Learning

Another session from August’s ABCD Convention that deserves individual comment is Jackie Roxborourgh’s session on community choirs. Jackie works in the world of natural voice practitioners, and so probably spends a lot time helping the people ABCD delegates were referring to as the ‘generation lost to singing’.

One of the (many) things I liked about her approach is that her focus is in helping people over the obstacles they have had with singing, whether that be childhood discouragement or exclusion in adulthood due to a lack of music literacy. So she sees it as a badge of success when people move on into other choirs – such a refreshing difference in attitude from the hoarding of members and jealousy if they ‘defect’ that you so often see.

Anyway, part of her discussion involved a compare/contrast exercise of the ‘traditional’ choir versus the ‘community’ choir.

Last week I heard from a friend about an experience that was bothering her 17-year-old son. He’s currently studying for A levels, and planning to apply for a place on a BMus course. His career aspirations seem quite clearly thought-through (way more than mine were at that age!), with a desire to perform professionally backed up by Plans B and C of teaching music and/or doing something else to pay the bills while moonlighting on the semi-pro circuit.

The first thing to note is that Plan A will almost certainly involve either or both of Plans B and C en route. Very few people support themselves throughout their career entirely from performing. It’s not just when you’re in the early stages needing to supplement income either. You also see people shifting away from full-time performance later on, in order to see their kids before they grow up, or for the chance to spend a bit of time enjoying the house they’ve been paying the mortgage on.

Anyway, that’s the background; the problem is this:

Tuning is a funny thing. In some respects it is a very objective element of music, clearly explicable in terms of acoustical properties. We’ve understood perfect intervals since Pythagoras after all. But when you start measuring sounds with human ears rather than scientific instruments, things become less clear-cut.

Our ears pick up the both the fundamental of a note and the halo of overtones that all sounds other than sine waves carry with them, between the frequencies of 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. How our brains render this collection of sounds into a perception of pitch, though, is complex and not fully understood. It’s clear we perceptually wrap the overtones into the fundamental that generates them, producing a sensation of a single note of a particular quality rather than hearing lots of different related notes as would be displayed on a spectrogram. But this combined, perceptual pitch is not necessarily identical to the fundamental: the overtones can inflect our sense of tuning as well as of quality.

Years ago I was watching one of the piano classes at the Colchester Festival, in which I had a piano student performing. One of the other entrants played the first of Debussy’s Arabesques. He was accurate, but ploddy, showing little of the sense of sweep and flow the music calls for. My first thought was: ‘What on earth is his teacher doing letting him loose on this?’ My second thought, following hard on the heels of this was: ‘I know exactly why his teacher wanted him to learn this.’

This experience highlighted the contradictory nature of two standard imperatives in the development of musical performers. On the one hand, people are encouraged to perform music that ‘suits’ them; on the other, people are encouraged to engage with a variety of styles and expressive worlds in order to develop breadth and flexibility of communication.

I recently had an email conversation with someone who wanted comments on an arrangement, that framed the request for feedback as a matter of urgency, as they wanted to get the teach tracks out to their chorus. As it happens, I was in a position to juggle my schedule to fit this in, but at the same time I felt it only fair to question whether this was the right moment to be doing this.

This is a conversation I used to have frequently with students in my years as a lecturer. It was a reasonably common pattern for someone to work on an essay at length and then come for feedback only a day or two before the deadline. Often this was because they either felt there was no point in bothering me while there were still things they knew needed fixing or because they were embarrassed to show me work in an obviously incomplete (and therefore as yet inadequate) state – which does feel a bit like answering the door in your pyjamas of course. Other times it had a more cynical motivation – ‘just tell me it’s going to pass’ – which I felt rather less sympathy for, but actually didn’t change the answer.

Recently I was watching highlights of England’s 4th one-day cricket match against Sri Lanka at Trent Bridge, and in particular the stunning innings that Alistair Cook and Craig Kieswetter put in to win the match. After a while I started to notice a distinctive quality to their successful shots. (You probably notice this more in the highlights as you see them back-to-back without all the guff in between. And there were plenty of brilliant shots in this match from which to generalise observations.)

Even though everything was moving fast – the ball, and thus the bat, and indeed the body preparing the bat for the strike – there was a sense of space, of taking time. None of the shots seemed hurried. Rather, each player seemed to find time to consider exactly how to hit the ball, and then place their shot calmly and precisely.

Over the past few weeks, Magenta has undertaken a quartet project which has done all kinds of good things for us, individually and collectively. The initial rationale behind it was two-fold: first to generate a little more repertoire for a long gig we have coming up, and second as part of our 2011 goal to build all singers’ independence on their parts.

Back in May I asked who might be interested, and had 14 volunteers out of a choir of then 18 singers, which we all thought was a pretty good response rate. One later dropped out, but we still had 4 different quartets on the go, heading for a night in mid-July when we would all perform to each other. (The numerate will notice that this involved some doubling up.) I offered the three quartets in which I wasn’t singing a couple of 1-hour coaching sessions each en route, so long as they made sure they had rehearsed together before coming to see me.

I had an email recently from some who is currently the assistant musical director of her chorus, asking about how people in her position should best go about developing themselves. She is already taking up opportunities to go to training events, but it was more a case of what happens in between – how does the front-line director develop their team? She finishes her mail:

Having said all that, I do think that some sort of guide for MDs on how to develop their section leaders/assistant MDs would be a useful document. As you know, being able to direct doesn't necessarily mean that you know how to 'teach' directors.