Helping You Harmonise is 1 year old today! On 26 November 2008 I made my inaugural blog entry, having spent the previous couple of weeks busy uploading my arrangements catalogue before the site went live. Since then, I have posted 88,300 words of blog material – which is more than I wrote for my entire first book, and nearly as much as for my second.

Having been an avid but sporadic reader of other people’s blogs for some years (i.e. I binge-read several months’ worth of posts in an afternoon rather than keeping track of each as they go), I find it interesting to speculate on people’s motivations for blogging. Sometimes there’s a sense of someone doing it because they feel they ought to – as part of a promotional strategy, for instance – and these are the ones I enjoy reading least. They also tend to fizzle out quite quickly. I think it’s very hard to write regularly if the motivation is extrinsic rather than intrinsic.

More often, and more successfully, blogs reflect a passion or a desire.

A criticism levelled at amateur singers* is that their ideas of how to interpret songs are led almost entirely by the lyric with little concept of how to handle musical elements. Indeed, I have myself critiqued approaches to interpretation that are story-led to the exclusion of everything else. But surprisingly often you hear phrasing that cuts across the sense of the lyric – breaths that cut a sentence in two, or commas sung through as if the two clauses belonged together.

I think this happens mostly in places where the surface structures of lyric and music don’t completely coincide. The singers subconsciously parse the phrase structure into its simplest musical structure – and in its extreme form, this comes out in the nursery-rhyme phrasing I wrote about back in October. But there are more sophisticated versions of this. For example:

3/4 of Monkey Magic with a bag of trophiesLast Sunday saw a marathon BABS quartet prelims come to my erstwhile place of work, with 43 quartets competing in the national, senior and youth quartet contests. The biggest outcome of the day (though not the most surprising) was Monkey Magic winning the youth contest again to qualify to compete in the collegiate contest at International one more time before they get too old for it. After singing, they dashed off to Manchester to audition for Britain’s Got Talent, leaving their dads to receive the trophies on their behalf – which is quite endearing, and represents a lot that is going right in BABS right now. They did show their faces again in Birmingham right at the end of the day, though Alan had disappeared before I managed to get the photo!

The jury is out as to whether talent is in-born or whether it can be acquired. We do know, however, that it only shows up in people who have spent thousands of hours honing their craft. This obsessive, focused work often accounts for the teenage years – whether Picasso doing hundreds of small studies in figurative painting, or your stereotypical geek retreating from the difficulties of adolescent social life to write computer programs. But it can also come later: Van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was in his twenties, though once he started he went at it in a very intensive and focused way.

So, as Roy Castle used to sing, if you want to be the best, dedication’s what you need. This much is clear.

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:

Out with the old......and in with the new

I bought a new piano recently. The one I grew up with (a hand-me-down from my great aunt) has done sterling service, but I have grown out of it. Since I’ve stopped working in a music college, where I had a lovely Yamaha upright in my office, I’ve been finding I miss being able to play a good instrument. It’s a long time since I’ve been playing at anything like a professional level, but pianism is still an important part of how I think.

Anyway, I had a mild revelation while talking to my mum about the quality of my old piano – the ways in which it’s okay, and the ways in which it’s limited.

On Tuesday evening I spent a happy couple of hours with Hearts in Harmony, the staff choir at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham. They formed back in the summer, and have been inviting various choral folk from around the region to run one-off sessions in between auditions for a permanent director. So it was an interesting session to plan, as it needed to be both self-contained (they’ll be singing with someone else next week), and provide continuity (whilst I won’t be there next week, they will). Some continuity was provided in that they had an arrangement of a Christmas carol they had started last week and wanted to work on again. So I did them an arrangement of another carol in a contrasting style that we could learn in one session, but they could then add to their collection for their Christmas performances.

Regular readers will have noticed that I like to draw on the ideas of Leonard B. Meyer when I think about music. I was first introduced to his work in my first year at university, and it had quite a big impact on me, as it was my first real encounter with the act of theorising music. Hitherto most of the writing about music I had seen simply described what was going on, whereas this introduced me to the possibilities of explaining it.

(This early encounter also provided the occasion for possibly the most useful thing anyone ever said to me during my education. My tutor, Alan Rump, had sent me away to read some Meyer, and I came back saying tentatively that I found it very interesting but wasn’t sure that I agreed with it. ‘Good God, woman,’ he roared, ‘You’re not supposed to agree with books, you’re supposed to think about them.’)

Anyway, some recent listening experiences got me thinking about his implication-realisation model of musical meaning again.