Coaching

After my day with Rhapsody in Peterborough, I had a day in Essex coaching Flame quartet in the morning and Chorus Iceni in the afternoon. Flame is a new quartet, though its members bring a considerable breadth and depth of previous experience to the party, while Chorus Iceni are fresh back from achieving their best results ever (by a considerable margin) at LABBS Convention last month. So there was a good sense of momentum in both sessions, if for different reasons.

With Flame, we spent a good deal of time using a new coaching technique I had actually devised the day before with Rhapsody. I have been advocating slow practice as a way to get into the detail and give yourself time really to hear the harmonies for a good long time. But this has usually been an analytical process with a technical focus, rather than serving artistic goals.

I spent Saturday in Peterborough with Rhapsody Chorus for what turned out to be an intensive coaching session. Part of the challenge was from working on music that was as yet very fresh in preparation, so the singers were working harder all day than they would with more familiar repertoire. At the same time, the very freshness meant we weren't having to try and move beyond any particularly ingrained habits, so the distance travelled was commensurately greater.

A theme that emerged several times during the day, and then reappeared in our debrief session at the end was that the place where effective work takes place is at the edge of your current ability. If you can do something comfortably, it's having a nice time singing (which isn't itself a band thing to do!) but you're not particularly learning anything. The things you need to spend rehearsal times on are the things that you can't quite do yet, but you can get close enough that you know a few more tries will get you there.

I had a trip down to Kent on Saturday to do an afternoon’s workshop with Diversity Choir on the theme of ‘Expressive Performance and the Musical Imagination’ as part of their annual retreat. We built the workshop around the music they are preparing for their concert next month, on the principle that, since the goal was to explore methods to enhance the communicative impact of the choir’s performances, the most direct way to do this was to develop them in the context of music they will performing in the near future.

We approached the workshop through the ideas of the Manager and the Communicator. These are always useful concepts, but you notice it particularly when you are working with music that is only partway through the rehearsal process. You need the Manager on duty a good deal of the time for this stage of learning, but it is also the right moment to give an explicit role to the Communicator, so that the performers’ mental map of the song has meaning, imagination and imagery built in to it, rather than just layered on top of a technical learning process.

Through the looking-glass...Thursday evening took me down to Bristol for a follow-up visit to Avon Harmony. I last worked with them in September, and it was gratifying to both them and me that I could hear a distinct difference made by all the work they have put in during the intervening six weeks. In particular, I noticed that not only were they much better at bubbling than before, but also all the skills that bubbling develops had improved too - continuity of breath, forward placement of tone.

The balance of coaching shifted from last time so that I was working much more through their director, Alex, rather than directly with the chorus. Since we last worked together, he has developed a much more controlled and specific gestural style, losing a lot of the distractions that his energy had been introducing. There was more of a sense of technique to be refined than the raw musical intention he had previously been running on.

On Wednesday night I was down in West London to work with Capital Connection in the first of a series of three visits planned for November. It's a chorus I know quite well, but it's been a little while since I've heard them, so found myself with a pleasing combination of a previously-established trust that comes from familiarity with a freshness of listening that comes from distance.

It also creates an interestingly different dynamic when you know you are going to be following up again shortly from when any repeat visit is going to be some months away. The process of prioritising changes when you can decide to pursue something now or to leave it until next time. You can have a sense of developing an agenda that spreads beyond the one session, setting some processes in motion to return to again, while reserving other things for later, knowing they'll respond more effectively to attention once the highest priority areas are more established.

I have written before about the cultural discomfort with women singing loudly, and how some successful female singers have dealt with this. I'm going to get more pointed today, though, and specifically criticise the habit of some male coaches of systematically and radically reducing the volume at which the women they are working with sing.

First, I'm going to go out on a limb and say there is no such thing, in an absolute sense, as 'too loud' when you're talking about the unamplified human voice. When Isobel Baillie said, 'Never sing louder than lovely,' that was a statement about relative qualities, not absolutes.

I spent Saturday morning with the West Midlands Police Choir in central Birmingham, doing a half-day bespoke workshop on the theme of Developing the Ensemble. I have to say that, whilst my recent adventures have been most exciting, it was lovely to be working on my home patch for a change. It is quite a novelty to lead an event like this and still be home in time for lunch.

Within the major theme of how you turn a group of individuals, each with their own heart, brain and voice into a single performing unit, we had two main areas of focus: finding common approaches to using the voice, and opening up the ears and sense of mutual awareness between the singers.

Wednesday took me back to Windsor for a second visit to the Royal Harmonics. In some ways it feel like no time at all since I was last with them, but I couldn't help but notice that it was light when I arrived for my previous visit, but this time night had already fallen.

It was a pleasingly productive evening's work, with focused attention on several different pieces covering a wide range of musical and vocal issues. Their director, John Palmer, had some very clear agenda items for the songs he had picked to work on, but at the same time balanced his areas of interest with an openness for my diagnoses of a song's highest priorities for work. Sometimes the areas I picked up as the most important for attention were the same as the ones he had ear-marked to work on, whilst sometimes I brought up things that had not particularly been on his radar; either case was useful and interesting.