Coaching

Every so often I get a request to for someone to observe me while I'm working with an ensemble, and I'm writing this post partly so I can point people to it rather than writing very long emails in reply every time! But working through my thoughts about it has also been interesting, and I like to share when I think I've learned something.

So, there are two basic scenarios, and I have found they elicit quite different responses.

Scenario 1: the ensemble I'll be working with contacts me to say they have a visitor who would like to watch, and do I mind? My answer: no problem!

Scenario 2: somebody I know gets in touch with me to ask if they can come and watch when I do some coaching. My response: not comfortable.

I spent Sunday up in Liverpool with the ladies of Mersey Harmony. It was the first time I’d worked with the chorus, but I knew their director Lesley from my sessions with Cheshire Chord Company. There is a wonderful synergy in the way the premier ensembles in a region serve as training grounds for the musical leaders of neighbouring groups, and the northwest is one of the country’s real hotbeds of barbershop activity.

We spent a lot of the morning session on some intensive work on smoothing out the melodic flow in their contest up-tune. This is an enterprise that has both technical and imaginative dimensions, and thus involves adjustments to both physical habits of execution and mental habits of musical thinking. Part of my task, indeed, was working out what combination of the two they needed: was the slightly over-wordy delivery a function of incomplete control of vowel placement or of an over-investment in the rhythmic qualities of the lyric?

Wednesday evening took me up to Preston for another visit to the Red Rosettes. It is less than six weeks now until they head over to Ireland for the IABS Convention, and so are starting to gear themselves up to contest rather earlier in the year than they would normally for the rhythm of the British women’s barbershop year.

Many choruses find the summer the slow season, as people’s holidays keep attendance down over a period of 6-8 weeks. Indeed, many choral groups deal with this by taking a break over the summer, though this is rarer in barbershop world, where the performance seasons are regulated by events that are not particularly tied in to school terms.

So, out of a series of specific musical and technical tasks for the evening arose a bigger task of connecting back with the Red Rosettes as they are at peak performance, to put this slow season behind them for their convention preparation.

I spent Wednesday evening in Coventry with the Belles of Three Spires, working both with the chorus and with their directors. Well, that's always the case of course, but our focus was sometimes on changing what the singers did to improve the performance, and sometimes on the person out front.

Read almost any book on conducting, and you will find some comment about how the director's communication and expressiveness comes not only from their conducting gestures, but from their whole demeanour: their face, their stance, their way of being in the world. (That includes my book, I should add.)

Now, both Belles director Lucy and her assistant Lindsey are expressive musicians who clearly have a full-body experience of music. So I didn't need to tell them this. Actually, what we found ourselves doing was concentrating the musical attention more closely into the gestures.

Even more useful in rehearsal than duettingWednesday saw the highest temperature of the year so far recorded in West London - which was where I spent that evening, coaching Capital Connection. I was fully prepared for it to be a bit of a steamy struggle, but the chorus was prepared. The combination of strategic positioning of the risers between open doors and windows, and two floor-standing fans kept the working environment reasonably civilised, and we were able to get on with making music without undue distraction.

We were working on the same material as in my last visit, but this time turning our attention to larger-scale structural processes, particularly in their up-tempo contest song. We started off considering the musical/emotional shape of sections of 16 bars - the span of the primary musical statements in this piece. By making the openings more narrative and less emphatic, there was room for a more dramatic growth to the arrival point of each phrase. Making the implicit shape more explicit allows the music room to grow and develop as it unfolds.

Saturday took me over to Coventry to work with Silver Lining chorus. I have visited them a number of times over the years, though not for a while, and they have developed considerably since my last visit - both in size and assurance. Their director, Sara Jackson, had sent me a to-do list of things it might be useful to work on, with the proviso that if I identified something I felt was more important or urgent, that could queue-jump.

The way this played out in practice was that I went in with some specific plans for coaching tactics right from the get-go, and was then able to diagnose and start to address other coaching needs from within those activities. It felt like an efficient way of working.

The delegates in songSunday saw 95 chorus directors, assistant directors and directors-in-waiting from the Ladies Association of Barbershop Singers convene in Birmingham for the day. That is a lot of people, I should add. We had run a consultation exercise last autumn which not only fed much of the content of the day, but had led us to project an expected attendance of about 70 delegates, and even a month ago that still looked about right.

Don't get me wrong - I was delighted with the huge response to the day. But the last flourish of registrations before the deadline had me worrying over the published programme and whether we had left enough time for the breaks, and how the noise levels were going to be in discussion sessions. One of the great things about working with directors, though, is that they understand such dilemmas and readily cooperate to make the logistics work. We also had the splendid 'sheep dog' skills of Anne Potter, who rounded everyone up regularly to keep us running to time.

Thursday took me up the M6 to Warrington for my second trip north-west in two days, this time to work with current LABBS chorus champions, Cheshire Chord Company. We were working on two songs at different stages of development - the first only recently off the page and thus still at a stage where it could be pulled around and played with considerably, the second a show-piece already in the performing repertoire where the task was to refine the execution of the vision.