Choral

Borrowed from their facebook page

Wednesday evening saw me virtually heading across to the Netherlands to coach my friends RouteSixteen in preparation for the Holland Harmony Convention this spring. As with last time I worked with them on contest prep, I had intended to take a screen shot to share with you, but they turned up in costume so I didn’t so as not to give any spoilers.

Much of our work focused on the theme of continuity of sound. This is of course both a function of voice-technical and a musical matters, and I find it helpful to triangulate between the two dimensions as we work, connecting up what we are want to achieve with how, practically, to achieve it.

I have on multiple occasions had conversations, when musicking in Germany, that went:

German person: Is there an English phrase equivalent to ‘Ohrwurm’?
Me: We say, ‘The Germans have a phrase that translates as ‘ear worm’
Everyone: chuckles

(It is only on looking it up to check my spelling that I discover that this is also what Germans call the insect the English call an earwig. Maybe everyone else knew that already.)

Anyway, I am thinking about earworms because I’m writing this the day after Rainbow Voices’ Winter Concert. As is so often the case, it is the day after a performance when the music I’ve spent the previous weeks preparing for it is particularly vivid in my head. I have a similar experience when delivering an arrangement: just at the point when I no longer need to process the music is exactly when it rings loudly in my inner ear.

Today’s title is a question that emerged during an MD’s meet-up at LABBS Convention in October. It emerged partly in the context of familiar tensions within a chorus between those whose main motivation was to work hard and improve and those who were primarily interested in chorus as a source of social and emotional support. But it also existed as a stand-alone question: if singers were getting feedback from audience members that their performances were enjoyable, they felt satisfied with their achievements and rather resented being asked to develop further.

I guess the first stage in addressing the question is to step back and articulate exactly why those who do want the chorus to improve feel that way. It’s not that they don’t also value social and emotional support, but they also get a sense of reward from taking on challenges. They feel the need to aspire to something to keep engaged; maintaining (at whatever level that may be) gives them diminishing returns.

Recent conversations about learning music have identified memorising lyrics as a specific challenge. I feel this one too – the notes and rhythms stick in my head far quicker than the words do, and I have a particular talent for weird random errors in the lyrics while singing (spoonerisms, paraphrasing, malapropisms).

So it seemed like a good idea to collate some of the specific activities and tricks people use to help learning lyrics. If nothing else, having more different things to try the process more varied and thus less boring than if you just plug away at the same thing for the same amount of time. But my hunch is that varying your approach also makes the learning more effective as it means your brain has accessed the material in multiple different ways. Thus, when you have a momentary memory blank from your primary mode of learning, there are other patterns of experience available to fill in the gap.

I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about how people go about learning music: within Rainbow Voices, with other conductors I’ve been mentoring, and then just chatting with friends at the recent LABBS Convention. One of the latter conversations brought a key theme into focus in a way that helpfully organises various other interesting ideas people had shared.

My friend Mick Dargan was commenting on a previous blog post of mine where I made the point that people aren’t just empty vessels that you can pour the learning tracks into and then they know the music. He said that he could have the tracks on in the background for hours and still not know his part: he can’t learn by just passively listening, that is, he has to do.

I recently returned to Gary C. Thomas’s classic essay ‘Was George Frederic Handel Gay?’ in the context of preparing to conduct an LGBT+ choir in the Hallelujah Chorus. For those who haven’t read it, the answer to the title’s question is: it is significantly more likely that he was gay than that he was straight. There’s a nice summary the reasons for that conclusion, including reference to research done by others since the original publication here.

Thomas writes not just about Handel’s homosocial social circle and activities, but also about how those have been discursively closeted off from his role as celebrated composer. Both in his own lifetime and since, there has been a general attempt to ‘normalise’ him as a properly manly (heterosexual) man, based largely on assertion, along with some invented evidence of ostensible female love interest.

In my previous post about the insights emerging from the Association of British Choral Directors Discovery Day on female composers, I promised to develop a wider point that emerges from a number of themes, but only after I’d discussed some more detailed thoughts shared by Louise Stewart of Multitude of Voyces.

If you’ve not come across this charity before, you should investigate their work, especially if you have any involvement in Christian liturgical music. They’re most famous for publishing collections of music by women for church use – some historical, some newly commissioned - although this is just the headline output of their more general charitable objects, which are about amplifying the voices of those who have been marginalised.

The abcd Discovery Day on choral music by women earlier this month provided not only the chance to explore a cornucopia of repertoire, but also generated some interesting insights into the processes by which music gets created and into the repertoire – or not.

The tale of the London Oriana Choir’s Five15 Project, as told by Tara Mack, provided some of these insights. Tara started out by giving a description of the project, which included a programme of sustained commissioning of new music along with programming of existing music by women, and a variety of workshops, over a 5-year period. One thing that struck me about this project was its depth and breadth. It’s hard to get unfamiliar names into the regular performing repertoire because they are, well, unfamiliar, and thus less easy to remember than the big names we hear all the time. Both singers and audiences have a much greater chance of remembering whose music they have experienced if they get repeated exposure.