Rehearsing

I wrote some years ago in general about the concept of mental rehearsal - that is, the act of running through an event in your imagination to practise how it going to go. And it is a technique I have been using more recently in my workshops on managing performance nerves. A recent session with Magenta brought out some interesting and useful side-effects of the technique, which I have been finding helpful to reflect upon.

The exercise was designed to introduce the technique as something for the singers to take away and use as part of their individual preparation for a festival performance. (And, indeed, the festival itself is serving as a medium to focus upon and develop techniques that can apply to all our performances.) The first part was undertaken sitting down, with our eyes closed.

I had an email last week from a director who is grappling with two interrelated issues that I am sure will resonate with a lot of my readers:

• Singers who have signed up to perform at an event dropping out as the event gets closer
• Singers texting him before rehearsals with apologies during the time he is trying to get 'into the zone'

In both cases, the problem he identified - rather perceptively I thought - was the effect on his mood. He feels frustrated by these actions, and demotivated. He recognises that this response doesn't help his chorus, and so is looking for ways to manage his own emotions.

To-do list for discussionOn the recent abcd Midlands Conductors' Day, our final activity was a trouble-shooting session. We compiled a list of the top two or three things that each director felt would most help their choir to get sorted out, and then spent some time on each discussing different approaches to them. This kind of session works on the principle that it's much easier to solve other people's problems than your own, and even with your own, just talking them through with people who understand but aren't involved can open up all kinds of new ideas.

One item on our list gave a wonderful demonstration of how so many dimensions of leading a choir are related to one another. We can divide the craft up into all kinds of areas for convenience of training and development - musical, technical, leadership, organisational - but when dealing with the practical questions of how to get things done, we'll find ourselves moving through all these areas in turn.

There is a rehearsal technique that emerged during the early months of Magenta’s existence that we have continued to use because it is rather effective, and I have been finding it useful to reflect on why it works. Its primary purpose is for memory work - for getting a piece that is basically learned off the page and securely into our brains - but it seems to have all kinds of benign unintended consequences.

The technique works like this. We sing the whole piece through with the music two or three times in succession (two if we’ve already run through it during the rehearsal, three if we’ve only looked at patches so far) very quietly and very fast, then drop the music and sing it at the correct volume and tempo from memory.

The pertinent elements of the technique are, I think:

That's a very poncy-sounding title isn't it? It's a classic example of starting off with a simple, practical question, and discovering that miscellaneous bits of cultural theory lodged in my brain from past research projects are actually quite helpful in thinking through the answer. The title only comes later when it's time to write it up...

So, the question that started this all off is: how can we, as performers, remember to do all the stuff in performance that we have prepared in rehearsal? There are all kinds of things that an ensemble will have considered in their performance preparation, and that the members 'know' to do, but you find yourself half-way through a song and realise that you're not doing something you should be, or are doing something you shouldn't (through ignorance, through weakness, through your own deliberate fault...).

Something that all musicians have to cope with, whether in their individual practice or working with ensembles, is fixing passages that 'always go wrong' (sometimes with the addendum, 'however much we practise them'). There are two issues to deal with here, neither of which can be fixed in isolation:

• the ingrained pattern of actions that routinely pull the music off-piste
• the negative emotional response associated with this moment - what Oliver Burkeman has called the 'psychological flinch', or 'ugh response'.

Comedian Jo Brand used to talk of an agony aunt who had received a letter from a man whose girlfriend considered him inadequately endowed. (Bear with me, this metaphor becomes relevant shortly...um, no pun intended...) She wondered who these women were making such comments - surely they should realise that if you observe that it's small, it just gets smaller...and smaller…

This sequence comes to mind whenever I'm working with singers and someone gives the remark that something sounds tentative or lacking in confidence. They may be right (they usually are), but it is the kind of observation that will elicit exactly the opposite response than the one needed.

I have been thinking recently about the instructions that teachers and coaches give to refine what their students are doing, and how often you see what are essentially corrective instructions getting muddled up with how-to-do-things instructions.

Commonly remarked-upon examples include:

• Tuning of major 3rds: sometimes (well, quite often), people sing major 3rds a bit flat, and so are asked to raise them a bit to bring them in tune. This gets translated into a mistaken belief that major 3rds need to be sung really high, whereas in fact the justly tuned 3rd is slightly lower than the equal tempered one.
• Posture for singing: some people tend to slump a bit forward and collapse the chest as a matter of habit in their posture, and so are asked to raise their chests for a good singing posture. This gets translated into a general instruction to ‘raise the chest’ which, for the people who weren’t particularly slumped can result in their distorting their posture, narrowing the back and adding all kinds of extra bits of unnecessary tension.