SWITCHing it Up

Just remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detailJust remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detail

I spent a happy couple of hours on Monday evening coaching SWITCH quartet from the Netherlands. I realised as I came to write this post that one of the things about online coaching is that you don’t necessarily know exactly where the people you are working with are based, but as I had met one of them previously in Dordrecht, that is where I imagined them!

We were working on an arrangement I did about 7 years ago, and it was interesting to revisit it with them. I remembered a good deal about how and why I had made the bigger-picture decisions, and also found the individual lines quite easy to sight-read (which may be due to familiarity, or because I like to write lines I find sight-readable!), but there was also a sense of both discovery and re-discovery on working through it with them.

Conversations about Learning Music

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.

Cryptic Coaching with Bristol A Cappella

BACnov24

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, working with them on a new contest package that they’ll be taking first to the European Barbershop Convention in Sweden next May, then a couple of weeks later to the British Association of Barbershop Singers Convention in Bournemouth.

I was not actually being cryptic (as per today’s title) with them; they know exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. But we did have a laugh or two about how I was going to blog about their new package without giving any spoilers as to what it is. If I tell you that the coaching conversations included phrases such as ‘it’s an epiphany’, ‘the semiotics of testosterone’, and ‘make your ‘P’s more ‘Poo-ey’, I don’t think you’ll guess what the songs are, but you might get the idea that they’re not going to be boring.

Musings on Handel, Style, and Ideology

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.

LABBS Convention 2024

Amersham A Cappella and SpecsAppeal: the afterglows were also excellentAmersham A Cappella and SpecsAppeal: the afterglows were also excellent

The last weekend in October typically takes me to the annual convention of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. This year we were back in Bournemouth, which once again seemed to hang on to the tail end of summer for us.

Looking back on my reflections from last year, I see I was full of thoughts about how hearing fresh music keeps your listeners fresh throughout a long contest day – and also about some strategies to help make that happen. I was having similar thoughts this year, particularly in the quartet contests. Of course now we have the mixed quartet contest alongside the upper voices one, both semifinal and final rounds are significantly longer than they used to be, giving more opportunity for repeated songs to show up.

Further abcd Discoveries

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.

More Discoveries with abcd

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.

Guidance notes on Repertoire Selection/Programme Planning

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

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