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Zooming along with Route Sixteen
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Wednesday evening saw me virtually heading across to the Netherlands to coach my friends RouteSixteen in preparation for the Holland Harmony Convention this spring. As with last time I worked with them on contest prep, I had intended to take a screen shot to share with you, but they turned up in costume so I didn’t so as not to give any spoilers.
Much of our work focused on the theme of continuity of sound. This is of course both a function of voice-technical and a musical matters, and I find it helpful to triangulate between the two dimensions as we work, connecting up what we are want to achieve with how, practically, to achieve it.
You won’t be surprised to know that we started out with bubbling, as this is possibly the archetypal exercise for connecting up the vocal and the musical. As well as its usual benefits for vocal efficiency and connecting breath to voice, it reveals so much about what is going in within the texture of the legato.
In this case, it revealed that there was often something of a burst of energy at the onsets of phrases, something I have observed over the years often to correlate with the more immediately audible issue of loss of energy at the ends of phrases. We thought about smoothing our way into the phrase as if stroking a cat: you can’t land heavily or the cat will just go away. This also gave their MD Marlous the opportunity to hear the detail of the impact of her conducting gestures: bubbling made it very clear when her direction was eliciting either suddenness or smoothness of onset.
We them put our focus onto breathing patterns. There were a number of places where the chorus had specified breath-points as part of the musical narrative, but otherwise they were aiming to connect everything up. We had a short conversation about the discipline of choral breathing – about how you need to omit a syllable, rather than finish it early, if you are to breathe imperceptibly. The chorus knew this, but were not always aware of when they inadvertently snuck extracurricular breaths that could be heard.
A good exercise to bring this to conscious awareness is simply to have each individual raise their hand whenever they take a breath. There are a few places where everyone does together, but otherwise you see hands going up in pleasingly random patterns as the music progresses. This can flush out places where you have multiple people breathing in the wrong place, but it turns out we weren’t dealing with that kind of problem on this occasion. It was just that people needed to be a bit more mindful of how they were doing this, and given a tool to become so, sorted a lot of this out for themselves.
There remained an issue, interestingly, of the sound dipping in places, not because of breaths being inserted, but because of how people were thinking about the structure and flow of the lyric. We introduced a joining-up gesture to turn these conceptual boundaries into moments of positive connection, rather than merely absence of breath. I like doing this, not just because it is easier to do something expressively positive than just to avoid a breath point, but because it makes the aesthetic of perpetual legato more expressively salient. The connectedness has a role in the story-telling.
Legato is not just about the joined-up-ness of sound, of course, but also the consistency of resonance. On zoom I couldn’t see the detail of the what the chorus were doing with their mouths in any great detail, but I was hearing a some markedly different resonant qualities between certain vowels: each was itself well-matched within the ensemble, but presented a different colour from those either side. It made me suspect that the singers were moving their jaws quite a lot as they sang these vowels, effectively changing the shape of the resonant space in their mouths and thus the audible impact.
We tested this hypothesis by asking them to sing as ventriloquists. (I briefly clocked the Dutch for ‘ventriloquist’ in the process, but have forgotten it again.) Given the chorus’s commitment to audience engagement, we emphasised that ventriloquists are performers, so it isn’t a matter of holding the face still as a mask, merely of calming the jaw movements down and letting the communicative energy be expressed in other parts of the being.
The result was not only more flowing, but also better tuned, which is always a sign that you’ve chosen a helpful exercises.
We also spent some time thinking about expressive arc. The second song in their set starts with an intricate intro of neutral syllables. In the original of course, this was an instrumental texture, into which the voice would then enter. In an a cappella context, you have the same timbre performing both roles, so it takes much more attention to differentiate the roles. You want the intro to signal that something is about to happen, rather than that it itself is an event. It sets the stage, but does not yet present the characters or story.
One way to help find the sound quality this needed was to have the chorus sing it with their eyes closed. This was partly because they had to listen differently when they had no visual cues to coordinate with each other, but also because it simply gave them a more directly introspective experience.
Once we had found this expressive world, the way the ensuing verse, pre-chorus and chorus unfolded was completely transformed. It was as if the singers had always known they knew what trajectory the song should take, but until we got the set-up right, that intention wasn’t audible. There were further nuances in crafting the arc to be worked on after this, but my abiding memory of the session is of how dramatic the difference can be when you find a way to give space for people’s intuitive musicianship to take over.