Rehearsing

So, when I wrote about this last December I got as far as articulating the following question:

How do we give our singers enough opportunities for repetition to embed the skills that need automating without dulling their imaginative response to the music?

I have subsequently marshalled some of the thoughts that started to teem in my brain in response. There are several strategies you can take, each of which spawns its own set of rehearsal tactics.

Having a healthily celebratory moment
Last week I found myself back with my friends at Harmony InSpires in Oxfordshire. I last coached them back in September, and it was encouraging to hear how their sound had improved in accuracy and clarity in the intervening months. We found some common themes with my last visit as well, though – it’s a rare choral group that can stop thinking about breath support and legato in just five short months!

The thing that has stayed with me most from this session, however, was nothing to do with the specifics of technique and rehearsal method we went through, but was about the chorus’s relationship with the sounds they are producing.

One of the participants on the course for choir leaders I’m currently running for MusicLeader West Midlands asked an interesting question as we chatted after this week’s session. She took over a long-established choir (with well-entrenched ways of doing things) about a year ago and is gradually inveigling them out of old habits and into new ways of doing things. One of the things on her to-do list is finding ways to help her sopranos produce a sound that is less hard and shrill. We came up with some solutions together during our conversation, but I kept thinking about it afterwards too. So, this post is for Clare.

One of the things I touched on in my guest post at Owning the Stage on Musical Performance and Flow last year was the question of how much a performer is in charge of what they do, and how much they are simply following other people’s instructions. This is important, because a sense of personal control is one of the five pre-requisites for attaining a flow state.

This is a potentially tricky issue for choral directors, since we spend a lot of our time asserting our control over what our singers do. We require them to watch our gestures, to listen to and act upon our instructions, to keep changing what they do until it matches our vision. There is a risk that our desire to refine and hone the choir’s performance may get in the way of the singers’ capacity to get into that zone where they perform their best.

So, it’s worth thinking about ways we can hand control back to our singers, without relinquishing our responsibilities to the ensemble and to the music.

In my post back in March on singing semitones, I started to develop a hierarchy of musicianship by how much of the music singers are aware of. The lowest level is where they just sing their part, and the highest is where they feel as if they’re singing the music in its entirety. And it is a robust generalisation from my experience working with barbershop choruses and quartets in post-contest evaluations that the groups in which the harmony parts could not sing the tune were the choruses that scored low.

Our rehearsal processes can sometimes mitigate against the development of this kind of awareness, however. Section practices are very efficient ways to learn a part, but not at all effective ways to learn the music, for example.

Every so often as I reflect in this blog on the process of learning, I come back to the need for repetition or drill for the secure acquisition of skills. It turned up as the idea of ‘re-freezing’ when I was thinking about Kotter’s model of how to effect change, and Iacoboni’s book on mirror neurons gave some insight into the neurological processes that underlie it.

But you’ll have noticed a certain mistrust of drill even as I affirm its necessity.

There’s lots of good advice out there for rehearsing choirs, but I’ve been trying to work out which ones are really important. I’ve made myself stick to three, since that means I can’t include just everything that’s a good idea, but have to actually prioritise. You may choose to disagree – I’d be interested if you could give your top three golden rules in the comments.

I talked back in July in broad terms about how Stephen Covey’s distinction between production and production capacity can usefully guide the choral director’s thinking as they plan rehearsals. But I thought it might be helpful to ponder a little further on this and articulate, in practical terms, what the results of using this distinction might look like.

My basic premise is that every rehearsal should include some of each. Even when rehearsal time is very tight, you need to keep your eye on the big picture, if only to maintain some sense of control over your destiny at a time when you could feel under pressure. And even when your primary focus is on skill development rather than preparing for performance, you need to give the singers some sense of concrete achievement from the occasion.

There are three main ways directors typically introduce production capacity development into rehearsals: