Coaching

Warming up on Saturday morningI was back in the Bristol area for the weekend to work with Fascinating Rhythm chorus. Since I last coached them they had had a very successful contest experience, scoring an average of 71.8 at LABBS Prelims in April,* a significant jump in their scores since the previous November. One of the questions that we faced for the weekend was to what extent was a case of out-performing themselves as a fluke and to what extent it represented a leap in standard that was capable of consolidation.

I realised overnight on Saturday that I had been pushing the chorus considerably harder than I had on my last visit, and reflected that it was probably a subliminal response to their new higher scores, and in two dimensions. On one hand, I was responding to assumptions I had about the working methods and levels of discipline and stamina it takes to get to a level that scores in the 70s, so was going in to work at that level of intensity. On the other, I was expecting a certain standard of performance, and anytime I didn’t get it, I worked at getting the quality up to that suggested by their recent success.

I was recently re-reading Mark Forster’s helpfully-titled book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play and – as you often find on re-visiting books – noticed a point that hadn’t particularly struck me before. The book as a whole is very good at getting inside the psychology of procrastination, of what’s going on when we resist doing things that feel a bit too hard. The particular issue that caught my attention this time is when you’re getting down to something and your brain suddenly pops up with something else that needs your attention.

Tuesday night saw me returning to the London City Singers for a refresher on the things we’d worked on at their retreat back in February. This gave me another chance to learn about how people retain things we’ve worked on together – a central part of my ongoing quest to become ever more effective as a coach, and to understand the inner workings of my fellow singers.

The weekend's judging panel: Alison, Alan, David, Liz, Linda, Rod and AnnekeI spent last weekend in Veldhoven for the combined Holland Harmony and the Dutch Association of Barbershop Singers convention. It was a nice size of convention – with a total of 21 each of competing quartets and choruses, it had enough participants to give a good sense of occasion, but neither contest was too long to feel like an endless slog. And there was time for every group to have a follow-up coaching session, too, which is so much more useful for onward development than mere spoken or written feedback.

Having judged at the last Holland Harmony convention two years ago, it seemed to me that both the number and standard of competitors had increased noticeably.

CleftomaniaI spent last weekend in the Algarve, working with what are, as far as I know, Portugal’s only barbershop quartet and chorus. When Sylvy Wilks moved out to Portugal four years ago she wasn’t intending to introduce a whole new musical genre there, but she quite quickly found herself part of the local network of singing and performance groups. And when she was asked if she might help re-form a choir that had folded, she chose to make it a barbershop chorus as that was where her primary experience lay, having learned to sing herself with what was then Chiltern Harmony in Amersham. So by a combination of pure luck and the gumption to make things happen, Bella A Cappella was formed.

The main purpose of my visit was to help the quartet, Cleftomania, prepare for their first contest at the Spanish Association of Barbershop Singers convention next month. As well as competing, they will also be taking along a delegation from the chorus, partly as moral support, but mostly to show them why people get so excited about the convention experience. This is only the 2nd SABS convention, but it’s clear that last year’s inaugural event has already done a lot to strengthen the network of barbershop groups in the Iberian peninsula.

I had a return visit to Heartbeat Chorus in Cheshire on Sunday, to work in tandem with one of their other coaches, John Grant. John is an immensely efficient coach, effecting significant changes in performance with a few words and a brief demonstration, and it is both a pleasure and an education to watch him in action. I think the two things that lie at the heart of this efficiency are (a) his listening skills and (b) his ability to prioritise. In fact the two are linked: it is his acuity of perception that allows him to home in on precisely the issue that most needs attention.

The chorus is in good spirits, with their win at the Majestic Choir Festival in Torquay last month having given a useful confidence boost. But they are also developing rapidly, which brings its own inherent energy.

Raymond Warren, who was Professor of Music at Bristol when I studied there used to talk of the way that Brahms so easily falls into what he called the ‘moderato trap’. Fast movements aren’t so very fast, slow movements aren’t so very slow, and there’s not much room between for the tempi of what should be of a genuinely moderate speed. I’ve been noticing a similar effect in a number of the groups I’ve been working with lately.

I had the pleasure at the weekend of working with the London City Singers at their annual retreat. They are an unusual chorus in that the area from which they draw their members is based around where they work rather than where they live, so they all stay in London after work for rehearsals before commuting back out to all points of the compass. They are also a young chorus, in both senses of the word – having been formed only 4 years ago, and with members primarily between the ages of 21 and 35.