Learning

Pretty much anybody involved in singing is likely to be proselytising about it at times. They’ll tell you how great it makes them feel physically and emotionally, and how it makes them feel more alive and true to themselves. It can all get a little mushy and self-congratulatory, especially at events that gather a lot of singers together. ‘Singing,’ Bob Chilcott announced to delegates at the Association of British Choral Directors convention one year, ‘can change the world!’

Yeah, so what we do is special and wonderful and powerful and important, but can we just get over ourselves? I sometimes think.

Every so often, though, you come across something that makes you think: this really is special and important and actually not mushy at all. An example would be this account by a lady called Jacqueline of her experience in joining the Reading Barberettes, quoted in Voicebox towards the end of last year:

Self-help books, especially those with a bit of an NLP slant, tell us that mental rehearsal is a Good Thing to do. I’ve often found their exercises in visualisation quite difficult, however – possibly because the type of thinking you’re doing while reading the instructions is quite different from the kind of full-sensory fantasy the instructions tell you to engage in. So for quite some time I thought of mental rehearsal as being some strange and special thing that I didn’t quite get.

Then one day, I was preparing a lecture, and thinking through how I was going to deliver the material – where I could probably raise a laugh, where I would need to pause to let the students catch up, where the focal points to crystallise the key ideas would come. And I suddenly realised – what I was doing was mental rehearsal, and it’s not something special at all, it’s something I do all the time. Anything that takes a spot of planning or anticipation, you can live through in prospect, whether it’s working out what you’re going to say to someone in a non-routine conversation (asking someone out, quitting a job) or planning a rehearsal.

Maybe this is obvious, but it was a revelation to me at the time.

One of the things that distinguishes skilled from less skilled choral groups is the relationship between breath control and musical structure. To be sure, there are lots of other things that distinguish them, but I find this one interesting for the way that it allows a fundamentally imaginative function – conception of musical shape – to be audible through a physical response.

All singers seem to breathe according to their understanding of musical shape. However, more skilled singers have developed the capacity to choose where this might be. They think about the music and, through a combination of intuitive response and conscious decision, place the breath points in places that group the words and/or notes into meaningful gestalts. That is, they work in phrases.

Less skilled singers seem to experience music in two-bar chunks, and will breathe after each pair of bars whatever is going on in the music and lyrics.

I wrote last week about Iacoboni’s book Mirroring People, and I’m sure you realised at that point that the small point I picked out to discuss was not the only thing I’d found interesting. The central theme of how we become more like each other is at the heart of the questions I set out to address in my book on choral conducting, so if I’m writing about that less here, it’s because I’ve already spent 5 years focused on that question (and indeed, talking about mirror neurons as part of how I answered it).

But there were also all sorts of twists and turns and ramifications in it that I found resonating with questions that musicians fret over.

I recently read Marco Iacoboni’s book Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with People. I would highly recommend it, despite a couple of reservations about its style.* It came out shortly after I had finished my book on choral conducting, and I think it’s fair to say that had it come out 8 months earlier there would have been more mirror neuron talk in my book. On the other hand, several of the other key theoretical sources I drew on also feature heavily in the Iacoboni, and I am very relieved to say that I find this book develops and deepens my understanding of the neurological processes that underlie the practices I discuss rather than fundamentally changing them.

One small corner of the Iacoboni that I found interesting from a general perspective of teaching and learning was his assertion that we use different parts of the brain for newly-learned and well-practised tasks. He says:

If you came here via the front page of Helping You Harmonise, you will have seen the new notice announcing the mentoring scheme I am organising for barbershop arrangers. (If you haven’t seen it yet, more details are here.) It will work by pairing people up to give each other feedback on each other’s work, and I thought it might be useful to say a few words about the rationale for this approach.

I spent a happy couple of days at the weekend working with Signature, LABBS chorus champions from 2006, and Enigma, a quartet from within their ranks who won the quartet contest the previous year. Something I found very interesting with both groups was being invited to work on music that was in a very early stage of the rehearsal process, and I think this is something that many groups would benefit from too.

This toy is one of the key images that gradually came to mind in my early years of teaching to describe the process by which I was going through with my students. (Another was the Blue Paint Problem I wrote about back last winter.)

As a new lecturer, tasked with producing two hours per week of formal lecture material on ‘Beethoven and His Influence’, and an hour a week on ‘Aesthetics’ (between a miscellany of other classes on music analysis, history, study skills for musicians and a smattering of piano lessons) I was very focused on content. That’s a lot of material to prepare when you’re doing everything for the first time.