Rehearsing

This time last year I was complaining misanthropically about the clichéd nature of so many Christmas songs – both in their musical profiles and the imagery of their lyrics. This year I seem to be in less of a bah-humbug mood, and have been delighting in the way the Christmas season can provide a never-ending fund of imagery to help the rehearsal process.

I’ve written before about the usefulness of metaphors as a means to encapsulate complex, multi-dimensional (indeed, artistic) ideas about how music needs to be performed. And the more concrete and vivid the imagery it is, the more memorable it becomes. It turns out that the festive imagery we use to represent the season to ourselves can serve this purpose effeciently, effectively, and cheers everyone up in the process. People like to feel Christmassy, especially when rehearsing Christmas music.

I’ve written before about the pitfalls of ‘note-bashing’, but I thought it might be useful to think of the same issue from a positive perspective: the value of working on artistry from the get-go. This is something I learned from my first conducting teacher, Alan Rump, and like many of the useful things he said, it was some years after I left university before I noticed how useful it really was.

The rationale for the idea of ‘first learning the notes, and then putting in the interpretation’ is that - in terms of Maslow’s hierarchy -cognitive needs are more fundamental than aesthetic ones. So people won’t have any attention to spare for artistic questions if they’re concerned about what they should be singing. This is true as far as it goes, but doesn’t mean we need abandon all hope of expressive development until the notes are in – just that we need to be sensitive to the note-learning needs as we work on expression, and vice versa.

Do you ever have one of those evening where nothing seems to go right? Things that everyone sang with ease the week before sound like they’re sight-reading it upside down; when you gesture to start them singing, they just look at you as if you’ve done something strange and inexplicable; the vocal support sags and the tonal centre strays south.

We can sometimes identify the cause of difficult rehearsals.

Say the word ‘moon’ out loud twenty times. After a while it stops sounding like a meaningful word with connotations of romantic June nights and/or astronauts and just starts to sound like, well, a sound. A rather silly sound, indeed.

This is a process that linguists call semantic depletion. Say something often enough and the connection between signifier (the sound that points to an idea) and signified (the idea a sound evokes) breaks down. This isn’t usually a problem in conversation, so for linguists I imagine it’s an interesting phenomenon that gives them good clues about how the mind processes language, but doesn’t present any particularly urgent practical issues.

People who rehearse their meaningful utterances have more of a problem though.

Earlier this week I received an email that asked:

How do you identify which part drives the key change?

I thought I’d reply publicly, since my correspondent might not be the only person who has ever wanted to know about this. And it’s one of those questions that at one level has a simple general answer, and at another opens more complex questions.

Going back through my notes from my weekend with the National Youth Choir’s Young Leaders weekend back in March, I was reminded of a good question asked by one of the participants. My presentation had encouraged two principles widely recognized as good practice, but Nat pointed out rather cannily that there was an implicit contradiction between them and asked how to manage it.

Since writing earlier in the year about the effectiveness of duetting as a coaching and rehearsal tool, I’ve been reflecting again on why it works so well. One key point about it is that it’s not about the people who are singing – it’s the people who are listening who have the chance to grow. It offers people the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the music they sing – how the parts around them interact – and also about the voices of their fellow singers – tone colour, vibrato, vowel shapes, expressive nuances.

But what is interesting is what the brain then goes on to do with all that information.

John Bertalot produces a wonderful description of the rehearsal process in his book How to be a Successful Choir Director. He says:

The leading of practices is like pushing a man up a greasy pole. He goes up with a bit of effort, but slides down naturally when you leave him alone.

I like this metaphor not just because it is vivid and surprising – and therefore expressive and memorable – but because it is rich enough to tell us things beyond the immediate message it is presented to convey.