In a post about ‘The ‘C’ Word’, Chris Rowbury opens up the thorny question of cultural stereotypes as they relate to choirs. He identifies a handful of stock images that leap to mind when people hear the word ‘choir’ and talks about he finds them limiting – both because they focus on a hackneyed subset of actual choirs, and because they carry somewhat negative connotations with them. He finds himself, not unreasonably, rather wearied with the assumptions people make about him as a choral practitioner, since they are both rather inaccurate and presuppose a rather less interesting musical life than the one he experiences.

The strategies he proposes for dealing with the limiting stereotypes of the word ‘choir’ are all sensible as far as they go.

Amersham A Cappella: warming up with Lynne Owen
I was back in Amersham this week working with Amersham A Cappella in anticipation of their participation in the BBC Choir of the Year later this month. Their director Helen Lappert is brilliant at defining an agenda for the evening, and our goals were to:

1. Fine-tune performances for Choir of the Year
2. Increase the magic
3. Enhance individuals’ performances
4. Increase projection beyond the footlights

The thing that makes cat’s cradle work is the balance of opposing forces. The threads can form a structure because they are held in tension by the separated hands. Bring your hands together and this tension is released, and the three-dimensional form collapses.

I find this a useful image for juggling the competing demands a song makes on the arranger. There’s a network of opposing forces in somewhat different dimensions, both technical and artistic, pulling on the arrangement as it develops. Depending on the song and the group who’s commissioned it, the demands will vary, but there will always be this sense of simultaneous, but conflicting imperatives.

On Tuesday I participated in a teleseminar on Chris Davidson’s book Successful Speaking Secrets Quick Reference, which was published at the end of last year. Chris became a full-time public speaker and speaking coach about 8 years ago, when he could no longer bear the dire quality of most of the presentations he had been witnessing in industry. He has made it his life’s mission to inveigle business leaders of the world into becoming interesting to listen to.

I had a direct interest in the subject as a presenter (and one with opinions, indeed). But I also found myself applying his ideas to the roles of the musical performer and the conductor as we went through. After all, being interesting to listen to is a useful quality for a musician to have, too. My impressions are a little miscellaneous as yet – this post is about rummaging through the plethora of things that caught my attention, but I think there are also a couple of Big Ideas that may emerge as posts in their own right when I’ve had time to live with them for a while.

Carfield Community ChoirI had a fun evening on Monday with Carfield Community Choir in Sheffield. They started a few years back as a choir of parents of children at a local primary school, and have gradually taken on an independent identity – though they still rehearse at the school, they have gradually acquired members who are not associated with it. They are directed by Liz Nicholas, who stepped out to keep things going when their original director moved on. Liz, like me, started out as a pianist (in fact we both studied with the same teacher, though not at the same time), who gradually moved through accompaniment to leading singers as she discovered how much more fun you can have making music with other people than alone in a practice room.

The workshop for Carfield was a bespoke version of my sessions on Developing the Ensemble and Aural Skills for Choral Groups. These are clearly related themes, so it took its focus in the overlap areas, with an emphasis on the listening dimension of developing togetherness as a performing group and the mutual responsiveness dimension of aural skills.

I was recently asked to write a reference for a barbershop chorus that was applying for charitable status, in response to the following question they had been asked:

Please provide independent expert evidence to show the performances are of sufficient educational merit to raise aesthetic taste.

As it happens, it’s quite a good chorus, so I could happily write in their support, and it’s quite easy to point to reasonably objective level indicators with barbershop, because the contest system is so effectively standardised internationally. The criteria are so explicit and the training regimens so thorough, that you can look at a collection of scores and articulate in some detail what they say about performance quality.

But what I found interesting was the set of assumptions built into the question.

On Saturday I was back with my friends in Sevenoaks as the first half of a double-bill weekend of coaching for Green Street Blues. They were spending the Sunday with Mark Grindall working on vocal issues, and it was good to have him around during the day so we could coordinate our to-do lists. (He also took this photo – thanks Mark!) Since I saw the chorus last September, they have acquired about 25% more singers, bronze chorus medals from LABBS and the title of Top Choir of Kent, and also – not surprisingly - a certain sense of confidence.

I’ve mentioned before some of the useful conceptual contributions that Chris Davidson made to BABS Directors Colleges over the years, especially with introducing chorus directors to Kotter’s model of how to effect change. This diagram was another model he presented that is just one of those ‘oh yes that describes exactly how the world is’ type ideas.

So the first thing it tells us is that in order to learn anything, we have to get out of our comfort zones. That sounds kind of obvious, except that most people are very happy to spend a lot of their time studying/rehearsing/practising doing routine things in a generally comfortable way and kidding ourselves that we’re making progress. And because we’re involved in some kind of activity we’ve labeled ‘work’, we can feel nice and virtuous about what we’re doing without encountering anything that is going to threaten our egos. (This is why I spent so much of my youth practising scales.) If we want to learn, rather than simply reconfirm our current skills, we need to get out of our psychic armchairs.