Coaching

I spent last weekend with Fascinating Rhythm near Bristol for their chorus retreat. Their director, Jo Dean, has been with them two years, and they are at that productive point where they have settled into a secure working relationship, but not into a rut. Indeed, one of the minor themes of the weekend was helping Jo feel safe to keep a lighter grip on the reins now that she is getting a more immediate and nuanced response from the singers – several gestures that were needed when the chorus was first learning to read her can now be reduced and/or dropped entirely.

One major theme that emerged was that many aspects of the way you deliver a performance are contingent rather that fully definable in advance. If one part leads into a phrase, the other parts need to respond to the vocal tone they use that particular occasion, for instance. Likewise, the length of a grand pause depends on the energy and manner of release of the sound that precedes it. Come back in too soon and the audience won’t be ready for you; leave it too long and their attention will wander; gauge it right and they will meet you at the start of the next phrase.

On Tuesday I had my first coaching session with Amersham A Cappella since they won both the Good Housekeeping Choir of the Year competition and the LABBS chorus championship within two weeks of each other last October. They are still wearing the extraordinarily broad smiles they acquired then, and are pushing forward to build on the performance gains they made during the previous year.

Both of the arrangements we worked on on Tuesday were show pieces that use a lot of the techniques of contemporary a cappella instead of (and/or in addition to) the techniques of core barbershop. So, homophonic close-harmony textures appeared somewhat sparingly, to be replaced by more layered textures, largely driven by nonsense word-sounds (‘vocables’) used for their evocation of instrumental timbres. Hence, much of our work revolved around teasing out the details of these different textures, and balancing out the layers.

The New Year’s coaching season launched off at the weekend with a visit to Heartbeat chorus in Cheshire, under their new director Nancy Kelsall. The goal was to kick off their preparation for the Sweet Adelines Region 31 convention in May after all the distractions of seasonal performances before Christmas. As current bronze medallists, they are approaching this with a distinct sense of purpose.

Over dinner on Saturday night, Nancy’s husband Simon remarked on a helpful comment one of his rowing* coaches used to make: that usually the moment at which you notice the problem isn’t the moment that’s causing it. So, rather than dealing directly with the issue you notice, you should analyse what has happened immediately beforehand to set it up. This applies really well to singing too: if a note is slightly flat, it’s probably the two before that lacked support; if a phrase has a ragged start, it’s probably from uncoordinated breathing.

Vale Connection ChorusI spent last Saturday working with Vale Connection chorus in Evesham on my arrangement of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. Some of the singers had attended the education day back in 2009 that it was originally arranged for, but for others it was new territory. It’s one of those songs where the title sets the tone for the performance style, and it’s almost impossible to avoid having a good time with it (not that I’ve really attempted to).

Two things stood out for me from the day’s activities.

Warming up on Saturday morning
I spent the weekend with my friends in Amersham A Cappella at their annual retreat. I was one of three coaches for the weekend, along with Nancy Kelsall and Sandra Lea-Riley of Eu4ia fame, and I found the team approach an interesting change from my regular coaching experience.

It’s been some years since I did much team coaching, and I found this weekend went significantly more smoothly than that previous experience. I’m sure being more experienced helped, as did a more equal relationship within the team (rather than being the junior partner – which is one of those problems that self-corrects over time of course). But most important was working from established relationships - Nancy and Sandra are already well accustomed to working together, and we’ve known each other a good long while too. I first worked with Eu4ia back in 2005, and we’ve spent enough time discussing ideas about music and performance together in the intervening years to have a pretty good idea of each other’s philosophies.

Coast to Coast in warm-up modeCoast to Coast, the national chorus of LABBS, invited me to coach them on Sunday as part of their retreat weekend. The chorus comprises singers from across the country, and meets once a month, usually on a Sunday. Many of its members sing with small choruses, and find that Coast to Coast offers them not only the chance to sing in a larger group, but provides a wider networking opportunity to exchange ideas and advice to take back to their home clubs.

The chorus had spent the Saturday on big-picture questions such as planning the group’s development and exploring their understanding of the music. Their new director, Linda Blackett, has identified as a medium-term goal to work on musicianship, and having the extra day together gave them the chance to do activities that focused on the skills of the singers and not just preparing for their next performance – a nice bit of work on production capacity, not just production.

On Tuesday I spent an evening with Green Street Blues to help kick off their pre-convention preparation season, and the focus of our work was on the new contest uptune that they commissioned from me earlier in the year. During my last visit back in April we had established the overall expressive approach to it, and our task now was move into the detail.

On Sunday I made another coaching visit to my friends in Bristol Fashion chorus as they start their pre-convention season of contest preparation. They had had the foresight to record their contest package on their rehearsal night last week and send them to me in advance, and it was great to be able to spend some time on the way down formulating ideas for our day’s work from a really up-to-date snapshot of their work.

One of the issues the chorus is grappling with how to get the benefit of deep familiarity with a song whilst keeping their relationship with it fresh. This is a dilemma that all ensembles face in some way or another. You need new repertoire to expand your artistic horizons and stretch you emotionally and technically; but you also need to be able to get beyond the practical issues of getting the notes and words right to be able to develop depth and insight. So the question is how to manage this balance without familiarity collapsing into autopilot.