Exploring Gesture and Voice with Bristol A Cappella

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, working on their new contest set for next May’s BABS Convention. The have one arrangement they picked up from another group, and the other they commissioned from me to make an emotional arc over the two songs. I think this is the quickest turnaround I have ever had between delivering an arrangement and coaching it – they have only had it since the end of September. It was novel working on a song before I had had time to forget all the thought processes that went into it!

We started the day however working on a show song that their Assistant MD Stuart will be conducting in an upcoming concert, focusing on developing his technique. I had spent my time watching the chorus contest at last week’s LABBS Convention thinking about details of conducting technique, in anticipation of the association’s major director education event next Spring which I’ll be organising. Consequently my work with both Stuart and their front-line MD Iain drew on ideas I have been working on over the last week.

We explored how to use the non-dominant hand as a focus for listening. This is something I’ve noticed in my own praxis, as a way to connect up the feedback loop between gesture and perceived sound. It is something of a weird metaphor, but Stuart engaged with it despite his bogglement and in the process achieved a greater clarity and richness of tone. It also usefully gave his non-dominant hand something to do when it wasn’t needed for signalling, keeping it enlivened without being distracting.

Later, with Iain, focused work on a passage with its consonants removed gave us an opportunity to explore the relationship between hand shape and vowel shape. I had the chorus thinking about maintaining continuity of tone and consistency of resonance as vowels changed one into the next. At the same time, I was testing the hypothesis that it is the hand curling in on itself that invites loss of tonal energy at the boundaries between vowels, whereas a more consistent hand shape facilitates finding the common resonant shape between adjacent vowels. I had observed this correlation in performances, and it was rewarding to be able to put it practical use.

With both directors, we worked on effecting a mindset shift away from ‘showing’ the music to the singers towards simply allowing the music to come to them. They have trained their singers well, and they don’t have to drive the music to make it happen. I was expecting this to free up brain space to help the conductors hear more, which happened; I was interested to hear from a singer that she also found that having a less busy set of gestures to observe freed up brain space with which she could also hear more of what was going on around her.

Musical gestures were also a theme for the day alongside conducting gestures. We explored the role of leaps within a line, and thus how to approach and recover from them. The process revealed places where activity in one line had implications for the whole texture. The rhetoric of the main melody is the most obvious manifestation of this, but we also found gestures built into harmony parts that necessitated a certain shape of energy that required all the other parts to participate for the whole to remain balanced. It was gratifying to hear that a part with a dramatic vocal gesture felt much more secure singing it when the whole chorus was helping create the expressive shape.

One of the satisfactions of working with a group regularly over a period of years is the development of a shared vocabulary and frame of reference. This gives us a platform to build on to engage in more artistically refined processes that draw on skills already embedded. So maybe what I’m finding satisfying is not just the rewards of building a long-term relationship, but the pleasure of coming back and finding that the chorus can now do things quite readily and routinely that they used to find difficult. And whilst I like to think I have been useful in helping that happen, the real success story here is in their ongoing rehearsal processes that have taken what I bring to the party and made it their own.