Learning

Course participants with their certificates

I spent the weekend teaching the Association of British Choral Directors’ Initial Conducting course, in its new two-day format. I wrote in the past about the educational value of the previous structure of four one-day sessions a month apart. The practical downside of it was that it was hard for people to attend to the whole course, and the whole-weekend format was devised in response.

When preparing for the weekend it felt at first like trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, but as there is the expectation that people will typically do the course more than once before being ready to progress to the Intermediate course, it turned out to be actually quite manageable. And the core practical work has always been strongly tailored to individual needs, with people at somewhat different stages learning together, so in that sense it hasn’t really changed.

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.

As promised, here is the follow-up to my recent posts about memorising music specifically focusing on lyrics. I considered this some years ago and and again more recently, and recommended lots of specific practice strategies, but it feels worth revisiting to reflect on the reasons why those strategies can be useful.

So, the general points about approach I made in the previous two posts remain true: the key to effective memorising is in developing depth of understanding, not in mechanical repetition. But words are processed a bit differently from music in the brain, and quite a few people (me included) find them harder to memorise.

My previous post on this theme came to the conclusion that the secret to memorising music lies in deepening one’s understanding of it. In music we find difficult, we can’t manage it at all without working in depth, but in music that comes more readily, we need to find ways to get inside it, in order that it might then get inside us. This post (and the follow-up dedicated to lyrics) is about ways we might go about this.

At the heart of all of these ways is the process of analysis. Molly Gebrian makes the point that all music practice is, at bottom, a process of creative problem-solving. This is as true of internalising music as it is of figuring out how to execute it. Studying our music should be a process of asking questions, hypothesising answers, and then seeing if the music detail supports our hypotheses: ‘What’s going on here, then?’, ‘How does this work?’, ‘Why is this note used here rather than that one?’

I’ve been having a number of conversations recently about memorising music, with both piano friends and choral friends, and reflecting on them has helped bring a number of things into focus for me. This post and the next cover general themes that apply across both worlds, and I’m planning a follow-up that specifically considers lyrics, since language is processed by the brain somewhat (but not entirely) differently from music.

For some people, a lot of the memorising process happens during the process of simply learning how to execute the music, without any specific attention to memory per se. For people who find memorising hard, this can seem like unhelpful information: that’s all right for them, you might think, but it doesn’t help for those of us that struggle.

However, as someone for whom that is sometimes, but not always the case, I think there are things to be learned from what’s going on when memorising comes readily to inform how to go about things when it doesn’t.

Usually my first blog post of November is about LABBS Convention, but this year it has been queue-jumped by a question from a conductor I’ve been working with, namely the use of members of the music team to lead short spots in rehearsals. This post is partly for him, to help him work with his team, partly for his team to help them understand what this would entail and why, and partly for anyone else in the world who has rehearsals to run.

There are two things to clarify here: why it is valuable to have different people lead short spots in rehearsal, and what you might do in them.

In my title I’ve termed them ‘refresher’ spots; in other contexts I’ve called them Music Team spots, or ‘wildcard’ slots. All three titles capture elements of what they do: refreshing attention, making use of the team, and – by giving someone other than the MD the decision about what to do in them – bringing a little spritz of unpredictability to things.

I spent Saturday with my friends at Bristol A Cappella, revisiting their set from the European and BABS Conventions back in May in preparation for the World Mixed Chorus contest in Germany next Spring. By now they are deeply familiar with the music and their performance plans for it, and this presents the opportunity to do the kind of deep work that only becomes possible when you no longer have to focus on what you are doing and can direct your attention to the how.

Much of our work focused on listening techniques, finding ways to enhance everyone’s perception of what they were doing, since the first stage of refining your execution is increasing the acuity with which you hear the detail. Duetting inevitably played a part in this, with a lot of micro-adjustments making themselves through the process in addition to the explicit observations singers made as we walked through the process.

In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.