Music Teams

On Saturday, Andy Allen was invited to present at the quarterly Forum for MDs of choruses in the British Association of Barbershop Singers. For those who don’t know him, Andy is the brains behind the renaissance of Hallmark of Harmony, a once-great chorus that had by the mid-2000s fallen some way from its previous heights, while still being haunted by the memories of those past achievements. Andy led their transformation back to glory from around 2012, and they are the reigning British male chorus champions from 2019.

Now, Andy is a fine musician, but the thing I admire him for most is his skill and insight into building organisational structures and processes that bring out the best in the people around him. Indeed, one could hypothesise that one of the reasons he has such good people around him is his knack for figuring out how they can best make their contributions: there’s nothing like feeling useful to motivate people to stay involved.

On Monday evening I zoomed in for an hour with the Music Team of Norwich Harmony. They are in the process of learning one of my arrangements and wanted to talk through several aspects of it as a way of both verifying and deepening their understanding of the music. They chose an ideal moment to have the session – they all clearly know the song well enough to know what kinds of questions it asks of them, but are still fluid in their conception of it.

A theme that came up in a couple of contexts was dynamic shaping. One team member remarked on the way the sheet music doesn’t contain any explicit indications (‘there aren’t any Ps and Fs’ is how she put it), but the music clearly doesn’t want to just to be all at one level.

Today’s post is reflection on a concept I learned from Tara McPherson’s Reconstructing Dixie - which I highly recommend as a detailed and nuanced analysis of the meanings accrued by the American South from the mid-20th century through to the 1990s. If you’re interested in the cultural construction of nostalgia, there’s a lot of food for thought there, but today’s theme is specifically her central image of ‘lenticular vision’.

A lenticular lens is one that magnifies different images when viewed from different angles, and is used to produce pictures which change with changes in the position of the viewer. McPherson introduces this concept via the example of a picture of an old plantation house which from one angle showed the White people that owned it, from another, the Black people who serviced it.

In my recent post about a set of wide-ranging questions from a reader, I deferred the question about how expectations of our singers have changed under covid, on the grounds that I needed to do some more thinking about it. This post is where I will do that thinking.

When someone asks you a question about a subject on which you know you have some knowledge, you look into your brain, and usually find, if not a ready-made answer, then some useful examples from which to start to derive one. On this occasion, that process revealed… not very much. For all I’ve spent a much larger proportion of my time than usual plugged into various choral community support networks this year, I’ve not seen very much discussion about this.

Last week I received a message from a reader with a number of wide-ranging questions:

Have you already (that I missed) posted something about the changing culture, changing expectations of singers as a result of our individual COVID experiences? Thoughts about what new/different things that directors should do, music teams should plan, individual singer behaviors that will change, etc.? I would be interested in your thoughts in some of these areas.

Looking back over my postings over the months since March, I could see that I’d wandered near these themes a number of times (for instance here, here, and here), but there was clearly a lot more in his questions than these posts covered. So I promised to have a mull and if I had further ideas to blog about them.

When the rules in England changed mid-August to allow group singing within certain guidelines, the Telfordaires were one of the first groups out of the blocks to restart live sessions. Our main rehearsal each week remains online, so that it is accessible for everyone (including those having to quarantine or self-isolate, both of which have occurred in recent weeks), but we have added optional ‘weekend supplement sessions’ for smaller groups to experience live harmonising.

Part of our decision back in March to start remote rehearsing some days before the UK went into lockdown was that we didn’t want those who were vulnerable – and thus already disadvantaged by circumstance – to have to miss out on the nice things. In a similar spirit, we established the principle for our return to live singing that anything we did that didn’t include everyone should have a focus on improving things for the whole chorus.

Screenshot or it didn't happen...

I had a productive session on Tuesday evening with the music team of the Red Rosettes, exploring musical features of the ballad I arranged for them last year. I would have met with the whole chorus, but their rehearsal clashes with my own, and while under normal circumstances I don’t mind occasionally abandoning my team to get on with things while I visit another chorus, under current conditions I’d rather not. Not that my team aren’t awesome, you understand, I just want to be there for them.

Anyway, the Red Rosettes were very understanding, and we recorded the session to share with the rest of their singers. There is an advantage in a smaller group that you have a more genuinely interactive session, so there were upsides too.

They had sent me a recording of the chorus singing the ballad just before lockdown, and whilst it was clearly still work-in-progress, you could hear that they are on the case: they have a clear intuitive feel for what the music is doing and what it asks of the singers. Our session largely involved bring this intuition to the surface, articulating things they have felt implicitly to help them understand their instincts.

One segment of our working brain-dumpToday’s title is a direct quote from the inimitable Mo Field, who as Guest Educator at the LABBS Directors Weekend last summer, invited the assembled chorus directors to consider the kinds of vocabulary and turns of phrase they habitually use with their singers. What kind of values do they encode? What underlying messages do they give about what you care about?

Re-reading Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code earlier this year gave a nice cross-reference to his analysis of successful coaches. Distinctive and pithy catch-phrases that capture central principles of praxis are one of the characteristic behaviours that he documents.