Learning

In the character of robots...

Wednesday took me back to Coulsdon for another visit to Surrey Harmony. Two months on from my previous visit, they had had time to work with the ideas we explored in June, and we could see what was working, what needed further support, and what could usefully be added. And once again, we were working both to support the development of their director’s rehearsal and conducting skills and to build the skills of the singers.

Indeed, these two things often work hand in hand. Their MD Penny had a clear idea of the challenges she was facing: things that she knew she wanted to improve but was struggling to get the results she wanted. Hence, the coaching processes of diagnosis and intervention served both to help solve the problems and to model ways to go about solving them.

My second post on this subject tackled the ‘well what do I actually do?’ part of the question about how to deepen our interpretations. And whilst it came up with a bunch of things that I know to be useful and effective in developing imaginative and expressive musical performance, taken together they don’t add up to a total of ‘deep interpretation’. It’s like if someone asks you why you love your life’s companion, you can list lots of things about them that you adore, but the fact of your love is always more than the sum of those parts.

[Looks across the room at Jonathan, smiles fondly, but decides not to interrupt him just now to tell him about the examples I considered including but decided were unnecessary for the argument. I’ll tell him over dinner tonight instead. If you know him you can probably guess anyway.]

Having explored in my last post the question of what it means to develop our interpretation of a piece of music, it is time to turn our attention to what we actually do to make this happen. Using the distinction between ‘interpretation’ as meaning our imaginative understanding of a piece, and as meaning our concrete performance actions to make it audible, I am going to divide this up into to categories: things we do with our brains and things we do with our bodies. Of course, the two are only ever notionally separable, but when you’re thinking about something that keeps throwing up more tangents you need some kind of organising principle to hold the ideas together.

I’m also focusing on activities that can work either as individual study or as group activities. The relationship between a conductor’s understanding of a piece and the overall insight in performance is a whole other interesting set of questions that I am not going to get into today.

I had an interesting question by email recently from a barbershop director about how to go about deepening her chorus’s interpretation of a song. It came out of some feedback from Convention judges, who had considered their interpretation to be somewhat simplistic at times, and advising them to develop it by exploring the song’s layers. The director was finding it hard to know exactly what to do in response, saying:

As a song we'd sung for so long, we'd got to a point where we were all confident in our own interp, so I'm not sure any of us will have any new ideas as we felt our interp was appropriate. Yes we can get a coach into work on it and breathe new life into it, but I do worry that will simply upset the chorus that we have a version we like.

Our MDs of the future

Last year’s joint LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend had such large numbers of delegates that we had no room to accommodate, or indeed to meet the needs of, aspiring directors of tomorrow. So I promised that we would do something specifically for them in 2025, and it happened on Saturday.

The day was modelled on the introductory one-day courses I run periodically for the Association of British Choral Directors, but tailored to the needs of this one choral genre. So, the morning had class sessions on various aspects of the MD’s role, including tuition on the fundamental elements of conducting technique, while the afternoon was spent doing practical work, with each delegate taking it in turns to direct the rest in song and receiving individual coaching.

I mentioned in my recent post about a coaching session developing a rehearsal protocol for quartets to support each other in correcting notes that had been learned incorrectly. It felt like it deserved a post in its own right, as it’s something lots of us need to deal with and so it would be useful to work through not just what to do, but why this procedure helps. Plus of course having its own post will make it easier to point back to when I meet other people with the same need!

So, learning any phrase involves generating neural pathways that encode the act of singing it; the more you repeat that act, the stronger the neural pathway becomes and thus the more automated. This is very useful, until it turns out that you have been practising a wrong note, when the strength of your practised neural pathway keeps pulling you back when you’re trying to correct it.

In my first post about Molly Gebrian’s book on the neuroscience of music practice, I mentioned resonances with the ideas of the Inner Game. Interestingly, the friend who recommended this book to me was keen to keep the two separate – whilst not knocking what Inner Game principles can offer, he saw this book as much more practical and task-focused than the psychological orientation of the Inner Game.

And I agree that is a useful distinction to make. Nonetheless, as someone who enjoys finding connections, I found in a number of places that Gebrian’s suggestions for practice strategies were not only reminiscent of various aspects of the Inner Game, but also helped explain why they work. So I’ve found it helpful to work through some of these connections.

In my last post I gave an overview of Molly Gebrian’s excellent book on the neuroscience of practising music. Today I turn my attention to a number of specific concepts she shares that help us understand why we experience particular types of learning experience as effective or ineffective.

Contextual Interference

This is the term used to describe the extra cognitive load that comes with switching between tasks. This is why it feels comfortable to get stuck in and stay with one piece of music for extended periods during our practice. However, as we know, what is comfortable isn’t always the optimal learning experience, and Gebrian recommends using contextual interference strategically in order to make our brains work harder in practice. Finding ways to randomise what’s coming up, and using a timer to schedule regular changes of task make us dig deeper at each change-over. It will probably feel like we’re not doing so well than we feel after a long stint on one piece, but it results in better performances.