Our MDs of the future

Last year’s joint LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend had such large numbers of delegates that we had no room to accommodate, or indeed to meet the needs of, aspiring directors of tomorrow. So I promised that we would do something specifically for them in 2025, and it happened on Saturday.

The day was modelled on the introductory one-day courses I run periodically for the Association of British Choral Directors, but tailored to the needs of this one choral genre. So, the morning had class sessions on various aspects of the MD’s role, including tuition on the fundamental elements of conducting technique, while the afternoon was spent doing practical work, with each delegate taking it in turns to direct the rest in song and receiving individual coaching.

Friday night at Birmingham Pride

Well over half the Spring bank holiday weekends in my entire life have been spent at the British Association of Barbershop Singers Annual Convention. This year was the first of a new shape to the weekend, as it is also the weekend of Birmingham Pride which is a major fixture in Rainbow Voices’ calendar. Hence I spent the Friday night with them performing on the big stage at Pride, before heading down to Bournemouth to catch just the final day of the Convention.

One of my stock phrases when coaching expressive performance is: The lyrics tell us what is going on, the music tells us how to feel about it. Like most stock phrases it lacks nuance in some contexts, but is a safe and useful generalisation that focuses our attention on the role that of aspects of a song that can sometimes seem quite intangible play in its communicative impact.

All musical elements play a part in shaping the sense of characterisation and emotional narrative - melody, rhythm, texture, voicing – but today I am thinking particularly about harmony. For there is a particular challenge that faces the arranger when working within the defined harmonic vocabulary of contest barbershop: how do you shop a song without making it sound just like every other barbershop song you’ve ever heard?

I’ve just spent a happy Sunday with SpecsAppeal, working with them on techniques to help them build their unit sound as a quartet. I’ve known them for some years, having arranged for them a number of times, but this is the first time I’ve actually coached them. I have enjoyed seeing how they have grown as an ensemble over time, and we all came into the day with a sense of alignment between what they are currently focused on and what I felt I could help them with.

Sometimes a coaching session is all about exploring a particular repertoire, and you might have thought that this might have been the case on Sunday as I had arranged both of the songs we worked on for them. But in fact, there was relatively little they needed from me in terms of concept or shape; they had picked the songs and knew exactly what they wanted to do with them, so other than helping them execute those intentions more effectively in a couple of places, there was very little we did that wouldn’t apply to any song they might have chosen to sing.

I mentioned in my recent post about a coaching session developing a rehearsal protocol for quartets to support each other in correcting notes that had been learned incorrectly. It felt like it deserved a post in its own right, as it’s something lots of us need to deal with and so it would be useful to work through not just what to do, but why this procedure helps. Plus of course having its own post will make it easier to point back to when I meet other people with the same need!

So, learning any phrase involves generating neural pathways that encode the act of singing it; the more you repeat that act, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and thus the more automated. This is very useful, until it turns out that you have been practising a wrong note, when the strength of your practised neural pathway keeps pulling you back when you’re trying to correct it.

If you are familiar with Italian at all, you will not be surprised to learn that the quartet I spent Saturday afternoon with usually sings on Mondays. It was a session focused on techniques and methods rather than preparing for a specific performance occasion: the repertoire was chosen as useful vehicles to work on, but the intent was to work on things that could then be transferred to all their other songs.

There were two broad areas we focused on: first, vocal technique, second, ensemble techniques. They arrived as four singers comfortably in control of their vocal apparatus (I note that the tonal centre did not waver all afternoon), but with potential to develop greater resonance.

A working majority of the directors present: the ones who didn't quite fit in the pic are also lovely!

On Saturday we held the annual Directors Day for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Over the years we have focused increasingly on finding ways to include as much practical, hands-on work for all delegates as possible, as that is a core skills which can only really be developed by doing. This often involves, as it did this year, work in small groups where people take it in turns to direct and sing for each other, facilitated by a coach.

The faculty always meet the night before to road-test our coaching models. This is partly so that we go into the day confident about how they work, and having figured out where the pitfalls may lie and what to do about them. And in fact it often seems as if the very act of contingency planning makes it less likely that our anticipated difficulties arise as we can head them off before they happen. But it’s also so that we get some time to nourish our own praxis, both as directors and as coaches. We learn a lot in these sessions to inform both the coaching that follows the next day and our own week-to-week directing.

Saturday took me back to work with my friends in Bristol A Cappella on the set they are preparing for both the European Barbershop Convention in early May, and the BABS national Convention at the end of the month. As I mentioned after my last visit, whilst we have been working together for many years now, this is the first time I have arranged for them, and it brings a whole new level of intimacy to the relationship. One of the singers remarked to me about how much they wanted to do me proud, to which I replied that that was how I felt about them.