Coaching

Sunday saw the LABBS Convention-preparation season continue with my friends from Green Street Blues. They are taking two of my arrangements to contest this year, one that they commissioned and first performed a few years back, and another newly arranged for them earlier this year.

As might be expected from this programme, we spent far more time on the new song, exploring its structure as a means to develop the expressive shape of the performance, in particular in relation to the pattern of tonal centres the arrangement uses.

(This is fun. I am always careful not to spoil the big reveal when premieres are coming up, so I won’t tell you what song it is. But I can tell you which keys bits of it are in, and leave you to try and guess what song it could be. The original song stays in one key throughout, so you’ll be guessing from the emotional content of the lyrics. If you don’t want to play the guessing game, of course, then just come along to Bournemouth next month and they’ll sing it to you.)

I spent Saturday working with Brunel Harmony on the contest package they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in October. They had got to the point where things were generally in place - music and choreography largely embedded, and the overall concept and intentions clear - so what it needed next was a combination of polishing of execution and bringing out the details.

What we found ourselves doing to achieve this, though, was integrating technical control of the various performance elements with a sense of characterisation and narrative. It was a classic example of how you can start with any one item of technique, and find that as you explore it, it turns out to be connected with all kinds of other areas, both technical and expressive.

Warm-ups with bunting!

On Wednesday night I literally had a flying visit (plane up to Scotland Wednesay afternoon, plane back to Birmingham Thursday morning) to work with Albacapella, a relatively new ladies barbershop chorus up in Aberdeenshire. They started about 3 years ago, and are just heading into what will be their second trip to compete in the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention this autumn.

The main challenge they are currently grappling with is embedding skills that they currently exercise at the level of conscious competence (i.e. they can do if they specifically focus on them) into automated processes that they do as a matter of course. Actually, that sentence could describe pretty much any choral group at any stage of development, but, with only a short history together as an ensemble, and having taken a major leap forward in skill acquisition at a retreat earlier in the year, Albacappella are particularly aware of which specific skills they are aiming to integrate.

Thursday took me back for a second visit to Fascinating Rhythm in South Gloucestershire, this time to focus on the second of their new contest pieces they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in the autumn. They had sung through it to me the week before, which meant I could arrive prepared with a sense of the ways I could be most immediately helpful. The back-to-back visits also allowed us to revisit the work we had done the week before and make sure that was getting embedded nicely (which it was).

Both the songs the chorus is currently working on have specific musical challenges defined by the primary area of interest in the material.* Last week it was rhythm, this week lyrics. I was reflecting on this on the way home, and wondering if it is always going to be the case that the thing that makes a song distinctive and special is also the element that makes the most pressing technical demands on the performers.

Assistant director James leading the warm-up
Tuesday night took me back down to Bristol, this time to the heart of the University district, to work with a relatively new mixed group, Bristol A Cappella. I mention the university not because the chorus is particularly connected with it (though a handful of the members are), but because their rehearsal venue is within a very few minutes’ walking distance of two of my addresses from my student days. The journey there had that odd quality of deep familiarity and strangeness you get returning to places you used to know well but have not seen for a long time.

Anyway, once inside a building I had walked past hundreds of times but never previously entered, it became much more like any normal coaching visit, with a group of willing singers and the opportunity to mess with their heads.

In the event, the head I ended up messing with the most was their director’s. Iain Hallam had the personal courage and trust in his ensemble to put working on his technique firmly on the agenda as part of our work, and that turned out to be a most productive way in to helping his singers achieve more.

If you wonder why all my chorus pics are of warm-ups, that's the only time I have a moment to use the camera!On Thursday I went down to Bristol for the first of two visits working with Fascinating Rhythm on music they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in the autumn. The main challenge for the song we were working on in this first visit was getting a handle on Latin rhythms. They were at that point where they felt they were finding their way into the musical world, but not with absolute confidence.

So, what they really needed was a sense of method. It was one thing to work on the rhythms there and then with them, but I wanted to leave them with a set of steps they could go through, both in individual practice, and at subsequent rehearsals, to reconstruct the process we had gone through and so be sure in their own minds that they were getting it right. For a convincing performance, everyone involved needs to know they can make the effect happen at will.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been helping Bristol Fashion with a similar kind of review/audit process that I undertook with Hallmark of Harmony back in March. As with that exercise, I am not going to share the detail of what the review produced here - as that is for the chorus use - but I would like to reflect somewhat on the process.

The review with Bristol Fashion worked as a two-stage process. It started off with a visit to observe their Music Team in action on a regular rehearsal night, which produced a report that identified things that are working well (i.e. to make sure they keep doing them!) and areas that can be developed as individuals and as a team.

This was followed, two weeks later, by a second visit in which I facilitated a values- and goal-setting exercise with the whole chorus. The aim of this was for the singers to articulate to each other the things that matter the most to them about their musical life together, and to generate concrete actions that each individual could undertake to enhance their shared experience.

Jim Clancy: Not the best pic I've ever taken, but you can see some of the delight he is bringing to the singers on their facesIt was a no-brainer, at the recent BABS Convention, to go along to see Jim and Greg Clancy do a coaching workshop. You want to see how the current and founder directors of the world’s most successful barbershop chorus go about things; and if you’re me you also want to take notes and blog about it afterwards.

And it wasn’t a surprise to see Hallmark of Harmony take to the risers - since they will be representing BABS at the International Convention in Pittsburgh in just a few weeks, they were the obvious candidate for coaching. Then, when the singers took up position for the choreography, the penny finally dropped that I was about to see them coached on the song I had arranged for them. That was an exciting moment, though I did feel a bit dim for not having foreseen it.

Anyway, most of what they worked on would have been the same whatever the chorus was singing, so the rest of this blog post will stop being about me and go back to my original plan of writing about coaching methods. But the bit where Greg did focus in on the detail of the chart was wonderful - homing right in on the features that were there to make it exciting and bringing them into full musical technicolour.