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

We all know that if you practice between rehearsals, you develop skills faster and retain more of the music learned than if you don’t. And everybody I know always intends to do more between rehearsals than they actually do (including me of course).

I was at a workshop recently where we were being exhorted to practice various exercises regularly as a way to improve our vocal skills, and being assured that just a few minutes a day would make all the difference. And it occurred to me that the problem with this message isn’t its content, it’s the follow-through: everyone agrees with the principle, but do they do anything about it? (Well, they might a couple times in the following week…but then Real Life takes over again.)

I came away with two questions from this:

1. How much difference does ‘just a few minutes’ a day actually make?
2. How do you get people to do it?

Last time I looked at this subject, I was considering the vocal issues that need addressing to smooth out a choppy line – namely continuity of airflow and getting the vowels in line. But I’ve also been thinking that an overly wordy delivery is also a symptom of an overly wordy way of thinking about music.

Maybe I should put that more positively. When you see a performance that you could criticise as choppy or over-articulated, you can usually also congratulate it for its energetic commitment to the message in the lyric. You never doubt that the singers know what the song means, and you can tell very clearly which bits they like best. They have nailed comprehensibility and communication – though seemingly at the expense of choral tone.

Symphony Hall's central thoroughfare, thronged with chorus singersThe weekend saw Sweet Adelines Region 31 come to Birmingham for their annual convention. Symphony Hall is an expensive venue for this kind of event, but it does provide a wonderful environment. It’s not just that the auditorium is designed so well for acoustic performance (the judges remarked they’d never been at a contest venue of this size before without people needing amplification), but the social areas are so nicely integrated into the city. Of course I could be biased about my home patch, but I’d like to think I’m grateful for good venues wherever they can be found!

Both quartet and chorus contests were of an impressive quality. Both had clear winners out in front of the pack (Finesse and Forth Valley Chorus respectively), but 2nd-5th places were hotly contested in both competitions, giving a real excitement to the results. And in the lower-placed ensembles, all the performances were of creditable quality – all managed to make entertaining contributions to the weekend.

This post is a follow-up to my last one about the question whether there are choirs that don’t audition but nonetheless achieve a high standard of performance. We have established that such choirs exist, and the question is, what are they doing that other non-audition choirs which don’t achieve such high standards aren’t?

This is something dear to my heart; indeed, I’d almost say it’s part of my primary life-project to work out how not to have to choose between excellence and inclusion. I’m greedy, I want both – and I think it is possible to have both, though I recognise that it takes longer to achieve than picking one or the other.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but a collection of observations about choirs which appear to out-perform the skills their members first turned up with:

I had a letter recently from someone who has returned to singing since retirement, telling me about his musical journey, and asking some specific questions about choral life. I’m answering here because I know the issues he is grappling with are ones that many other people in the choral blogosphere care about deeply too. I’ll start with a few (edited and anonymised) extracts from his letter so you can get a feel for where he’s coming from:

You remember the slogan “Sport for All”? My abiding passion is “Music for All” or specifically “Choirs for All”… I spent a lifetime in comprehensive education, a lot of it in the inner city, so the issue of social inclusion was important to me and [the cathedral choir] seemed to me to be about choral apartheid. … I don’t think that “Music for All” needs to preclude choral ambition.

I’ve been thinking about tempo a lot recently in performances I’ve been listening to, and how we develop perceptions about what is the ‘right’ tempo for a piece. It’s one of those interesting questions because there are no absolute right answers, but as listeners we still have a pretty reliable sense of when a particular choice feels appropriate.

So, to state the obvious: most pieces of music have a range of speeds at which they will work well. The metronome looked like a major advance for composer control-freakery, but even with pieces that have precise speeds specified in the text, there are still musically plausible performances possible at faster and slower speeds.

Well, yes, directors don’t get a choice about this – we’re either male or female, and even if you go for re-assignment, you’re still one or the other. It’s like whether or not to play repeats in Mozart sonatas – not something you can fudge. You do get a choice about how much you make a feature or downplay your gender identity in your interactions with your choir, but even here the choice isn’t only in your own hands. As some of our past discussions about conducting and gender showed, even those conductors who wish to ‘leave their gender at the door’ may still be ‘read’ in gendered terms by their singers.

Today’s subject isn’t the general question of gender and directing, however, but the specific question of the dynamics between a director and a single-sex choral group.