IABS Spring Sing

I’ve just spent a happy weekend in Athlone as part of an international faculty at the Irish Association of Barbershop Singers’ annual spring education event, including educators from the US (Vocal Spectrum, Don Campbell) and Germany (Lucas Bitzer) as well as me from the UK. The structure of the event is built around coaching for choruses and quartets from across the association, supplemented by classes on various aspects of barbershop craft and a daily Big Sing chorus experience.

My role in the team was to do a modicum of coaching, but mostly to deliver sessions in a new initiative to develop Musical Directors and Music Teams. This included workshops for those already in post as well as sessions designed to give some initial training in musical leadership to help people not currently in such roles gain some confidence and experience to open up future possibilities for them. All organisations need to develop their pipeline of future leaders.

Some delegates came for the whole weekend – primarily but not exclusively those who are members of more than one ensemble – but quite a few came only for the day on which their group(s) were scheduled for coaching. As a result, all of the classes were programmed twice, to increase access to them. The coaching schedule still meant that not everyone could get to everything they wanted if they came to only one day or were members of multiple groups, but the opportunities were significantly increased thereby.

It is some years since I have found myself delivering the same material to a similar cohort in quick succession and it was interesting to revisit that experience. Actually, in my days in formal education, the repetitions tended either to happen immediately back-to-back (for some years I spent all of Friday morning doing practical musicianship sessions with multiple groups of 1st-year undergraduates) or a year apart, by which time it didn’t feel like a repetition, just a class for which a past self had helpfully done the bulk of the preparation.

Doing the same class on successive days is more like the former, but not entirely. On one hand, the problem of, ‘Have I said this already, of was that to the previous group?’ turns out to be less of an issue than when you do things back-to-back. On the other, the new, creative bits of content that emerge within the process are more readily integrated into the repetition after a night’s sleep to absorb them.

And, of course, it’s precisely that sense that it’s actually never the same twice that keeps you engaged with the material as an educator. I have taught the basic building blocks of conducting gesture many times before (and will be doing so again this coming weekend), but it remains interesting to do because, while you can plan what you want to teach, you can never entirely predict how people are going to learn. So you always have to remain alert to how people are processing the input you give them, and figure out ways to adjust when they don’t use the information quite how you expected, and ways to help them understand their successes so that they can repeat them at will.

In this sense, delivering a class is very like coaching, if more structured and tutor-led. But you still need creative diagnostic skills to respond to the learners and figure out what and how they need to learn at this particular moment on their journeys. It’s rewarding in the same way a conversation is. You don’t want to chat with someone who just says what they were going to say irrespective of what you might contribute, and likewise the learning is more interesting and fun for all participants when you have the sense you generate learning together that none of you would have generated by yourselves.