Coaching

On Thursday I finally made it up to Warrington to work with the Cheshire Chord Company. The visit had been scheduled for last month, but an accident on the M6 had on that occasion turned Birmingham to gridlock, and saw me spending an hour and 20 minutes to travel 8 miles and never even getting out of my home town. This time the M6 was really quite clear (by M6 standards, that is), and I was about the third person to arrive there!

One bright side to the postponement was that in the meantime the notes I had made on the chorus’s prize-winning performance at Llangollen International Eisteddfod had turned into a post on interpreting ballads. So, those chorus members who read my blog were already primed with some of the concepts we were going to be working with. There were just a handful of places where harmonic details or melodic shaping in the harmony parts suggested slight changes to the way they were delivering the melody.

Sunday took me over to Coventry to work with my friends the Belles of Three Spires. They are deep into their preparation for the Ladies Association of Barbershop Singers convention in the autumn, and the day was booked to give the opportunity for some detailed, in-depth work on their contest package.

One theme to emerge during the day was singing not just accurately, but with expressive purpose. The breath-points aren’t there just to breathe, for instance, they are there to articulate the moments in the story where the protagonist has the realisation that motivates the next line. The words tell us what is going on, but the harmony tells us how the protagonist feels about it. Most importantly for their ballad, the melody is the heart of the song.

Rolf Dobelli’s book The Art of Thinking Clearly includes primacy and recency effects in its catalogue of cognitive errors that can mislead our judgement. We pay too much attention to both our first impressions and our most recent experiences, and tend to neglect what happens in between. Dobelli gives some advice about how we can develop strategies to compensate, but I find myself more interested in considering how we can work with this natural tendency to make it work for us.

There are two main scenarios in which these matter for musicians: rehearsing and performing. In both cases, we need to note that those whose attention we are managing - respectively the musicians learning the music and the audience listening to it - are going to be disproportionately affected by the first and last things that happen to them, and thus this is where our best opportunities to influence them lie.

Well, it's only 3 years since I last blogged about watching Jim Henry work with a top-notch British chorus, and 4 years since I wrote about a Cottontown coaching session at a BABS convention. But I don't get bored of this stuff: it is always fabulous to watch people who are good at what they do being helped to get better by people who are *really* good at what they do.

As I noted last time I watched Jim Henry coaching, the how is more striking than the what. The techniques are simple, and Jim has no compunction about staying with a single technique and/or coaching focus for an extended period of time. Indeed, when I asked a friend what I'd missed in the first part of the session (I was late as I needed to hear the Telfordaires premiere an arrangement they had commissioned from me for the 40th anniversary convention), she said, 'He told them to sing in tune'. Which is actually also a fair summary of the hour I saw. Of course, the point is, anyone can tell you to sing in tune - it's the coaches who can make that actually happen you want to pay attention to.

I've written a couple of times over the years about asking for feedback - at what stage(s) it is most useful to do so, and how to manage one's own emotions so as to get the best value out of it. But it's also worth considering how to give feedback. This is something we work hard at in Magenta, with very clear protocols, because while (nearly) all feedback is meant well, it makes a huge difference how it is done.

Unless your intention is to deliver a fatal blow to somebody's confidence, bear the following points in mind.

On Wednesday I had a return visit to work with the Belles of Three Spires in Coventry. As with my previous work with them, it was a nice balance between work with the singers on musical detail and work with the directing team on aspects of conducting technique.

The first part of the evening was spent delving into the nitty-gritty of a song they had learned to that stage of basically-solid-but-not-yet-nuanced. The process was one of connecting the detail of arrangement choices to the narrative and emotional state of the song's protagonist - i.e. a process of characterisation. That makes it sound very grown-up. But it was a playful song, so that gave us the excuse to use lots of highly frivolous metaphors. You know you're going to have a laugh when the rhythmic flavour a song needs is 'giggle'.

Friday night saw a visit from Obsession! quartet from Bristol for a coaching session on developing their unit sound. The have the interesting challenge of combining two English-speaking singers with two whose first language is Spanish. This on the face of it presents all kinds of technical obstacles (vowel-matching, and the like) and psychological obstacles (anxiety about ‘getting it right’ in your second language).

We had a productive evening cutting through all that by considering not how the Spanish speakers could get to sound more like the first-language English speakers, but instead how all four of them could sound more like the accent the quartet needed to sing in. For no four people produce their voices exactly alike, and even those who have a strong agreement on regional rendition of particular vowels, sung English usually aims to move away from regional specificities to a national or international genre norm.

Magenta's primary triggerOne of the techniques from sports psychology that Karen O’Connor shared in her Performing On Your Mind workshop was the use of triggers, or cues. For me, this was one of those lovely moments when a concept crystallised out aspects of my own praxis. By naming the tool, it became possible to analyse it - and also to see ways in which I can apply it more tactically.

(Which is, if you think about it, what a coach is doing a lot of the time anyway: making things that a performers is experiencing perceptually available, and thus also conceptually available. Actually, that’s the function of music analysis too - I hadn’t spotted that parallel until I started this paragraph.)