January 2015

When people commission an arrangement, sometimes they don’t want me to hear it until they’ve got it performance-ready. Other times, people like to me to come and work with them on it, presumably on the grounds that that way they get a coach who will is guaranteed to have already spent some time thinking about how the music should go. (And actually, that’s a good way of holding me accountable - I write nothing for others to sing that I wouldn’t be prepared to help them with if they needed it.)

Amersham A Cappella took the latter approach with the contest up-tune they have commissioned for this year’s Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention.* And they got me in right at the start of the process, at the point where everyone basically knew the song, but they hadn’t practised anything into an unbreakable habit yet. So, we could get right in there and build both the overall concept/characterisation, and get some of the expressive details that will bring it alive identified from the get-go.

We got ready for the new year by considering what my father used to call the ‘too-hard tray’ - that collection of things that we look at, think, ‘eek!’ and get very busy doing something else very useful in the hope that the sense of virtue will drown out the feeling of being daunted. Corralling our demons into a specified place is a good first step to facing them properly, but does not in itself do anything more than acknowledge that they are there.

Sooner or later, that is, you have to do something about the stuff in the too-hard tray.

You may think that my spending time writing this post is itself a displacement activity, and that I am addressing this question rather than getting on with those things which are currently intimidating me. It would be a fair conclusion to draw.

But, in fact, on this occasion I am actually allowing myself the indulgence of doing some writing (something I am not - currently - scared of) as a reward for having made some progress with the too-hard tray earlier this morning. Take that, Demons!

Every so often, you hear someone articulate the idea that ‘So-and-so is a very good director, but their choir isn’t very good’. And when I hear this, my brain goes into melt-down at the sheer invalidity of this concept. The only measure of a conductor’s quality is the standard of performances they elicit from the musicians they work with. If your ensemble isn’t very good, it’s because the director isn’t very good.

Okay, so there are some caveats here. I anticipate your objections.

The raw material makes a difference. A director who is working with novices will not, from a standing start, produce results as good as one working with experienced musicians. This is particularly true of instrumental groups, but also a fair generalisation for singers. You’d expect auditioned choirs to achieve more than non-auditioned, as they have filtered out all the people who lack whichever set of skills you test for at audition.