Rehearsing

After writing recently about the rehearsal device of the toggle-switch, on the grounds that it is something I mention frequently, so could usefully articulate in a single place to point back to, I realised that for all the times I have talked about duetting (29 times to date according to a search of this site), I have never done likewise for this most flexible and effective rehearsal method.

I am sure that this is partly because 'duetting' is a reasonably self-explanatory term for what it involves. You rehearse a piece two parts at a time, just like you'd have guessed. But that doesn't tell you why it's such a disproportionately useful device. It sounds as if it's going to be helpful rather than transformative.

Today I am having a mull over one of those exercises that has more benign unintended consequences the more you think about it. The exercise is to sing a passage without any consonants - easy to say, rather more challenging to do.

The primary purpose of this exercise is to help develop legato. By taking out the word sounds that interrupt the flow of the voice, you can focus on producing a genuinely continuous vocal line. My first singing teacher used the metaphor that the voice is line a washing line and the consonants the clothes pegs: they articulate the line, but do not cut through it. When I found this metaphor a little too feminine-domestic for my liking, my friend Sarra provided the alternative image of cable clips over a wire, which is now my preferred image.

There is a style of British (or maybe only English?) humour that takes the hapless idiocy of a struggling learner as the butt of its jokes. It is an old-fashioned mode of interaction in the classroom - I encountered vestiges of it in my own education, though mostly grew up in a more modern, child-centred world.

It is a masculine style of humour. You see it in fictional accounts of boys' schools of yesteryear, and, while a male teacher may apply it in a mixed classroom, the specific recipients of derision are more likely to be boys than girls. You don't hear it much from female teachers. John Cleese gives a good cameo of the style in The Meaning of Life

I have mentioned the rehearsal tactic of using a 'toggle switch' in various posts on coaching visits and rehearsals, but it occurs to me that it deserves a post of its own. Not least so that I can link back to it when I mention it in future without having to explain it again every time!

The way it works is that you designate an object or spot in front of the ensemble as a switch, which toggles the group between two different states every time it is operated. In theory it can be operated by anyone in the ensemble, though with bigger groups sometimes you need to limit access to those towards the front who can get to it easily.

Examples of states I have used this to toggle between include:

Sometimes you find yourself running a rehearsal in a completely new format and it works.

I recently found myself needing to plan a Magenta rehearsal in which the primary need to be met was the capacity to maintain a breadth of repertoire in our heads. Our newest material had been absorbed and had its first performance, and we'd given recent and detailed TLC to those parts of established repertoire that had needed it. So in the week before we started our next new material, our biggest challenge was in making sure the fruits of this work were accessible at will.

Now, we could have spent the evening simply singing through our entire repertoire. That would have been boring and tiring and would have given use the opportunity to practice in mistakes. So, maybe not.

I recently received a message in response to my posts on Transactional Analysis last winter. (The message was actually sent back in December, but I only discovered the 'Other' inbox in Facebook this week. Fortunately most of the of the other messages I had missed were either advertisements for concerts or spam, so I haven't been rude to too many people in my ignorance.) It was from a choir director who mostly has a good relationship with her singers, but was encountering some difficult behaviour from one of them. In her own words:

My problem is one choir member who constantly breaks the flow of energy by making inappropriate comments, mocking my choice of songs, using the group as a platform for his political beliefs and generally distracting people from enjoying the singing. I have tried to discuss the issue with him a number of times but he claims to have no understanding of what my problem is.

Most people I have spoken to either don't understand my problem or, if they have any experience of running groups themselves they tell me to kick him out. I don't want to ask him to leave as he has been coming for as long as the choir has been going - 10 years - his wife also comes and I realise that the group is a very important part of the lives of everyone who comes along.

Scott Dorsey, over on ChoralNet, has a nice blog post about the usefulness of having a fresh pair of ears in your rehearsal room. I liked it not only because he promotes the kinds of services I offer (!) but also because it got me thinking about breadth and depth of perception, and how we balance these out.

Scott uses a delightful metaphor coined by a postgraduate class-mate of 'flaming pink hippos' as representing the glaring and obvious problems that you gradually lose the ability to see the closer you get to your work. You get so focused on paying deep attention to one aspect, that you totally fail to notice much more fundamental issues developing elsewhere.

Do you ever have the experience in rehearsal where people are singing the right note, but it's sitting just a shade too high or too low for the chord to gel? If you spend any time at all working a cappella, I bet you do (if you don't, you lead a charmed life).

I’m not talking about your regular, run of the mill tuning issues here, caused by tiredness, habit or faulty vocal production. I’m talking about a specific kind of fault where an ensemble that is basically in tune horizontally doesn’t always nail the vertical tuning.

Now, you can address this problem at an analytical level, asking people to nudge their note up or down a bit to get it into true. But this approach has drawbacks: