Learning

Last week I was encouraging the world to develop the capacity to start singing at any point in the music, not just the obvious section boundaries, and promised some practical hints on how to work on this. So, here they are.

The first port of call is the music itself. Part of the director’s preparation for introducing new repertoire needs to be to identify potential start points, and to categorise them as more or less obvious or challenging. The three musical dimensions that most affect this classification are harmony, rhythm and phrase structure. (Arguably the third is a product of the other two, but it is a useful analytical dimension in its own right.)

The obvious section boundaries will usually see these three working together. It’s easy to come in at the start of the verse because all musical elements are signalling the sense of ‘beginning-ness’. It’s harder to pick up from the second phrase because, whilst the phrase structure might signal it as a new beginning, it will likely have moved away from home harmonically. It’s harder still to pick up mid-phrase because both are in flux, though easier if the parts are rhythmically unified than if they are staggered.

So, the four qualities that the singers will want to hang their hats on as they develop this skill are:

When I was working up to my Grade 1 piano exam aged 8 or so, my piano teacher introduced me to a game of ‘lucky dip’. This involved identifying all the passages in my pieces I was stumbling over, writing each on a piece of paper, and putting the paper in pot next to the piano. During each practice session, I would then take one piece of paper out at random and work on that passage until I could do it three times in a row correctly, at which point I would throw the paper away and pick another.

At the time I kind of recognised that she was getting me to engage with difficult bits by turning it into a game. But what I didn’t realise until years later was that she was also training me to be able to pick up the musical thread anywhere in the piece without having to go back to the beginning. This is a skill that I think would benefit quite a lot of the ensembles I have been working with in recent months.

Neumes: How did that go again?The question of do you have to be able to read music to sing in a choir can be a point of some contention. The battle lines are (possibly rather notionally) drawn between ‘classical’ choirs as representing the pro-literacy lobby and ‘community’ choirs representing the non-readers. These lines probably relate more to repertoire expectations and working methods than the skill levels of the actual participants, though. Plenty of classical choirs include non-readers picking things up by ear, while plenty of community choirs include readers mentally writing down their parts as they hear them sung.

So in real life, readers and non-readers often sing side by side. The divisions arise more as matters of ideology. Community choirs may argue that to insist on musical literacy excludes people who have not had the opportunity to learn, and that would both deprive the singers of rewarding experiences and deprive the choir of the singers’ vocal and moral support.

Addressing anyone here who classes themselves as either an ‘arranger’ or a ‘wanna-be-arranger’ or a ‘not-sure-I’d-claim-to-be-an-arranger-but rather-like-fiddling-around-with-notes’:

Hands up if you have a bunch of half-finished and indeed barely-started arrangements hanging around in your desk drawer and/or hard disk (depending on your preferred technology).

Have a look round – see how many people have their hands up? Pretty much everyone.

I quite often find myself in conversations with people who feel bad about this, you see, and I wish they wouldn’t. They talk about their pile of unfinished charts as if it’s something to be ashamed about, as if not turning every tune they play with into a finished product marks them as a failure. Whereas in fact it’s just a normal part of the existence of an arranger.

A few months ago, my friend Sarra sent me a link to an interesting post on The Fluent Self blog about different phases of skill level. It is worth reading in its entirety, but the executive summary is as follows:

Beginners don’t need to be given challenges because everything is challenging.

In an advanced practice, you find challenges, because you have a conscious, intentional relationship with yourself and the world around you.
It’s the middle you want to watch out for. When you need other people to create challenges for you.

Most people think the middle is where you are until you get good, but the middle is where you stay until you decide it’s time to be conscious.

This is an intriguing observation, and I’m finding it resonates in all kinds of ways with my observations of how people develop musically.

The process of communication – whether verbal, nonverbal or musical - is typically theorised with a model based on the postal system. The originator (speaker, composer) writes a letter that they deposit into the postbox of the relevant communication system (spoken utterance for conversation, performing ensemble for music) so that it can be delivered to the addressee (listener, audience).

It’s a model that’s useful for thinking about such things as intentionality of communication, and the dangers of transmission error and misreading. But there are whole other aspects of communication it ignores.

Gesture theorist David McNeill develops a concept of communication that is much more participative. (It also integrates verbal and nonverbal communication rather than separating them out into distinct ‘channels’.) He uses the word ‘inhabitance’ to express the way a conversational group works as an ensemble, creating a world of meaning that they cooperate to maintain and develop.

This time last year I was complaining misanthropically about the clichéd nature of so many Christmas songs – both in their musical profiles and the imagery of their lyrics. This year I seem to be in less of a bah-humbug mood, and have been delighting in the way the Christmas season can provide a never-ending fund of imagery to help the rehearsal process.

I’ve written before about the usefulness of metaphors as a means to encapsulate complex, multi-dimensional (indeed, artistic) ideas about how music needs to be performed. And the more concrete and vivid the imagery it is, the more memorable it becomes. It turns out that the festive imagery we use to represent the season to ourselves can serve this purpose effeciently, effectively, and cheers everyone up in the process. People like to feel Christmassy, especially when rehearsing Christmas music.

I have had conversations recently with three different women about the phenomenon of ‘not being able’ to sing. Each had brought the identity of ‘non-singer’ with them from childhood, but each now had a different relationship with that identity.

The first has been singing in a choir for a few years now. She joined when she was in her fifties, having believed since the age of 11 that she couldn’t sing, because somebody had told her so. But she always rather wanted to nonetheless, so went along to join the choir with much trepidation and discovered to her pleasure that she could after all.

The second was a participant in a workshop I ran recently who had come along to accompany her daughter. She confessed to enjoying the session, but was worried that she was spoiling it, because she couldn’t sing. ‘But of course I sing to my daughter,’ she mentioned as an afterthought.