John Mayer: music as intellectAndrew Downes: music as feeling

At one point we had a pair of composition teachers at Birmingham Conservatoire who seemed to get on very well, but nonetheless had diametrically opposed views about how we should approach music. John Mayer used to harangue me over the photocopier about how music was nothing to do with the heart, but was an intellectual pursuit, while the then Head of Composition and Creative Studies, Andrew Downes used to say that you should never analyse anything, it should all come from the heart.

At last week’s session of the Inspire Your Choir course I’m running for MusicLeader West Midlands, we had a really fruitful discussion about how to help our singers go into performances calmly and confidently and be happy that they can deliver their best to their audiences. It included lots of practical tips, and gradually three main themes emerged:

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.

I’ve just spent a happy weekend working with Heartbeat chorus at their retreat in rural Derbyshire. The chorus booked en masse into a small college about 40 minutes’ drive from their usual rehearsal venue to spend a full two days away from the distractions of everyday life focusing on their repertoire for the Sweet Adelines Region 31 Convention in May.

It was a wonderful luxury to have that much time available. It meant we could focus in on details and get them sorted out without feeling we were short-changing the rest of the song. We spent a lot of time exploring the arrangements by duetting, and as ever, the opportunity to hear and understand how the other parts interact with each other brought clarity and colour to the performance, as the singers intuitively let the detail of the arrangements through. Indeed, I felt that I came home a better arranger after having lived with the inner details of the work of David Wright and Ed Waesche for a weekend.

One of the areas of choral directing in which there is the greatest disparity between text-book ideas of good practice and what happens in real life is in the use of beat patterns. The orthodoxy is that they provide the correct method for conducting a choir, and they provide the foundation of most approaches to teaching the craft, yet the literature remains full of rude comments about the technique of choir leaders who depart from them – real conductors, it seems, are quite happy to ignore the othodoxy.

As in most well-entrenched debates, each position has its virtues, and real life tends to involve finding a way to sail a coherent course between the polarised points.

I just found out that I was on the radio this afternoon! It was a repeat of the programme I did a couple of years back on key characteristics and synaesthesia, and it is available on Listen Again for the time being (I would guess for a week, as that seems standard).