Tuesday night took me over to Three Spires Harmony in Coventry to work primarily with their director, April Stevens. April is in her first post as a director, and having got a few months experience under her belt – getting to know the chorus, getting to know the music – she was ready for some specific input on her conducting technique.

Incidentally, April’s trajectory is an exemplary case study of what sociologist Robert Stebbins has termed a barbershop ‘career’. His point is that one of the things that marks a hobby out as ‘serious leisure’ is the way its structure offers opportunities for individuals to progress and develop over time.

So, like April, you can start out as a singer in a chorus, get promoted onto its music team, and from there be in a position to take on the directorship of another local chorus. In April’s case, this career progression is being explicitly supported by the director of the chorus she sings with, The Belles of Three Spires, and I am certain this mentoring has helped both chorus and director settle in together more readily. I just mention it in case anyone else wants to do likewise in similar circumstances.

When arranging a popular song for a cappella, like any other type of cover version, you have two basic options for how to approach it. You can aim to recreate the original in the new medium, or you can use the act of transfer to reimagine the music. In the first approach, the primary pleasure for your listeners is recognition: Oh yes, I know this, here are all my favourite bits in a new context! In the second, it is rediscovery: Oh, I’ve never heard it this way before – now I hear it in an entirely new light!

As an arranger, I am often complimented for my work of the first type. People value the sense of being true to something they know and love. But sometimes I’ll choose instead to completely recast a song, either because somebody asks me to (as in my arrangement of I Will Survive), or to solve some essential problem that the song presents.

If you’re female, you’ve probably experienced this far too many times, going back to before there was a word for it. I seem to have encountered quite a spate of it recently (both as recipient and witness), and it’s got me thinking about what exactly is going on.

The first thing I’ve been mulling over is a question a male friend asked me over a year ago: how does mansplaining differ from the kind of dominance displays men enact on each other by showing off their knowledge on a subject? The key dynamic of mansplaining, I articulated to him at the time, is not merely the lecturing of one person by another, but that the woman being lectured to is in fact an expert in the subject the man is telling her about, but he isn’t. (If you don’t know the story that inspired the coining of the term, you need to go read it.) I don’t know why blokes do this, by the way, since it makes them look stupid, but it’s well documented that they do.

So it’s time to get back in the saddle and start paying attention to the outside world again. I hope you have all had a restful break over the holiday season, with the balance of fellowship and quiet time that best suits your personality. For myself, I can’t remember the last time I spent quite so many days in a row at home without working, which is a bit of an achievement. I love what I do for a living, but I had some times during 2018 when I struggled to remember what I do when I’m not doing that.

The title is in the spirit of ‘The Christmas Song’. Other blog posts about Christmas are available, but a gratuitous definite article always makes things look more purposeful when you’ve not yet thought of a better title. (I’m not – necessarily – saying this was the songwriter’s rationale, just sharing my own process.)

Anyway, just a quick note to say that as usual I’m not planning to post over the seasonal break. I shall be aiming to get myself some more time away from screens over the holiday, and am helping you do likewise by not posting anything you might want to read. If it turns out that you actually like a little escapism from all the people and excessive good cheer, you can always indulge in a little nostalgic browsing of the archives.

My title today refers to a paradox relating to Christmas repertoire in general, rather than to the specific song of that title. But now I’ve mentioned it, I am going to be self-indulgent and get a few things off my chest.

1. Why the definite article? Other Christmas songs are available
2. Nobody dresses up like Eskimos for Christmas. For sure there are all kinds of wintry clichés associated with the festival that have little or nothing to do either with its pagan origins or its appropriation to celebrate a Palestinian-born Messiah. (For example, I don’t recall the gospels mentioning penguins along with the ox and the ass). But the Eskimos line is clearly there for no other purpose than to rhyme with ‘Jack Frost nipping at your nose’.

   And you wouldn’t think it should be too hard to find something else, less absurd, that would fit. Chose, crows, doze, froze, goes, hellos, joes, lows, pose, prose, rose, sews, shows, suppose, toes, those, woes…all those possibilities…

   Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
   And played through speakers made by Bose

   Okay, so this doesn’t pass the ‘less absurd’ test, but it is likely to be more factually accurate.

3. Everybody knows that candles and some fairy lights help to keep the season bright. Turkeys and mistletoe have their seasonal uses, but not typically as lighting solutions.

I recently had some correspondence with a director who asked me for feedback on her technique after I’d been working with her chorus, and it took us into territory that feels like other directors might also be interested in. So, I’m doing the further thinking about it I promised to do publicly here.

It started with an observation I made about how she came over in action:

I observe that when your musical concept is clearer, your gestures are more neat and precise and it takes less effort to communicate. So it may be that when you are finding the physical coordination more difficult, that is a signal that you need to clarify your musical concepts more. That is a working hypothesis rather than an absolute, but one which there is no downside to exploring.

She replied that she found this plausible, and that in fact it was sometimes developing the musical concept itself that presented the challenge:

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I rooteenlee trie anned tawk them owt uv thiss on thuh baysiss that it maycks thuh myoozick mutch hahda two reed four thohz hoo undastanned hahmunny. Ewe haff two stop anned puzzul owt wot awl thee individyoual nohtz ah anned tranzlayt that ennhahmonickly intwo uh kawd rahtha than chust reeding thuh myoozick. At bessed it sloes ewe up, at wurst it chaynjezz thuh meeningz.