Getting into the Flow with Mosaic

I spent Sunday happily in Norwich with Mosaic, a mixed-voice barbershop chorus who meet once a month, and who are preparing to participate in the British Association of Barbershop Singers’ Convention in May. Last year I had revoiced an arrangement for their contest set, and we spent a good deal of the day working on that, with a little TLC also on their other song.

The general trajectory of our work on both songs was to start from the holistic and work our way towards the detail. The reason for this is that global concepts often improve a lot of details at once, and so save you a lot of effort compared with diving immediately into the nitty-gritty. The chorus’s MD Chrissie had identified flow as a primary area she wanted to develop in the delivery of my arrangement, and it turned out that quite a lot of what we worked on with that song was also relevant to the other.

Flow is itself an interestingly holistic concept, encompassing elements of both singing technique and musical shaping. It is related to legato (which I write about quite frequently), but as an idea is subtly different in its associations. Anyway, as with any complex, multidimensional musical element, it is susceptible to being approached from a variety of different directions.

These included:

• Working on evenness of breath flow. Bubbling is as ever useful for this, as it makes it very clearly audible where people are producing bursts of air and where they are losing connection with the breath. This is partly a technical issue, but it is also conceptual: often the unevenness comes from thinking in syllables, and an exercise that brings the focus onto line changes how people think about the musical flow. It also gives excellent information back to the director about where their directing is facilitating flow and where it is causing bumps.
• Working on groove. The song I had revoiced for them has a gentle swing backbeat, and exploring this both facilitates forward propulsion and mitigates any tendency to land heavily on the downbeat.
• Attention to singable and approximant consonants. The poetry of the song's lyrics involves a lot of br, sw, l, m, and n sounds, all of which have the potential to impede flow by taking too long and/or by being voiced at a pitch outside of the melodic line. We worked on a few examples together, then sent everyone off in pairs to work through the lyrics finding other examples and practising cleaning them up.
• Working on the consistency of resonant space by exploring how little you actually need to move your jaw and tongue to change vowels. This allows successive word sounds to be more closely related to each other and thus connect up more readily into a flowing line.

We also worked with their director on refining her conducting technique in support of these aims, by:

• Working on stability of posture. Asking the chorus to mirror Chrissie any time she bobbed her knees cured her almost instantly of a previously well-practised habit. I was impressed how quickly she made this change, and that she did so without introducing stiffness or rigidity in her lower body. Reducing the knee bends served also to keep her torso more open and upright. The difference in the sound was immediate, and – possibly even more pleasingly – so was the difference in her confidence. Chrissie reported feeling more in control and calmer as a result, and the singers also reported feeling more settled as they sang.
• Connecting gesture with the seat of the breath. Bringing gestures from upper chest height down to around the lower ribs helps the singers connect their sound with a deep-seated breath, and also relaxes the shoulders. There is an expressive logic to a high-placed gesture space, as it brings the hands and face close together as an expressive unit, but the grounding effect of a lower gesture space as one’s default usually offers more support to a resonant sound.
• Keeping connected with the sound right through from one ictus to the next. This is both physical and attentional: you need to keep your fingers engaged if the sound is to remain likewise engaged, but in order to do this, you have to keep your ears interested in the sound right through the full length of the vowel into the next consonant.

Working on holistic concepts before detail is particularly useful for a chorus with Mosaic’s rehearsal pattern of infrequent, but extended rehearsals. By necessity a good deal of their work, both music learning and rehearsal consolidation, is done by individuals between sessions. A shopping list of details to revisit has some value for people’s private practice after a coaching session, but transferable skills they can practise embedding not just in the passages we used to introduce them but also apply more globally are far more useful. Not only does that spread the effect of the coaching beyond what we could specifically cover during the day, but also means they get to spend a greater proportion of their practice time exercising the skills, giving them a deeper and more secure grasp of them.