June 2012

Every musician has to make this decision when they start a new piece of repertoire: in what order should I learn this? But it always feels like it matters more when you’re a making the decision on behalf of an entire ensemble: what approach will help the performers learn grasp it with most efficiency, security and confidence?

If you make a poor choice of strategy in your private practice, it’s only your own time and emotional energy you’re wasting. If you take a sub-optimal course of action leading an ensemble, not only are the wasted person-hours multiplied up, but you may create obstacles to your musicians ever really bonding with the piece. (No pressure.)

In stand-up comedy, there are two schools of thought about the use of the stage. One is that you should keep moving as that forces people into maintaining attention - they can't drift off because they won't know exactly where you'll be when they look up again. The other is that you should stand still, as that is a position of power on the stage.

In conducting, there's only really one school of thought. Everyone agrees that getting rid of extraneous movement is the ideal, although every over-active conductor also remarks how hard this is to achieve.

Sunday saw me up in Warrington to work with the Cheshire Chord Company. Our primary task was getting inside a new ballad they are learning.* It is a relatively recent arrangement by David Wright, and is chock full of the kind of harmonic twists and turns he uses to turn the purposely limited chord vocabulary of the barbershop style to surprising and original effect.

It was clear that there was more in the music than we were going to be able to explore in only one day – but then isn’t always the case? – so the goal developed into a kind of double vision: to use the work on this specific music as a way to learn about the kinds of things it is possible to find, so that the chorus had methods they could continue to use on the parts of the song we didn’t have time to examine in detail. And, indeed, on entirely different songs.

Sunday morning's workshop at the recent Sweet Adelines Region 31 Convention developed on from Sandy Marron's work on the vocal instrument to an exploration with Judy Pozsgay on how to effectively combine the voice with bodily movement. It's an interesting contradiction that, while there is a fertile theme in mainstream choral pedagogy around the use of gesture to facilitate vocal and musical skills in rehearsal, it is also a truism in more formally choreographed choral traditions such as barbershop that 'the singing goes as soon as the moves go on'.

Judy's approach is designed both to integrate the body so it is working as a unit rather than a set of atomised parts, and thus also to integrate the voice with bodily movement. The idea that the body needs to be integrated both for grace/ease of motion and effective vocal support is hardly controversial of course, but knowing that it is so and actually doing it are not the same thing. (I am reminded of Steve Jamison's comment that 'understanding is the booby prize'.)