Coaching

I spent Sunday afternoon with NoteOrious working with them on a new medley which I had arranged for them last year. (One of the challenges of writing this post is going to be making musically useful comments that make sense without naming the songs involved, as I don’t want to steal their thunder for when they want unleash it on an unsuspecting world.)

But it was a great moment in its development to work on it – they know it well enough that memory issues were infrequent and transient, but it’s not yet been so rehearsed that it becomes difficult to make changes. Indeed, it struck me that their depth of experience as a quartet shows as much in their capacity to respond quickly to coaching input and retain the changes as in their well-developed performance skills. They have become adept at making effective use of their coaching time.

CleftomaniaLast week I had my first experience of coaching by Skype. I know some people have been doing this for some years, but I had been somewhat hesitant because my experience of the technology in its early days had been quite frustrating. It was okay as an alternative to the phone – you could live with the problems of intermittent sound and the picture freezing in return for the lack of cost and novelty of the video contact. But I had reservations about using it for something that is such a full-sensory experience as coaching.

I was persuaded to give it a go, though, by the quartet Cleftomania, who are based in Portugal. I went out to work with them last year, and will be heading out there again later this month. Not unreasonably, they’d like coaching more often than once a year, but budget and logistics make this difficult. So we gave it a try.

This is a subject I was thinking about in a very particular scenario – giving feedback to competitors after a contest – and gradually realised that the thought-processes involved generalised very well to many other teaching and coaching situations I have found myself in over the years.

There are 4 basic types of factor involved.

A couple of years ago, I was mulling over the challenges that semantic depletion presents for performers. This is where repetition of an individual word sound (or musical element) gradually renders it meaningless by stripping it from its linguistic (or musical) context. The problem for performers is that rehearsal necessarily involves lots of repetition: so how do you refine and perfect your execution of the performance without detaching yourself from its meaning?

More recently, though, I’ve been finding that there are situations in which semantic depletion can work in your favour.

When people are in the early stages of a learning process and feeling a bit daunted, you’ll often hear them being encouraged to ‘take baby steps’. Now, actually, I think this is good advice (for reasons I’ll get onto later), but the way it is usually articulated completely misreads the metaphor. People say ‘baby steps – little by little’, as if the adjective means miniature version of normal steps, rather than steps as taken by babies.

This post from the Bulletproof Musician is a case in point. I feel a bit mean picking on it, since mostly I really admire the articles over there (and if you haven’t been over there before, I encourage you to spend the rest of the afternoon having a good browse). And actually, the basic point of the article – that small incremental changes in behaviour add up over time to significant improvements in performance – is sound. But that’s kaizen, not baby steps.

MacFourI had a trip up to Edinburgh at the weekend to work with MacFour quartet. They are a well-established ensemble with a consistent track record both as performers in their locality and in Sweet Adelines contest. Their goal for the coaching session was therefore to explore new rehearsal and performance techniques that will help them build on the skills they have already embedded. They have a really secure technical control over what they do, and wanted to focus the artistic and communicative aspects of their performance.

It was clear when we were corresponding to set up the trip that they are an organised quartet, and they like to have clear sense of method. So the task wasn’t simply a case of working on repertoire, but of providing them with processes and vocabulary they could apply beyond the specific songs we worked on.

The Lichfield Singers

I had a happy and productive afternoon on Saturday with the Lichfield Singers, doing a workshop on the theme of Rethinking Choral Musicianship. One of the benefits of customising these workshops to individual choirs is that not only do they get the workshop time focused on the music they are currently working on, but the things we learn together are also specific to that occasion. I love that sense of knowledge arising from a particular context, and the feeling that we all go home slightly changed from when we arrived after the experience of working together.

Note-Orious 8: International silver medallists Note-Orious sing with National silver medallists Note-Orious 4 in the afterglowI spent last weekend in Galway as a judge for the Irish Association of Barbershop Singers’ convention. The association is one of the world’s smallest at around 250 members, but proportionately to the population of Ireland, this is as at least as high a participation rate as in other countries, and the convention sees an impressively high proportion of them attending.

The event punches above its weight in the barbershop calendar. This is because in addition to its national contests for quartets and choruses, it has an international dimension. Many new but ambitious quartets from Europe dip their toes into the water of contest for the first time over there, so people have learned to keep an eye on the Irish Convention for the coming new talent.