Coaching

I recently read Marco Iacoboni’s book Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with People. I would highly recommend it, despite a couple of reservations about its style.* It came out shortly after I had finished my book on choral conducting, and I think it’s fair to say that had it come out 8 months earlier there would have been more mirror neuron talk in my book. On the other hand, several of the other key theoretical sources I drew on also feature heavily in the Iacoboni, and I am very relieved to say that I find this book develops and deepens my understanding of the neurological processes that underlie the practices I discuss rather than fundamentally changing them.

One small corner of the Iacoboni that I found interesting from a general perspective of teaching and learning was his assertion that we use different parts of the brain for newly-learned and well-practised tasks. He says:

I had a trip down to Kent on Tuesday this week to work with Green Street Blues, a chorus based in Sevenoaks. As a group which has recently acquired a lot of new members, they gave me a very specific remit: to help them understand how their music was put together, and why the composers and arrangers might have made the kinds of decisions they did. That is my idea of a fun way to spend an evening, so we were well set to get on together.

On Wednesday evening I had another visit to coach my friends at Harmony InSpires, near Oxford. I last heard them back in November 2008, when they had recently acquired a lot of new members, and it was good to see that lots of those new members were still there, and more new ones arriving on a regular basis. Whether you have a net inflow or outflow of singers is always a good indication as to the health of a chorus!

We spent much of the evening thinking about the breath, and the way it is the key to delivering musical flow.

On Sunday night I had a trip up to Yorkshire to work with the combined voices of Pennine Chimes from Bradford and Main Street Sound from York. They have been rehearsing together once a month for the last few months, as well as coordinating their plans and approaches for each group’s weekly rehearsals, and as a result are operating very much as a single ensemble. Indeed, my only clue as to who originated with which chorus were their name badges!

During the second half of the coaching session we addressed an issue that besets so many barbershop groups: the way that introducing choreography seems to undo months of careful work on vocal production.

I spent a happy couple of days at the weekend working with Signature, LABBS chorus champions from 2006, and Enigma, a quartet from within their ranks who won the quartet contest the previous year. Something I found very interesting with both groups was being invited to work on music that was in a very early stage of the rehearsal process, and I think this is something that many groups would benefit from too.

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

On Sunday I went back to coach my friends in West London on the songs they will be taking to Llangollen International Eisteddfod in July. It’s amazing how fast four hours can zip by working on three songs! I was pleased to discover that they had really internalised the work we did last month on the blue notes in ‘At Last’ and made that feel their own, which freed us up to explore other aspects of the music.

On the way home, I spent quite a lot of time reflecting on the coaching process, and in particular the way that barbershop’s particular musical practices set up some significant cognitive challenges for singers.

I spent a happy day on Saturday coaching Bristol Fashion chorus and their director of two years, Craig Kehoe. As I was there for the whole day, we had plenty of time to explore their music in some depth, including work on different types of swing, embellishment strategies, the relationship between emotion and vocal colour, as well as some of the more colourful harmonies.

The area I spent most time thinking about on the way home, though, was our exploration of the relationship between Craig’s gestures and the singers’ voices.