July 2024

Finding the Candy with Heartbeat

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 30th July 2024

It is apparently over a decade since I last worked with Heartbeat (where did all that time go?!), and I see that back then I was remarking on the number of new faces that had arrived since my previous visit. This time I was struck by how many faces I recognised even after all this time; I don’t know how much of a chorus’s story you can infer from just two snapshots, but it does feel like there’s something in there.

Anyway, I remembered the chorus as being a lot of fun to work with, and that remains true. You can tell there’s a fundamental sense of up-for-it-ness in the room if on the first song you start work on you ask them, ‘Shall I be a complete bitch right from the get-go?’ and they all nod cheerfully. Accordingly we started out with an exercise that mercilessly reveals any and all flaws in rhythmic precision and found ourselves 10 minutes later with a much tighter execution.

Exciting News!

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 25th July 2024

Just a short one today to share some news. I have just been offered, and accepted, the role of MD for Rainbow Voices, to start in September 2024. Rainbow Voices are an SATB choir for LGBT+ people and their friends, based in South Birmingham but with a catchment area across the West Midlands. Their MD of the last five years, Rosie Howarth, has had to move on, and I am enjoying a smooth and well-organised handover, finding the choir in good shape both vocally and in spirits. (Interesting how often the two go together isn’t it?)

How Should We Go About Learning Music?

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 22nd July 2024

Learning

I’ve had a number of conversations recently with people about different approaches to learning music. You won’t be surprised to hear that it’s a question that has multiple right answers, though the different approaches confer different advantages and so may prove more or less useful in different circumstances, and I’ve been finding it useful to reflect on these differences, both for my own benefit, and for the various other musicians I find myself supporting.

Start at the beginning

This is a classic approach for a reason. Learning the music in the same order that an audience will listen to it has an intuitive logic because your learning experience follows the same narrative journey that you will eventually be sharing with others. It is easier to make sense of the music when you encounter each musical event in its proper temporal sequence, and it is easier to internalise (and memorise if that’s your genre expectation) if you have this sequential structure in place from the get-go.

On Punching Up

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 5th July 2024

This is one of those ‘writing it out to see if I can work out what I think’ posts. I have been thinking recently a lot about the dynamic in which a choral director finds themselves being bullied by a member of their choir. Chris Rowbury wrote an insightful post on the kind of dynamic of which this is a particular type some time back, which prompted some painful and heartfelt conversations within various communities of choral directors in which I’m involved.

There’s stuff going on behind the scenes to develop training and support for choir leaders – both musical and administrative – with the aim of both helping reduce its incidence and help people cope with and resolve difficult situations whilst keeping relationships and emotional health intact. It may be appropriate to blog about some of that in due course, though it’s currently at too early a stage to go into any detail.

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