Having contemplated some broad themes in my previous post about the research strand at the recent abcd Choral Leaders Festival, I’d like to pick out a few interesting cross-references between the papers. There were four speakers reporting on projects undertaken for advanced degrees in the strand sessions, plus the plenary keynote presented by Dr Katie Overy, all of which addressed topics that would make choral practitioners say, ‘Ooh yes, we want to know about that!’

But it’s in the resonances between them that you really feel the value of a event like this, rather than just reading their findings as published articles. Not that I object to reading articles, you understand. The published format offers other strengths – the opportunity for the author to cover more detail, and for the reader to take time to think about things en route. But it doesn’t offer the same kind of creative opportunities as a live event, where the ways in which the papers bounce off each other spark insights beyond what they each offer individually.

So, here are the things that I came away wanting to think about further:

Sunday took me back to Stockport for a longer follow-up to last month’s session with Affinity Show Choir on their new contest set for LABBS Convention in October. Having established the overall shape of their delivery last time, this visit focused on developing narrative depth and clarifying the turning points in the story. I’m nostly focusing on their ballad here as our work on this was both more time-consuming and more complex, and so more useful for me to reflect on. But we also left their up-tune in a more sparkling state than we found it.

Michael Bonshor's methodology diagram

The recent abcd Choral Leaders Festival in Birmingham saw the introduction of a new research stream to this annual event. This is the brainchild of Martin Ashley (whose own research is well worth reading if you don’t know it already), as part of a wider project to facilitate a research culture amongst practitioners and develop a disciplinary community amongst choral researchers. Look out for the launch of a new journal in the coming months as another part of this initiative.

As you might imagine, a morning immersed in multiple researchers’ work filled more pages of my notebook than can be digested in a single blog post. Indeed, many of the things I noted will show more in the way they nourish my thinking over the coming months than in any immediate reporting. But there are themes that need thinking about, and this blog is where I do my thinking in public.

This post is inspired by a recent conversation about what different choral groups do by way of a tea break (or not) during an evening rehearsal. I have framed my post as one where I climb up on my platform for being opinionated, but I should let you know that the dialogue it emerges from was anything but contentious. Just a bunch of people saying, ‘We rehearse from this time to that time, and this is what we do by way of a break’.

We all found it helpful and interesting to see the range of options available. I particularly liked the one where they had drinks available for the half hour they had the hall before rehearsal started so that those who wanted to come early could socialise. It seemed a good way of balancing the needs of those who value a cuppa and chat and the task-focused shy people who would rather be singing.

click on the pic to see it biggerAt the Telfordaires we recently spent a chunk of rehearsal exploring the sonority of the Icicle 7th. And since I had in the process ended up with a nice picture of it, I thought I’d share it with you as well. The original picture I drew of this on our flipchart in rehearsal wasn’t either as neat or as colourful as this, but since I forgot to take a photo of it for our weekly notes, I had to recreate it at home, and took the opportunity to spiffy it up a bit.

So, we started out by singing a normal barbershop 7th. (That’s a dominant-type 7th for normal musicians; we let you use them, because we like to share, but know that they’re ours.) Basses on root, baris on the 3rd, leads on the 5th, tenors on the 7th.

One of the niche challenges of a cappella arranging is how to handle melodies that feature a rest on the first beat of the bar. The reason this is an issue is that the change of harmony at the start of a bar not only plays a role in supporting the melody and shaping the phrase, but is also the primary means by which we perceive metre.

Interestingly, this is a melodic feature that appears in a variety of rhythmic guises. I’ve come across it arranging in stylistic contexts from reggae tunes like One Love to ballads like Someone to Watch Over me.

I am of a generation to have gone through my student years, and indeed the start of my lecturing career, before notation programs were the normal way to write music. (I also wrote all my undergraduate essays by hand. Astonishing to think that I used to have handwriting that other people could read. Sort of; there were some complaints.) It used to take a lot more time to produce a score and parts back then. Oh my, producing parts was painful...but then again spare a thought for those musicians who lived before the invention of the photocopier.

Anyway, using a notation program is not only faster and more legible than writing everything out by hand, it gives you a different relationship with material. In particular, playing back what you’ve just written is fundamentally different when it isn’t you at the piano but a device that is not only external to you (and so will play what you actually wrote, not what you thought you wrote), but guaranteed to play it accurately.

So I am eternally grateful for the helpful people who invented this tool.

Action warm-up pic!

Thursday evening took me up to Stockport to have an initial session with Affinity Show Choir on two new arrangements they have commissioned from me for LABBS Convention this autumn. We have a date in the diary for a full day on them next month, but they wanted and initial undergrowth-clearing session before then to get the big-picture issues identified so they could come into that day prepared and ready.

We’d already had a productive dialogue about how the songs wanted shaping during the commissioning process, as it was this package that inspired my post To Recreate or Reimagine?. Their director Andrew and I had had quite a long phone conversation that involved singing bits to each other to discuss phrasing, then he had put together a guide track to inform the person making learning tracks for him, and run that past me before commissioning the tracks. As a result I went in knowing that they had been learning the music from materials that made sense of the intended musical world, so we could get straight into refining the fit between musical detail and their expressive personality as a chorus.