Rehearsing

Going back through my notes from my weekend with the National Youth Choir’s Young Leaders weekend back in March, I was reminded of a good question asked by one of the participants. My presentation had encouraged two principles widely recognized as good practice, but Nat pointed out rather cannily that there was an implicit contradiction between them and asked how to manage it.

Since writing earlier in the year about the effectiveness of duetting as a coaching and rehearsal tool, I’ve been reflecting again on why it works so well. One key point about it is that it’s not about the people who are singing – it’s the people who are listening who have the chance to grow. It offers people the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of the music they sing – how the parts around them interact – and also about the voices of their fellow singers – tone colour, vibrato, vowel shapes, expressive nuances.

But what is interesting is what the brain then goes on to do with all that information.

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.

When we talk about ‘balancing’ a chord, we usually think of this as a metaphor to express the optimum volume relationships between its constituent notes. I’ve been thinking recently, though, that we could take the metaphor a little more seriously and replace the discourse of amplitude with that of whose job it is to anchor the chord in place – which is the load-bearing part, perhaps.

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.

Choral discipline encompasses many things, from remembering pencils, to learning notes at home, to watching the conductor closely. But the archetypal sign of a choir’s level of discipline is how much talking goes on within the ranks during rehearsal.

This dimension of discipline is often seen as having a moral dimension – as, indeed, the word ‘discipline’ implies. A hub-bub of chatting is seen as rather slovenly, the choral equivalent of frayed cuffs and dandruff. (Alternatively, sitting up straight and paying attention is seen as overly prim, a form choral OCD.) This discourse takes us back to school days, evoking a traditionalist’s model of education, with desks in rows and all children silent and on task.

Tim Sharp: ACDA Executive DirectorEarlier this week, Tim Sharp posted an entry on ChoralNet’s blog with this title. ChoralNet’s daily digest is one of the few regular emails I sign up to, and most days I get a ‘Hm, looks interesting – might pop over to that’ moment. This time, though, I had a real ‘ooh goody, gotta go there now!’ moment when I read that title.

As ever, though, Tim wrote the blog post he wanted to write rather than the one I wanted him to have written. Not complaining – it’s a good post and well worth going over there for a read – but still it remains that the main reason you become a writer is because other people insist on writing to their own agendas instead of yours. So, this post is about what I thought he was going to say when I read that title.

Highcliffe Junior ChoirBack in 1996, when Highcliffe Junior Choir won the title of Sainsbury’s Youth Choir of the Year, I heard their founder-director Mary Denniss make a comment in an interview that has stayed with me ever since. She was asked if she ever had children join the choir who couldn’t sing in tune. ‘Well, yes, of course,’ she replied, ‘but they pick it up after a while.’

It wasn’t just that she was so pragmatic that struck me, it was the fact that she said it so kindly. It occurred to me that much of her success in turning ordinary school children into one of the country’s best choirs lay in this calm and confident trust in her singers’ ability to learn.