Rehearsing

Anyone else who sings something like ‘Gaudete’ from memory at Christmas will be facing Magenta’s annual memory challenge of four verses of Latin. Doesn’t sound so very much in itself, but alongside other challenges like the rest of the seasonal repertoire to commit to heart and a reasonably sprightly tempo, it feels like a bit of a stretch.

So, here’s what we did in a 20-minute blitz to kick-start the process.

First, we assigned each verse a colour: red, green, yellow and blue respectively. We then took each verse in turn, and I asked random singers to give me a number between 1 and 12, which gave an exercise from a pre-prepared list:

I recently found myself leafing through a book called The Time Paradox that explores the question of people’s relationships with past, present and future. These relationships seem to consist of a combination of attention (is your imagination always leaping ahead to plans and projects yet to come, or wallowing in events that have already happened?), and emotional orientation (do you focus on the positive or negative aspects of the time you’re paying attention to?).

Lots of interesting stuff in there, of which possibly the most important for practical purposes is the typical profile of happy and well-adjusted people. This involves a strong orientation towards the positive past (traditions, happy memories, as opposed to regrets), and a reasonably strong orientation to both the hedonistic present (pleasure, living in the moment, as opposed to the fatalistic present in which you feel no control over your life) and to the future. They also have some useful lists of things to do to strengthen your connection with any of these if you’re out of balance.

One of Magenta’s singers recently asked if we could give some attention to a particular part of one of our songs in a rehearsal because the particular thing she was grappling with is hard to practise by yourself. Not only did this gladden my heart (I love it when people give me information that will help me make rehearsals really productive), but it also got me thinking (which is actually another cause for gladness).

So, I started to classify the skills we need in a choir according to whether you can practise them by yourself or whether you need other people there to work on them.

I recently found myself giving some advice about running a rehearsal to the effect that it is more important to move onto the next activity at the scheduled time than it is to complete the task in hand. And as I drew breath to say why I would recommend this, I realised that it's exactly the kind of thing to blog about: simple on the surface, but more interesting the longer you think about it.

So to start with the more simple and obvious advantages to moving on:

Breath control is a work-in-progress for all of us. Our past selves were less good at it than we are now having worked on it, but we all find that we could just do with a bit more. Like many aspects of technique, there are both physical and mental dimensions to this. The development of muscular control is to significant extent a matter of fitness: if you've not sung for a bit, you find it harder work to access the control you have at your command when you're in practice.

But training the muscles alone won't make your breath last to the end of the phrase. It's also a matter of how you mentally engage with the music. This is a theme I have explored previously in posts on Singing Long Phrases and Resonance, Legato and Support, and back in March, a comment from Trish articulated the relationship between continuity of breath and continuity of thought beautifully:

When the flow of breathing is interrupted, concentration is broken and the flow of awareness progresses in jumps and starts.

A friend of mine was telling me recently how she and her co-director had re-stacked their chorus using a method of assessing each singer’s voice for its type of resonance, and using that to determine placement. She remarked how quite a few of the singers were really quite agitated about the part in the process where they had to sing alone to be assessed – even though it was only ‘happy birthday’, and done in private, not in front of everyone else. Still, they felt the process was worth it when the restacked chorus sounded significantly better than before.

Now, the thing about this kind of story is that it’s supposed to be about the value of the stacking method, but you can’t help wondering how much of the improved sound is actually a result of the process. That little dose of adrenaline the singers got from their fear of singing alone will have shunted them up the Yerkes-Dodson curve to a state of enhanced performance, whilst the steps taken to keep the process not too scary will have prevented them over-shooting into counter-productive anxiety.

Every musician has to make this decision when they start a new piece of repertoire: in what order should I learn this? But it always feels like it matters more when you’re a making the decision on behalf of an entire ensemble: what approach will help the performers learn grasp it with most efficiency, security and confidence?

If you make a poor choice of strategy in your private practice, it’s only your own time and emotional energy you’re wasting. If you take a sub-optimal course of action leading an ensemble, not only are the wasted person-hours multiplied up, but you may create obstacles to your musicians ever really bonding with the piece. (No pressure.)

Recently I was having a facebook chat with a friend who wanted to talk over a dilemma, and it occurred to me that it was worth sharing, as it has at its heart what is probably the biggest question community arts face. The dilemma is this: he is the director of a village band which has an active committee that succeeds in getting them lots of paid gigs. However, it is an open-access band, and many of the players are not very skilled. He was therefore worried whether it is right to accept money for these gigs when the artistic product is often shaky at best.

Isn’t this an interesting question?