Learning

On Wednesday I outlined the background and rationale for an experiment I’ll be running during June to see what difference 5 minutes practice a day actually makes for the participants. Today I’ll outline what it will involve and how to join in.

What You Need to Do

1. Do the Practice Routine (see below) every day during June
2. Keep the following records:
   • Every day, note whether or not you actually did the routine
   • Once a week jot a few thoughts down about how you are finding the experience (maybe 30-60 words)
   • At the end of the month, write a brief summary of how you’ve found it overall (maybe 80-120 words)
3. At the start of July, email me your records

We all know that if you practice between rehearsals, you develop skills faster and retain more of the music learned than if you don’t. And everybody I know always intends to do more between rehearsals than they actually do (including me of course).

I was at a workshop recently where we were being exhorted to practice various exercises regularly as a way to improve our vocal skills, and being assured that just a few minutes a day would make all the difference. And it occurred to me that the problem with this message isn’t its content, it’s the follow-through: everyone agrees with the principle, but do they do anything about it? (Well, they might a couple times in the following week…but then Real Life takes over again.)

I came away with two questions from this:

1. How much difference does ‘just a few minutes’ a day actually make?
2. How do you get people to do it?

This post is a follow-up to my last one about the question whether there are choirs that don’t audition but nonetheless achieve a high standard of performance. We have established that such choirs exist, and the question is, what are they doing that other non-audition choirs which don’t achieve such high standards aren’t?

This is something dear to my heart; indeed, I’d almost say it’s part of my primary life-project to work out how not to have to choose between excellence and inclusion. I’m greedy, I want both – and I think it is possible to have both, though I recognise that it takes longer to achieve than picking one or the other.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but a collection of observations about choirs which appear to out-perform the skills their members first turned up with:

I recently read Daniel Coyle’s book, The Talent Code, which is all about the neurology of excellence. The central theme is that certain forms of deep practice enable the brain to develop in ways that allow you to get very good at something. The key process involves the way neurons get wrapped in a substance called myelin, which has the effect of ‘insulating’ the activated neural path so that it can fire ever more quickly and efficiently.

There were several key elements to the type of activity that leads to these highly myelinated paths. Repetition is important (the neurons that fire the most get insulated the most), as is working at the outer edge of your competence: making mistakes and correcting yourself is an integral part of the process. Musicians know this: there is a difference between actually practising and just playing through stuff. Even ‘worthy’ activities like technical drills don’t add much if you just do them rather than practise them.

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.