Everyone knows that listening is vital to good choral singing, but we don’t often stop to consider what this involves or how to do it better. This workshop explores the different dimensions of aural awareness, and the ways they can improve both a choir’s technical standard and its imaginative grasp of the music. Opening our ears helps us open our minds and open our hearts.
Themed Workshops
Each of these themed workshops focuses on a different area of choral, performance, or directing craft, and shows how the research from my book, Choral Conducting and the Construction of Meaning, can be turned to direct practical use. Each theme can be delivered as a full-day or half-day workshop, or as an introductory session in your regular rehearsal slot. In all cases, the workshops will be customised to your ensemble's current repertoire to help you integrate the skills it develops into your regular work.
The prices are:
Full day (c. 6 hours): £250 + travel expenses
Half day (c. 3 hours): £150 + travel expenses
Introductory session (c. 2 hours): £100 + travel expenses
I am also still available to work with your ensemble as a clinician and performance coach on either an ad hoc or regular basis.
Feel free to get in touch with any questions you might have.
The term ‘ensemble’ is used to describe attributes of performance from simple neatness of execution to that magical sense that a group is performing ‘as one’. This workshop uses research in social psychology to help participants understand how the ‘telepathy’ of ensemble musicianship works and uses practical exercises to put this into practice.
Nonverbal communication studies has long been interested in the relationship between gesture and speech – but has largely ignored the relationship between gesture and singing. Singers and conductors, meanwhile, have a strong practical but largely unarticulated understanding of how their gestures work. This workshop draws on research that brings these areas together in order to help conductors and singers increase their reflective awareness and thus develop greater control over what they do.
Different styles of music imply different approaches to performance, both vocally and visually. This workshop examines the implicit body language of the choir’s repertoire along three axes: stillness vs movement, uniformity vs individuality, and musical characterisation. This leads on to an exploration of the impact this body language has on other elements of performance style such as vocal production and interpretation.
Musicianship is to performing music what motor mechanics is to driving classic cars – you can get away with relatively little, but the more you are familiar with how the whole thing works, the more confidently and competently you do it, and the easier it is to troubleshoot when something goes awry. This workshop explores the benefits of investing time in musicianship training to enhance the skills the singers come in with. It shows how both warm-up exercises and repertoire work can be used to develop skills that will make future learning more efficient. The workshop assumes that the most confident in a choir can still usefully be stretched, and that the least confident can always make useful gains!
The connection between conductors and choirs is something widely experienced, but understood only at an implicit, intuitive level. This workshop draws on a five-year research project that investigated the cultural, psychological and neurological mechanisms that make the bond possible. It introduces key theoretical ideas, then guides participants through diagnostic exercises that help them make the bond work better in their own rehearsals.