January 2024

Getting into our Ears

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 30th January 2024

The theme for our recent joint LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend was ‘The Listening Director’. It was originally sparked by a request from a delegate at LABBS Harmony College directors stream last year for more work on diagnostic listening skills in rehearsal (initial response: yes that’s very important, let’s do more on it!), and then kind of snowballed from there.

The more you think about the ways and contexts in which chorus directors have to listen, the more it asserts itself as the central skill of the job. It’s more important in many ways than actual conducting skills, because however elegant your technique looks, it doesn’t do any good unless you can effectively hear what you’re getting in response to your conducting. Whilst if you can get your ears into the detail of how your chorus is singing, your gestures intuitively adapt themselves to those needs.

LABBS/BABS Directors Weekend: Initial Impressions

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Wednesday 24th January 2024

The opening plenary: Theo working with Silver Lining

The weekend just gone saw what I suspect might be the largest conductor training event this country has ever seen. 120 directors/assistant directors and 2 choruses per day from both the women’s and men’s British barbershop associations gathered in Coventry for their first ever fully joint educational event.

(The Association of British Choral Directors Conventions are bigger than this to be sure, but they don’t include practical, hands-on instruction for everyone there. And conducting training in higher education usually works with much much smaller numbers.)

As you can imagine, I have lots to reflect on, and many things I have learned will be finding their way into my blog posts over the coming weeks. In the first instance, I’m just trying to process what we achieved, and capture some of the big-picture learnings on the way past. If much of what follows sounds more organisational than musical or educational, that’s because that was the primary challenge of the weekend, but it was fundamental to allowing the music and education to happen.

Tuning is a Performance Indicator, not a Goal

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 16th January 2024

So here’s another one in the genre of ‘if you haven’t got time to read the post, the title says it all anyway’. I’ve had a few conversations recently about my preference to avoid talking about intonation in rehearsal if I can possibly avoid it, and it seems that some people equate this with not caring about intonation. So I wanted to clarify things a bit.

First off, I love the sound of in-tune singing. And by this I mean both singing that maintains tonal integrity (key note staying in the same place) and singing in which all the parts are in tune with each other. Both horizontal and vertical in-tuneness, if you like. And it’s not just the way that good tuning is more consonant and cleaner to listen to at an acoustic level, it’s all the way that it brings with it beauties of tone colour - clarity, ring, luminosity – and expressiveness that you may not hear at other times.

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