Coaching

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.

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.

Just remembered to catch a screen-shot before we got into the detail

I spent a happy couple of hours on Monday evening coaching SWITCH quartet from the Netherlands. I realised as I came to write this post that one of the things about online coaching is that you don’t necessarily know exactly where the people you are working with are based, but as I had met one of them previously in Dordrecht, that is where I imagined them!

We were working on an arrangement I did about 7 years ago, and it was interesting to revisit it with them. I remembered a good deal about how and why I had made the bigger-picture decisions, and also found the individual lines quite easy to sight-read (which may be due to familiarity, or because I like to write lines I find sight-readable!), but there was also a sense of both discovery and re-discovery on working through it with them.

I spent Saturday in Milton Keynes where I had been asked to deliver a workshop on Vocal Health and Developing Resonance with Junction 14 Ladies A Cappella. I have worked with the group every so often over quite a few years, but always previously in the more standard coaching format. It made an interesting change to approach the day through a single theme. It was overall probably physically less tiring than a coaching day – there were many more opportunities to sit down – but also more cognitively tiring as we were dealing with information as well as skills.

The day was structured around exploring the fundamental elements of vocal craft, introduced in the order in which one needs to get them established in order to set up the instrument: body, breath, phonation and range in the morning, moving onto the resonant cavities in the afternoon. Each involved some sharing of concepts, some exploring in exercises, and some application to repertoire.

It is apparently over a decade since I last worked with Heartbeat (where did all that time go?!), and I see that back then I was remarking on the number of new faces that had arrived since my previous visit. This time I was struck by how many faces I recognised even after all this time; I don’t know how much of a chorus’s story you can infer from just two snapshots, but it does feel like there’s something in there.

Anyway, I remembered the chorus as being a lot of fun to work with, and that remains true. You can tell there’s a fundamental sense of up-for-it-ness in the room if on the first song you start work on you ask them, ‘Shall I be a complete bitch right from the get-go?’ and they all nod cheerfully. Accordingly we started out with an exercise that mercilessly reveals any and all flaws in rhythmic precision and found ourselves 10 minutes later with a much tighter execution.

I spent a happy day on Saturday with Celtic Chords chorus down in Truro, with the remit to help them develop performing confidence. We approached this from a variety of angles; indeed it turns out that all kinds of development activities that you might think of in terms of vocal or musical skills can helpfully be addressed through the lens of how they contribute to performing confidence. And front and centre through all of them was the principle of why we perform: to share the delight that is music, to put joy into the hearts of others.

We started the day with a focus on vocal skills, since security in your technique facilitates security in performance. The essence of technique is being able to do something at will; having that sense of control over yourself means that you feel much less at the mercy of the vagaries of fate. And addressing this first meant that we continued to get the benefit of enhanced continuity of sound throughout the rest of the day.

My title today comes from one of the more surprising bits of feedback I have had after a coaching session. To be fair, it wasn’t actually me that was described as ‘sensible’ (I was as daft as ever), it was the ideas we had worked on. The point was that the singer didn’t feel she had a long shopping list of things to remember, because the ideas fitted in with her existing musical concept of the songs, but her use of the word ‘sensible’ to articulate this point still made me laugh out loud (well, squawk).

My day with Silver Lining chorus had the brief to help them discover more musical opportunities with the package they will be taking to LABBS Convention in the autumn, with its first complete outing at a local festival this month. They already had a clear concept of what they wanted to do with the two songs, so it was a matter of finding ways to help them realise that vision more vividly.