March 2014

Here is a paradox for you. Both these statements are, as generalisations, true:

1. People need to have sung something at least five times for it to get properly embedded in memory
2. After the third time through it, people's attention quality drops of significantly

This is one of the central challenges of choral rehearsal. It is not just that, whilst we need repetition to learn, repetition degrades attention. It's that this waning starts before we have done enough to cement learning. So it's not just a matter of not repeating things too much - as this will mean we are not repeating them enough.

Do you see what I mean?

When you get an email with the subject line 'quick question', you sometimes know that, while the question might be quick, finding the answer is actually your whole life's work. A recent email from a conductor I've been working with contained the following question:

I was thinking about what you were saying about using too much of my body. It was something I had been aware of, and I intend to work on it. But I was trying to work out how it came about. I think it’s a question of rehearsal technique – trying to convey the ‘shape’ of the song to the chorus without having to break it down. When I start a song, how is it best to teach the overall shape? Would you do it verbally? Break it down section by section? I think I was being lazy and trying, perhaps, to achieve too much too quickly by showing them rather than explaining it very well.

Now, some directors don't have this problem. They find standing still and beating time without flapping round like a tent in a hurricane comes naturally. For many of us, however, the challenge is how to keep our physical expressiveness under control.

I had a note recently from a conductor of a community band about his dilemma of whether he should continue working with them. I say 'note' - it was actually a lengthy reflection on the situation as it has developed over the decade he has been working with them. So I can only summarise here. But I think I can pull out the key points, and they are questions that face many musicians at various points in their lives, so worth mulling over together.

So the situation, in brief, is this. During his tenure, there are significant ways in which he feels he has succeeded: the band's performance standard is better, they are tackling more interesting and/or more ambitious music, and membership is up.

But he is worried that this process has also involved a degree of loss of some of the qualities that he valued on first acquaintance with the band: musical leadership and organisational management are more top-down these days, with the players seeming less in involved in things like suggesting music or finding gigs. He is worried that people are having less fun - there's less laughter in rehearsal, less buzz, less vibrancy.