Rehearsing

On Sunday I was back with my friends in Bristol Fashion, for my fourth coaching visit since May 2009. And what a difference they have made in two years! The clarity, resonance and confidence in their singing has really improved, and each time there are more singers on the risers – it is a sure sign that things are going well when you have more people wanting to join than are leaving.

One of the encouraging aspects of coaching this chorus is that each time I go, I find the things we were working on last time well embedded and secure, allowing us to move onto new challenges. The chorus uses the technique of bubbling for continuity of breath and enhanced resonance with so much more ease and security than this time last year, and the issues over synchronisation we focused on last August are likewise much improved.

My recent reading of Daniel Coyle’s book spawned not only the some arguably rather arcane thoughts about Schenker, but has also had me reflecting on the implications for rehearsal methods. Much of his discussion focuses on what deep practice looks like in individual pursuits such as learning an instrument, and the challenge then becomes how to generate that experience in a group learning environment.

Ensembles offer both advantages and disadvantages in this respect. The advantage is the social nature of learning. People who are more confident in a particular skill can model it for those who are just developing it, keeping the desired result fresh and present in their consciousness. The disadvantage is the possibility of coasting. In an ensemble there are other people to hide ‘behind’, and you can periodically switch off your active learning engagement and just go with the flow without necessarily being called to task.

Jim Henry in action

Another of the many delights at the recent BABS Convention was a masterclass run by Jim Henry on the first afternoon. Dr Jim was at the convention as bass in the 2009 International Champion quartet Crossroads, but of course he is also director of the Ambassadors of Harmony and Director of Choral Studies at the University of Missouri-St Louis. So it was only sensible to get the benefit of his choral expertise while he was there!

He spent an hour or so working with a large chorus made up of the Great Western Chorus of Bristol augmented by a large number of audience members who were invited to participate. He worked on standard elements of choral craft - breath, vowel and placement – with a brief diversion into the world of rhythmic integrity. So, the content was nothing surprising, but what was striking was the degree of improvement he effected in a very short time.

Three things in particular struck me as central to his effectiveness – and they were less to do with what he was doing than how he was doing it.

To get your lip-trill started, try playing with a toy tractorI spend a goodly amount of time encouraging vocal ensembles to use the exercise of ‘bubbling’ in their rehearsals. By ‘bubbling’ I mean singing on a smooth, continuous ‘brrrr’ sound such that the lips are vibrating together. It’s also sometimes called a ‘lip trill’. It is a wonderful tool, and I thought it might be worth saying a few words both about why it’s useful, and how to get better at it if you are one of the people who find it tricky at first to do.

Vocally, it achieves two things. First, it develops the continuity of airflow that you need for legato line. Quite often people use the word sounds as a way of sneakily conserving air. Consonants such as t or p are made by momentarily obstructing the airstream, and if you hang onto them you can make the air in your lungs last a bit longer than it would otherwise. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of breaking up the music. Bubbling removes all obstructions to the sound and thus teaches us how to sustain the flow of air throughout the phrase. When people are first learning to bubble, their instinct is often to give a fresh burst of sound for the start of each syllable, and they find when they learn to smooth it out that they are having to breathe in a much deep and physically-engaged way.

On Wednesday I outlined the background and rationale for an experiment I’ll be running during June to see what difference 5 minutes practice a day actually makes for the participants. Today I’ll outline what it will involve and how to join in.

What You Need to Do

1. Do the Practice Routine (see below) every day during June
2. Keep the following records:
   • Every day, note whether or not you actually did the routine
   • Once a week jot a few thoughts down about how you are finding the experience (maybe 30-60 words)
   • At the end of the month, write a brief summary of how you’ve found it overall (maybe 80-120 words)
3. At the start of July, email me your records

Some choral directors take the warm-up at the start of the rehearsal, while others delegate the task to an assistant director or vocal coach. And there are some quite dogmatic views in either direction that one or the other approach is better than the other. It would be quite easy to find a wishy-washy, it-depends kind of position on the matter, but actually I find that once you have identified what it depends on, I become somewhat opinionated once again!

So, the situation in which it is absolutely right for the director to take the warm-up is when the director is using it as part of the unfreezing process that sets up the choir’s capacity to effect change during the rehearsal. If the vision for the warm-up is that it is not merely about the physical readiness to sing but also about building the shared ethos of the ensemble, having the director there setting the agenda from the get-go gives a clear message that the warm-up is an integral part of the process.

I was recently re-reading Mark Forster’s helpfully-titled book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and – as you often find on re-visiting books – noticed a point that hadn’t particularly struck me before. The book as a whole is very good at getting inside the psychology of procrastination, of what’s going on when we resist doing things that feel a bit too hard. The particular issue that caught my attention this time is when you’re getting down to something and your brain suddenly pops up with something else that needs your attention.

Choral rehearsals nearly always have two sets of simultaneous agendas:

1. Repertoire preparation
2. Skills development

The two are clearly related. The skills agenda will often be driven by the needs of the repertoire (what do we need to be able to do in order to sing this music effectively?); conversely the repertoire choice may be driven by skills goals (what music will help us learn this particular technique?).

At the same time, they can fight each other. In particular, repertoire preparation is typically a time-bound activity. We need to know the whole work by the date of the concert; or, we need to know all our seasonal songs before the run-up to Christmas. And, like any activity with deadlines, they have a habit of diverting our attention away from things that could be done at any time (and as a result we never actually get round to them).