Coaching

As an interlude in my Bristol week, I spent Sunday over near Coventry with the Belles of Three Spires and their director Lucy Edmonds. This was the second of two full-day rehearsals for them, so they were very well into the groove. You could see a certain amount of tiredness, too, though this was mostly apparent at the start and end of the day; once we all got going the momentum of the process took over. And if they had to dig a bit deeper for mental stamina as we went on, that will return rewards in the coming weeks as they consolidate the weekend’s work.

As with my last visit, I was in a dual role of both working with the chorus and with the director. But the balance this time was much more director-focused. As the day went on we developed a working method whereby I was coaching the chorus primarily via Lucy’s posture and gesture. Our goal was to see how much positive change in their performance we could achieve via adjusting the directing technique rather than giving instructions to the singers.

My second coaching visit to the Bristol area came on Saturday, when I spent the day with Fascinating Rhythm, based just north of the city. In my last visit, we had been exploring David Wright’s arrangement of ‘South Rampart Street Parade’; this was on the agenda again, as was Rob Campbell’s arrangement of ‘Once Upon a Time’.

Our first major theme for the day was integration, in both musical and performative senses.

Thursday evening was the first of three coaching trips to Bristol in the space of a week. Entirely a coincidence as it happens, but I am going to feel properly up to date on all the news from that part of the world by the end of it. This first trip was to coach Bristol Fashion, with whom regular readers will know I have been working a couple of times a year for three years now.

I commented last time I worked with them how gratifying it is to have a sense of building on skills that have been embedded in the months between visits, and I couldn't help but notice them using exercises in their warm-up that we had introduced back in May. I'm sure they do this when I'm not there to see it too!

Wednesday night took up to Preston to spend an evening working with the Red Rosettes. In many ways it felt like a classic evening's coaching for me in its focus on exploring the musical material of the song and arrangement as a route to understand its emotional and narrative shape.

We started off by playing with different styles of rhythmic characterisation (discovering a preference in this instance for sling swing and stretch swing), and as so often happens, as soon as the rhythmic feel came into focus, all sorts of other performance details became both more interesting and better executed throughout the chorus. Clarity in musical shape produced better technical control and a more distinctive performance persona.

Thursday saw me out East to coach Norwich Harmony at the start of the convention preparation season. They have been making significant strides in recent years in their consistency of control over matters of vocal production and unit sound, and it was interesting to hear how these efforts played out working on different parts of their repertoire.

To start with, there was a clear difference in technical control between a piece they have only recently learned and one that has been in their repertoire for a couple of years. It’s one of the endless dilemmas in developing a chorus that, while keeping songs in the repertoire for longer gives opportunities for depth of learning as familiarity with content frees up attention for other matters, at the same time, each song tends to act as a snap-shot of the skill level the singers had when it was first introduced.

Wednesday took me down to Windsor to work current BABS silver medallists, The Royal Harmonics. I have arranged for them several times in recent years, but this was the first time we had made music together in person - indeed, it was also the first time I heard two of my arrangements sung live.

Part of the evening's agenda was to work on the most recent of my arrangements they had commissioned, and it was at that perfect point in the rehearsal process to coach where the singers were secure enough on it not to be wasting mental effort on memory tasks, but still fresh enough on it to be very flexible in adapting their performance.

Jane Fielding warms up the chorusSaturday took me down to Poole to work with Wessex Harmony and their director Dyrck Lamble. Dyrck had set an agenda for the day that involved breadth of repertoire rather than intensive coaching on just a couple of pieces, and we spent chunks of 20 minutes each on several repertoire songs interspersed between the work on the music they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in October.

As a result, we covered noticeably more different techniques and approaches than one would in a coaching session that had a narrower repertoire focus – and I found it made me much more aware of the techniques of prioritising. At the same time, of course, it gave us less chance to embed skills, and thus leaves the chorus not only with a longer list of things to work on, but also more responsibility to do so in order to make sure they become secure and permanent parts of their skill base.

Digging into the musical detail...

Wednesday took me off to Coventry to work with the Belles of Three Spires under their new director, Lucy Edmonds. New, perhaps, but clearly organised – Lucy had booked the coaching session several weeks before she was even due to take up the post.

I have reflected before on how you get different benefits from seeking coaching input at different phases in the learning of a piece: at the earlier stages more of the singers’ brains need to be tied up with remembering what they’re doing, which can be an obstacle, whilst at the later stage you are contending with more deeply ingrained habits, which is a different kind of obstacle.

We spent a fair chunk of the evening on a very new song.