Coaching

Harmony InSpires is a chorus with a special place in my heart, as they were the first group I coached - and therefore the subjects of my first blog post about coaching - after starting this website in 2008. Back then they had recently taken on their new name, and, though rapidly growing, were still a small chorus. They have continued to grow in both number and confidence, and it was lovely to see both some familiar faces on the risers, and lots of new recruits.

This was my first visit since their current director, Peter Cookson took over a couple of years ago, and he had asked me to come along to wear two specific, but distinct, coaching hats. One was my arranger’s hat, to work with them on a chart they commissioned last year, and are now just at that mostly-know-it-but-still-making-decisions-about-delivery stage. This is the perfect time for coaching on questions of shaping, trajectory, and overall intent, before anything gets too practised in.

After my day with Silver Lining last Saturday, I headed off down to Bristol on the Sunday for another day with Bristol A Cappella. This time we were in a different venue again, but still in the same area, and yet again it was one I had walked past pretty much every day of my undergraduate life without ever stepping inside. I can report that Bristol Grammar School has a nicely-equipped drama studio.

Turn-out on this occasion was a bit lower than anticipated, which meant that the singers who were there had to work rather harder than usual. The challenge in these circumstances is both musical (the safety net that usually rescues you if you make a mistake is sparser, so you have to do more for both yourself and your fellows) and also as a consequence psychological (you feel more exposed and thus less confident). The very sonic envelope around you is smaller, you feel less cuddled by the music.

Saturday took me over to Coventry to visit my friends at Silver Lining and spend the day working with them on their new ballad. They had had it for four weeks, so it was just at that point where they basically knew it, but hadn’t yet practised it so thoroughly that it would be hard to make changes. So, the perfect moment at which to have a coaching session focused on getting inside the song.

As is my wont in these situations, I’m not going to tell you what the song is, as they may want to control the manner in which they reveal it to the world, but I think it is fair game to tell you that it is one of those songs that is all about melodic flow. It has some lovely lyrics, some glorious harmonies, but it is the tune that steals your heart.

I have written about phrase-boundary embellishments before - about the kinds of harmonic behaviours involved, and thence the implications for voicing. I have been thinking about them again just recently while wrestling an arrangement into an interesting shape from a formulaic-sounding first draft. And in the process, I have stopped referring in my head to ‘phrase-end’ embellishments, and have started thinking more in terms of ‘phrase-boundary’ embellishments.

The point about these moments in a song, whichever term we use for them, is that the melody often comes to rest before the end of a phrase - it cadences onto the first beat of bar 6 in an 8-bar unit, for instance. If you had a band to sing with, they would keep the rhythmic and harmonic momentum going until the start of the next phrase, possibly with some extra twiddles as fill. But in the absence of instrumental colleagues, the a cappella melodist looks to her fellow singers to keep the music going until the next phrase starts. Hence the concept of ‘phrase-end embellishment’.

Only chance to take pics was at the start, so this doesn't include the people bringing the last riser!Sunday took me down to Bristol for the first of three day-long sessions planned for the first half of this year with Bristol A Cappella. Whilst my last visit took to me into a building I had walked past many times as a student and never entered, this one took me into a building that has been built since I left. But it’s right next door to the Wills Memorial Building in which I spent so much of my time in those days, so that combination of familiarity and strangeness I remarked on last time was considerably amplified!

Bristol A Cappella are currently gearing up to their first experience with contest. They have entered a festival in March, which is in part a warm-up run before the UK’s first mixed barbershop chorus contest to be held in May.

As I was about to leave after my coaching session with Cleeve Harmony last Wednesday, their director, Donna, asked, ‘So what’s the blog going to be about?’ She thereby drew my attention to the process of reflection that goes into that decision. When we’ve only just stopped making music, all the multifarious things we have done together are all jumbled up in my head: vocal things, performance things, conducting things, musical things. It takes some time thinking back over it all to discover which bits are going to stand out as the bits I feel like writing about.

On this occasion, I awoke the next morning to the realisation that the part of the session that had stayed with me most vividly was an intensive 25 minutes or so focused on sorting out a sequence of just 7 chords that had never quite settled into place. You know the kind of passage - one you’ve got it near enough right that you get away with it in performance, but not right enough to feel happy with it.

And the traditional warm-up shot before I get started...Last Saturday took me down to work with Avon Harmony in Bristol. I last worked with them back in 2012 when their director, Alex, was relatively new in the role. You could see how much he had worked on his technique in the intervening time, and how he was being rewarded with a much more consistent and resonant sound. We spent much of the day mapping out where the next stages of development are going to lie.

First up, though, was one basic bit of conductorly bad habit that we needed to deal with. Like many directors, Alex was frequently tempted into mouthing the words. I have tried various methods to help directors break this habit over the years, often involving holding things in their mouths. Straws are good, as blowing into a straw is good for the vocal mechanism, so gives a positive benefit in how the director models their bodily set-up as well as inhibiting the habit you’re trying to eliminate.

Rubric for rehearsal pacing: using my special 'almost legible' writingThursday night saw me doing another session for a chorus’s music team, this time with Surrey Harmony. It was a rather different dynamic from my last session - a similar number of people, but this time the entire team from a single chorus rather than a couple from each of several choruses. What we lost in the opportunity to compare experience between different ensembles we gained in the opportunity to develop mutual understanding and shared working methods within the group.

(As an aside: there is a truism lurking in there about the learning process. What you can learn in any given scenario is to some extent a function of your own needs, beliefs and habits, but it is also a function of who you are learning with.)