Coaching

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

On Sunday I went back to coach my friends in West London on the songs they will be taking to Llangollen International Eisteddfod in July. It’s amazing how fast four hours can zip by working on three songs! I was pleased to discover that they had really internalised the work we did last month on the blue notes in ‘At Last’ and made that feel their own, which freed us up to explore other aspects of the music.

On the way home, I spent quite a lot of time reflecting on the coaching process, and in particular the way that barbershop’s particular musical practices set up some significant cognitive challenges for singers.

I spent a happy day on Saturday coaching Bristol Fashion chorus and their director of two years, Craig Kehoe. As I was there for the whole day, we had plenty of time to explore their music in some depth, including work on different types of swing, embellishment strategies, the relationship between emotion and vocal colour, as well as some of the more colourful harmonies.

The area I spent most time thinking about on the way home, though, was our exploration of the relationship between Craig’s gestures and the singers’ voices.

This my third post about the recent a cappella extravaganza I attended in Hounslow, and since I’ve used up all my well-developed conclusions from the event, but still have a note-book full of things I found interesting, this one is taking the form of a miscellany. I may come back to think about some of these in more depth when I’ve lived with them for a while.

Vox Concordia with Wendy NieperSwindon Scratch Choir

I talked in a recent post about the range and variety of groups participating in last week’s Sing A Cappella day in Hounslow. This variety made it possible to see some interesting relationships between, on one hand, people’s working practices and their relationship with musical content, and on the other people’s musical background and their habits of phrasing and articulation.

Well, I’ve not finished thinking about the Sing A Cappella day, but further thoughts on that have been interrupted by another foray down the M40 to London, this time to work with my friends in Capital Connection on the songs they’re taking to Llangollen International Eisteddfod this summer.

One of the songs they’re taking is a Nancy Bergman arrangement of the Glenn Miller tune ‘At Last’. It was one of those ones that, the more we worked on it, the more nice little arranging details we noticed. I always enjoy those discoveries – makes you feel like you’re in on a special secret when you find something that was there all along, but takes on a new meaning when realise how artistic it is.

Last Wednesday I spent a fun evening with Silver Lining chorus in Coventry. It was the last session of a learn-to-sing course they’ve been running over the last few weeks, which has been both successful and popular. My session was intended as a transition from the course into the new repertoire the chorus would be starting with the participants who chose to stay on, and involved teaching a short version of my arrangement of Mamma Mia preparatory to the chorus learning the full version.

Now the challenge we set ourselves was not merely to learn all four parts of a song in a single evening, but for all singers to learn all four parts. This is possibly not as insane as it may sound, since I had originally written the arrangement for a workshop Magenta ran on the same lines, so I had designed the parts to be easily learnable. (One thing that really keeps you honest as an arranger is when you know you’ll have to teach everything you write down.) Still, it was a reasonably challenging task for singers who are accustomed to singing a single part, and learning that from a recording at their leisure. There were some who really didn’t believe we would make it!

In fact, the singers did a fabulous job.

Something that I’ve found striking when training or coaching novice and/or amateur choral directors is how often they express a desire for ‘quick fixes’. I used to think of this as rather shallow, rather like wanting some kind of miracle pill to make you healthy and beautiful rather than making the effort to eat properly and take some exercise. Directing singers is a more holistic and deep-thinking activity than that, I thought.

Last year I had an experience while coaching a barbershop chorus that put the whole thing in a new light, however.