Excellence

John Bertalot produces a wonderful description of the rehearsal process in his book How to be a Successful Choir Director. He says:

The leading of practices is like pushing a man up a greasy pole. He goes up with a bit of effort, but slides down naturally when you leave him alone.

I like this metaphor not just because it is vivid and surprising – and therefore expressive and memorable – but because it is rich enough to tell us things beyond the immediate message it is presented to convey.

A reasonably common point of debate within amateur choirs is whether the point is to have fun or to perform well. For the fun-faction, the requirements of choral discipline (watching the conductor, enunciating the text, not chatting all the time) are frustrating because they dampen the spirits and inhibit people’s enjoyment of a social occasion. For the performance posse, all the chattage and talkery and not following instructions very reliably is frustrating because it inhibits their opportunity for a flow experience and the specifically musical pleasures available from a really clean choral sound.

I suspect there are several things going on within this debate. One is a choral version of the difference in orientation between the people-focused and task-focused that you meet in any walk of life. Some people care about singing with other people because it’s singing with other people, while others are interested in singing with other people.

Well, I suppose the first question is whether we do in fact perform better to a bigger audience. I’ve not tested this hypothesis at all rigorously, but it does feel like a good generalisation. A full house seems to bring with it a sense of occasion that encourages performers to step up to the mark and do their stuff more extrovertly, with greater panache. A sparse smattering of listeners seems to sap the spirit very slightly, and a performance that is just as thoroughly prepared and technically competent can feel like it lacks a little something.

Toronto Northern Lights in rehearsalWell, I said in my last post that Toronto Northern Light’s package that won them third place at the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Convention recently deserved a post of its own, so here goes. It doesn’t appear to be up on Youtube so I’ll start off by describing what they did for those who haven’t seen it, and then highlight a few points as to why I admired it so much.

The first song was a medley of parodies on the theme of robots who wished they were human. All the chorus were costumed in grey overalls with all their visible skin painted in silver make-up except their director, Steve Armstrong, who played the part of the human operator. At the end of the first song, he sat down at a desk and went to sleep, while all the robots actually came ‘alive’ as humans to sing their ballad, ‘Over the Rainbow’ under the direction of their assistant director, Jordan Travis. At the end they returned to their robot world, leaving their operator to wake up with a hunch that something unusual had just occurred.

Bird's-eye view of the Harmony Marketplace in the Pennsylvania Convention Center
Last week saw the Barbershop Harmony Society’s annual International Convention come to the historic city of Philadelphia. It was a musically rich and socially warm event, as ever, and I came home feeling that such full immersion in the artform has made me a better musician.

I have had a conversation with choral conducting students on a number of occasions over the years in which they confess to anxiety in taking rehearsals because their sight-singing is a bit variable in accuracy. Now, feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking rehearsals I can perfectly understand – I tend to think that anyone who starts out thinking it’s easy has not grasped quite what the level of the challenge is. And wanting to improve your sight-singing is always a good idea.

But if the source of your rehearsal worries lies in intermittent sight singing, there is a simple and obvious solution in your preparation.

I recently received an email from Dr Carl Smith, a choral director based in El Paso, discussing among other things ideas from the book Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman. In particular, he was interested in the idea of ‘savoring’, and how that might intersect with the conductorly notion of charisma. He said:

To Seligman, "savoring" is is "...the awareness of pleasure and of the deliberate conscious attention to the experience of pleasure." Perhaps another way to describe the term is "being in the moment."

I have very recently learned (and am STILL learning!) to focus on what is happening right in front of me NOW and enoying the pleasure. In choral rehearsal at with the small church choir I conduct, it means to listen intently with a smile and with positive feedback to myself and the singers. IS THAT A PART OF "CHARISMA?"

My immediate response was: good question.

Royce Ferguson with the Cottontown ChorusAt the BABS convention last week I had the opportunity to observe Royce Ferguson coaching Bolton’s Cottontown Chorus. Royce is best known in the barbershop world as the director who took the Westminster Chorus to their first two international chorus medals in 2006 and 2007. It is not surprising therefore that he is in considerable demand as a coach and he is becoming a regular visitor to the UK in that capacity.

In his work with Cottontown he focused on the integrity of tone, on maintaining a sound that was neither breathy nor pushy. Indeed, he identified putting energy behind a breathy tone as the primary cause of vocal strain. He relentlessly insisted on a refinement of tone in which the voice is ‘always connected but never heavy-handed’. It is an active tone, not a passive one, which needs constant attention to keep it centred. He talked a lot about letting the natural beauty of the sound resonate without feeling the need to do things to it: