referenced in its later stages themes of bereavement and loss. Indeed, he found it quite personally challenging himself even without specific recent life events that might be even more triggering.

Obviously, I pointed him towards my post from last year that address this question directly. But after hearing Theo’s session, it occurred to me to wonder whether the different modes of musical engagement he discussed might give a more purposeful and strategic way to manage this.

The final plenary session at January’s LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend was led by Theo Hicks on the topic, ‘Philosophies of Musical Enjoyment: Listening for the Singers’ Joy’. It produced lots of things I wanted to reflect on, and because I kept getting them tangled up I have been procrastinating trying to organise my notes. But a recent conversation with another director who wasn’t there had me wanting to refer to it and so it’s time to try and untangle the thoughts to render them shareable.

The first thing to note the effect that having that title on the schedule had on the weekend’s overall agenda. It put the word ‘joy’ into our common lexicon in all kinds of contexts before any of us know exactly what Theo was going to talk about.