Performing

Welcoming the assembled delegates

Over the weekend I was back in Oberwesel with my friends from BinG! (Barbershop in Germany) for their Harmony College. Like last year, I come home with a note-book full of ideas to digest and a heart full of the nourishment you get from events that are intensive both musically and interpersonally.

As an experience for repeat visitors, it offered both continuity and familiarity, and a sense of change and renewal. You could say this of the faculty list, which included returners from last year like me, returners from previous years, and faces completely new to BinG!, and also of the content and organisation of the school. New for this year were opportunities for quartet singers to participate in the college choruses, a taster ‘extreme quartet experience’ scheme intended to make quartet activity accessible to those who didn’t have a quartet to come to the school with, as well as a different selection of classes on offer.

I have written before about the various musical functions of silences with the flow of a piece of music, and thus why we should respect notated rests. But I thought it worth spending a little time thinking about how the performer can do this. We spend a lot of our rehearsal time focusing on how to achieve the bits of the music that sound aloud, but tend to assume that the silent bits will look after themselves.

But the not-sound of a musical silence is not necessarily the same as all the not-sounds we emit (or, rather, don't emit) all the time when we're not singing, playing and conversing with people. They carry meanings created by and within the musical contexts they appear in that make positive contributions to the audience's experience, and thus need performing positively.

You know when an acquaintance makes a comment that gets you thinking on and off for some months? I had one of those moments back in December and have been seeing new things in my music-making ever since. Her comment was about how she had always felt musical performance to be a high-pressure activity, as there was the imperative to keep going at all costs. She contrasted this with activities such as conversation in which people are constantly making mistakes and fixing them; conversation repair is part of the collaborative endeavour of interaction.

Now, I certainly recognised that sense of pressure she identified as something that probably also contribution to my own struggles with performance anxiety through youth and early adulthood. But I also recognised her description of conversation repair as something musicians do all the time in rehearsal (and, indeed, in performance).

This is something I’ve talked about in my Make Your Nerves Work For You sessions at various events over the years, but I think it’s worth mulling over in a wider context too. Goal-setting is not just about managing performance psychology, after all. (Though I think this wider context does help draw attention to the way that things we think of as specifically performance-related issues are often rooted far deeper in our whole relationship with our praxis.) And first blog-post of the New Year feels like a good moment to share these thoughts.

So, this is a nice simple formulation, borrowed from sports psychology. It distinguishes 3 different types of goal:

I recently had a question from a director that struck me as one of those that I’m sure a lot of us grapple with on occasion. So I gave her some specific advice for the performance she was preparing for in the immediate future, but said I’d give it a think and blog in more detail about other things to consider after the big gig.

This was her question:

When I'm directing, even if in my head it's painfully slow.... It's much faster! I know it's linked to my nerves/adrenaline of competition but recently realised it happens a lot

My immediate advice was twofold:

After one of my ‘Make Your Nerves Work For You’ classes at BinG! Harmony College, one of the participants came up and remarked that I had mentioned humming in several different contexts, and could I give her a list of the different uses it has. My reply was: that sounds like a follow-up blog post. So here it is. A little way after the event, but there’s been quite a lot of stuff going on just lately that I wanted to blog about as it happened.

I suppose I should start with humming as a form of singing. As an activity to use in the warm-up, it is a nice gentle (and safe) way to start phonation and get the voice moving - I guess it would be possible to hum with voice-damaging tension if you deliberately tried to, but it’s pretty unlikely to happen by default. And while you’re at it, you can focus on activating the resonant cavities in your head to enhance both the richness and brightness of your sound.

And another stage-shoe-shot, for the same reason

My visit to Brunel Harmony was followed the next day by a coaching day with Yours in Harmony just down the road in Torquay. This chorus is also preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention at the end of the month, but for them it will be their first time. As a chorus, they have a several years of experience behind them competing in festivals of various sizes, but it is they have only recently affiliated to a barbershop organisation.

So, in some ways, they agenda was the same as the day before - polishing and confidence-building - as they are at the same point in the preparation cycle. But in other ways it was quite different, as they are juggling a lot of unknowns - they know how to perform, but very few of them really know what to expect from a barbershop convention.

Rehearsing in stage shoes is also good for the confidenceSaturday took me back down to Saltash for a follow-up visit to my session with Brunel Harmony last month. With only three weeks to go before Convention, the agenda was one of polishing the performance, and building confidence. One of the first confidence-inducing things to note was that I could hear that they had taken on what we had worked on last time and really embraced them. Bubbling had greater stamina, and the characterisation was embedded in both vocal colour and body language.

We balanced our day between attention to detail and holistic work. The nearer you get to performance, the less you really want to get the Manager on duty, so it’s not the point in the cycle to focus on technique. But where there are details that are getting away - the odd chord that isn’t locking, the odd phrase that loses energy - then finding the means to bring them under control increases confidence as it removes distractions for the singers as well as for the audience.