Learning

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.

Magenta has been working on my arrangement of Night and Day recently, which has a lot of chromatic movement in the harmony parts (not my fault – Cole Porter wrote it that way). We’ve been tackling this by developing our sense of scale degrees, and the notes between them.

This is all part of my general campaign to encourage people to conceive pitch in terms of tonal context rather than in terms of intervals. I have had a clear rationale for this for some time, but recently had one of those revelatory experiences which made me realise why it was even more important in the case of semitones.

So, the basic reason to think in terms of scale degrees rather than intervals is to avoid the problem of transferred error.

There’s a lot of advice out and around about how to make interpretive decisions based on the idea of coming up with a plan. This is clearly a useful method for a lot of ensembles, as it gives them tools to perform with some unity of purpose and a common rationale.

However, I’m struck by how verbal the planning process often seems to be. It could just be that the verbal – written and oral - media for communicating these ideas encourages people to focus on this dimension. But it seems to result in interpretive decisions based primarily in the lyrics of a song: you analyse the lyrics to infer the story behind the song, then use the understanding of this story to drive decisions about delivery.

Now, I’m not trying to pretend that narrative and character aren’t important, as anyone who has seen me coach will know. But I think it is worth experimenting with turning this method inside out, for three reasons:

Over on Smartermusic, Dan Newman makes a passing comment in his quick ‘n’ dirty guide to a cappella arranging that I think deserves a little more attention than its brief mention there:

Entertained singers sing better

This is something that all arrangers should have engraved on their partner’s foreheads, so that they contemplate it whenever they are gazing at the person they love most in the world. It lies at the heart of my point here that elegant arrangements make groups sound better than they usually do.

But how can arrangers make singers happy? There are, I think, three dimensions to this:

I spent a goodly chunk of yesterday with current LABBS Quartet champions, Noteorious, for a coaching session on two unremittingly cheerful songs: ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and ‘Get Happy’. They’re great to work with, because they enter into the imaginative world of what we’re working on so readily. Even if they look like they think I’ve suggested something utterly nonsensical, they jump straight in with both feet and make it work.

Reflecting on our session afterwards, I noticed two interesting things about the process of coaching:

Educational theory these days frowns down on models of learning that see the learner as an empty vessel into which the teacher pours their knowledge and wisdom. It’s patronising to the learner, and it fosters a belief that so long as the teacher is well informed, the learners will become so too. This belief is clearly belied by real life.

The problem with these models is the assumption that the vessel is empty to begin with. Sure, learners may know little enough about what the teacher is there to help them with, but they will have been experiencing and making sense of the world every waking moment of their life to date.