From the front of the choir

Finding out about songs: don’t believe everything you read!

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:29:00 +0000

I was in the middle of planning a workshop I’m running this weekend and was checking through a few songs to make sure I had the correct lyrics, source, meaning, background, etc. I came across a few that I couldn’t figure out so I went searching and ended up with several contradictory pieces of information!

find a trustworthy source

How do we go about finding out the correct background information to a song? How can we be sure that the lyrics are correct, especially if it’s in a foreign language? What about the translation: is it accurate, a poetic interpretation, or just plain hearsay? Are the lyrics accurate in the source language, or are they phonetically written? Are you sure that the country of origin and source language are correctly attributed?

The internet is an extremely valuable tool when trying to track down song information. But, like all media, it is not to be trusted! Many is the time that a false story has appeared in print and been picked up by other outlets then spread like wild fire without anybody bothering to check the facts. With the internet, this process just happens faster.

chinese whispers

The same with songs. Somebody mis-hears a song at a workshop or whilst singing around the camp-fire. They go home and write down the lyrics (phonetically), note down the country of origin (incorrectly), and half-remember what it was supposed to be about. Through a process of Chinese whispers, this song gets passed around from mouth to ear to mouth until it bears little relation to when it was first heard (and we don’t even know if it was accurate the first time!).

Very soon the song is widely known and its origins and meaning become fixed in people’s minds. The song then gets printed in a songbook and the myth gets perpetuated. Nobody has bothered to go back to the source or try to find out from scratch if the story and background is accurate or not. Now it’s in print, people believe that it must be true.

You can see this happening on the internet too, but it becomes a little easier to spot the myths. When searching for a particular song, it may come up on many different websites, but you soon realise that the text on each site is exactly the same! Somebody has written something once and it’s just got passed around intact without anybody bothering to question.

There is an apocryphal story of this process at work (I’m not sure how true it is, but it’s very believable!). A well-known workshop leader taught one of her own songs in a workshop. This song was then spread by various people who attended the workshop. Many years later, she was teaching it at another workshop when a participant came up to her and said that she’d got it wrong and proceeded to correct her tune and lyrics and tell her a long, involved story about the origins of this ‘traditional’ song. And she’d written the thing in the first place!

getting to the source

Before I teach a song I try to check that the information I have is accurate. If I learnt it from an individual, I go back to them and ask them where they got the information from. I then try to go back to that source and so on. If it’s in a book, I look to see what their sources are and if they credit someone in particular. If I’m not sure about something I’ll search on the internet (I’ll be writing a post on this later) and make sure I come up with at least two different sources for the information. I also try to contact an individual from the culture or country concerned (either through personal contact or via the internet), especially if they speak the language.

an example of song hunting

I’d like to give a concrete example that I’ve dealt with recently.

I got a song from a songbook recently which simply said “African greeting song”. It is called ‘Baba lagumbala’. The score said that it had been shared at a singing camp by someone in 2006. I contacted that person and was told that she’d got it from someone in Canada and told me that she thought it was a harvest song from West Africa.

I managed to track down the song on the website of the Canadian concerned. He didn’t say where he’d learnt it from, but on his site it said that it was in Zulu! He did usefully point out that he’d “learned it aurally so may not have the spelling correct. My apologies to anyone who speaks the language of origin. If anyone can inform me further I would appreciate it and will post it here.”

I searched for the song using Google and the spelling I found on his site and only four separate sites came up. One was the Canadian’s, one was about an Arkansas choir who sang it in one of their concerts, and one was of an arranger who had arranged the song in 2003 and credited it as “An African harvest song”. The fourth site was a resource site in the UK for children’s singing in schools. This contains a video of two black guys in traditional costume playing percussion and singing the song. The site mentions Ghana and harvest, but gives no more details. It looks fairly authentic, but I need to know more! Next step would be to contact someone through that website.

Google then suggested an alternative spelling: ‘Baba la gumbala’ and a whole new set of pages came up, mostly from Germany and Eastern Europe. This shows that it’s worth trying alternative spellings, but I’m still no wiser about the song!

more to meaning than meets the eye

No single person has the monopoly on the meaning of a song, especially if it is written poetically or metaphorically. You can ask two natives of the same culture about a particular song and get two widely different answers! Also, you need to be careful about what you are asking for. Sometimes a direct translation of the lyrics are not enough.

For example, I was taught a song called Inkonkoni iyajama by a group of Zimbabwean lads in Derby. The direct translation of the nine words in the song comes to something like:

The wildebeest strikes a pose. We will wait and see. They think we are blind.

Seems a bit boring on the surface so I asked the guys for a bit more background information and a whole story emerged about the nature of the wildebeest, the fact that the wildebeest is a rare animal and it is a bad omen if you see one (although any bad things might not happen today), and that older people have a longer view of life. So the song ends up meaning something like:

The wildebeest has the sweetest meat in the forest and is not very strong, yet it manages to survive the many lions and leopards which prey upon it. The wildebeest is poised ready to strike. This represents a problem approaching the community. But although the wildebeest is a bad omen, we will not be scared today, but will wait and see what happens. The very old members of the community may appear not to see well, but have great spiritual insight and take a long view of things. So the community will wait to see if the approaching problem will distract them from their traditional ways.

Not bad for a nine-word song!

So make sure you ask the right questions and get the views of several people before pinning a song down.

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The problem with men: getting them, handling them, keeping them

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 14:20:00 +0000

What is it with blokes and singing? In most open-access adult workshops that I run, only 10% of the participants are men. Many male voice choirs have an aging membership. Most mixed community choirs find it hard to recruit male singers (the 10% figure also applies to many choirs that I know).

I’ve looked briefly at this subject before (Where are all the male singers?), but thought it merited further examination. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had any male problems in your choir, especially if you’ve found an interesting solution.

men and the arts

When I used to run theatre workshops, there were similar low numbers of men. I’m sure the same applies to dance, pottery, life drawing, etc. In fact, when I attend any kind of ‘arty’ workshop, I am often the only man there! Yet in the professional art world, many of the top names are men, so they must get their training and inspiration from somewhere.

There are many reasons I have heard why men won’t join any kind of arty class:

arts aren’t a macho subject
blokes like to hang out with other blokes
men prioritise their careers, not their leisure time
guys like to be in control and know what they’re doing, they don’t like the vagueness of art subjects
some men are intimidated by a room full of women
most chaps like to look good and competent, so they tend to do their learning in private
blokes are not particularly social animals and shy away from group activities (unless it’s football!)
community choirs are too egalitarian – men like hierarchical structures, competition and goals (maybe this is why there are so many barbershop singers?)

men and singing

Even if none of the reasons above apply to a particular man, he may still not want to join a choir or singing workshop, even if he loves singing. He might simply be hesitant to join a group that’s been going for a while. But as I pointed out in an earlier post, it’s not that daunting and Everybody has a place in the choir. Like many people, he may not think his voice is ‘good enough’ (whatever that means!) and most men don’t like to be vulnerable in public. Even if a guy thinks his voice is ‘OK’, he may have had experiences where the songs are too high or too low for his voice, so he figures that he just doesn’t fit in. This is because most men are natural baritones, not basses or tenors (see But I can’t sing that high!).

And if a bloke is not persuaded by the fact that singing in a choir is good for your health and he will be surrounded by eligible women, he can always check out that There are plenty of good reasons to sing.

It’s not only male singers who are thin on the ground, but also male choir and workshop leaders. For example, the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network has around 270 members of whom only 40 are men (many of whom are called David for some reason!). This means that most mixed community choirs (at least those run on Natural Voice lines) are run by women. This leads us onto …

men and pitching

Men can get easily confused (ah, bless ‘em!) when a woman is trying to give them their note. I’ve talked about this in an earlier post: Singing the same note – differently. A woman can sing the note at pitch for the tenors (in which case they might try to sing an octave higher!), but usually can’t get down low enough to pitch the bass part. And if a woman choir leader is (un)fortunate to get a male bass who sings an octave below all the other men, she will have a difficult job getting him back on track.

Sometimes you get a confident male singer who can blast out as good as the next man, but never seems to be able to hit the right notes. There are women who do this too, but the male voice tends to be louder and more noticeable. So we have this chap merrily singing along at the top of his lungs, really enjoying himself, oblivious to the fact that what he’s singing bears little relationship to his part (or even the main tune).

Often the bass part has only a few notes so is harder to remember than the tune. For someone not used to harmony singing, it is often the case that a bass can find himself trying to sing the tune rather than the bass part (usually without realising it!).

There is nothing inherently wrong with a guy not getting his part right, but if he ends up singing so loud that he puts the other men around him off, or if he stands out in the overall blend in the choir, then we need to do something.

it’s not just the men!

This is not just limited to men, of course, but it is perhaps more noticeable with male voices. The alto who is a little bit out usually manages to gently blend in with the others and nobody notices. Unfortunately, men tend to have louder voices, and perhaps more importantly, the male sections are usually much, much smaller than the other sections.

If a 60-voice choir only had six altos, then they would really be put on the spot, be very noticeable, and have to deliver their part forcefully and accurately. But that’s not usually the case, and that pressure ends up being put on the poor basses. Fortunately, the men usually have a good sense of humour and can put up with the barbed wit that I often send in their direction!

learning to listen

If, for any reason, you have a singer (male or female) who sings loudly and wrongly, then you have to do something for the greater good of the part they’re in, and of the choir. In fact, the only time I have ever, ever asked someone to leave a choir or workshop since I started doing this back in 1997, was when an over-enthusiastic member of the bass section used to consistently sing loudly and wrongly. I felt awful asking him to leave – we are, after all, an open-access choir, and I believe that everyone can sing. But he was putting the other guys off so much that they couldn’t learn their parts properly or sustain them accurately, and I was worried that some of them might leave.

So I took this chap to one side and pointed out that he needed to develop his listening skills. Too often we think there is a problem with the production of the singing voice, whereas often it’s just because somebody is not listening: to themselves, to the other voices in their part, to the harmonies, to the person teaching the song.

If someone is a bit nervous or unused to singing with others, they become focused on their own voice and stop listening to those around them. That’s when mistakes are made. We need to constantly bring singers’ focus of attention back to the here and now (“watch what I’m doing, listen to what I’m singing/ saying”) and to the overall mix of voices in their own part and of the choir as a whole.

Unfortunately in a choir, it’s not possible to give particular singers individual attention. As choir leaders we can introduce listening training into our warm ups, but that can only go so far. So I told this man that he would need to go away and do some work on his own to develop his listening skills. It wasn’t that he less able than the other choir members, just that he hadn’t had as much listening experience as them. I suggested he seek out opportunities to do unison singing: church, karaoke, football matches, folk club sing-alongs, etc. Once he had become more aware of his own voice and that he was fitting in exactly with the other singers, then he could come back to choir and begin to develop his harmony singing abilities.

male singers are for life, not just for Christmas

I don’t have any answers in how we can recruit and retain more male singers. I’ve tried running a men-only workshop each year. It’s great fun and we make a wonderful sound, but it’s usually men who sing in choirs already. It’s hard to attract new singers.

We’ve tried “bring a man, get 50% off” and similar variations on workshop fees. This can result in more men attending a particular workshop, but doesn’t convert into more regular membership of choirs.

Often, after a concert (usually at Christmas) I get several blokes coming up to me afterwards to say they want to join the choir. Last year I had four. One of them came for a few sessions, but I never heard from the others!

If I had the time and the energy, there is one thing I would like to try: instead of asking the men to come to a workshop (scary, unknown, not their kind of thing, too busy, need to get off my backside, etc. etc.), bring the workshop to the men! Find places where men gather naturally (pub, rugby club, snooker hall, freemasons) and just turn up to run a taster workshop for half an hour. I bet that there will be a few individuals who will be enthused enough to want to take it further.

Do let me know if you have had any similar problems, have found other solutions, or have any good ideas on how to recruit young(er) men to choirs.

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From the back of the choir 2 - a typical choir session

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:41:00 +0000

This is the second guest post from Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Her first post was From the back of the choir 1 — first steps which looked at her experience of joining the SOAS World Music Choir. In this post, Deb describes a typical weekly choir session.

Chris was kind enough to ask me to contribute some thoughts about what it’s like to be involved in a natural voice style world music choir from the choir member’s perspective. The promise that there would be no auditions and no requests for anyone to sing alone was very important to me. Like lots of people I’ve previously been given messages suggesting that I “can’t sing”, but I still enjoy trying. In this kind of choir, that’s not a problem, I fit right in. I’ve no desire whatsoever to be a soloist, or in any way to draw attention to myself, so I always prefer to stand at the back of the choir for performances.

A typical practice session with the SOAS World Music Choir

Practice starts at 7pm on a weekday, actually people tend to drift in over the first 20 minutes or so … We form a big loose circle and the choir director starts with a physical warm up, shaking out tight muscles and a bit of stretching. No standing in prim rows, it’s shoes off and stand straight (in my case, at least for as long as I can stand!).

Then onto some noise-making: sirens, humming, nonsense sounds, whatever the director suggests, really, sometimes we add the sound effects for a funny story. Then we might move on to some kind of vocal scales, perhaps in the form of a counting song, moving up and down the range of our voices — don’t strain, but reach as low or high as you can. It’s surprising, but the group manages to start sounding like a choir, even this early in the session.

Learning songs

For a first song, the director will probably choose something very easy. It might be something silly, like a tongue-twister, or something we have practised often before.

Or perhaps a simple piece that can be easily turned into a multi-part round (that’s where the choir is formed into many sections and each sings the same, but they start at different times, so the sound has many layers).

The second piece might be some work on a more difficult song, in our case that’s usually something in a language other than English (more about that later). It’s usually best to do the toughest stuff before people get too tired.

Usually we work by first all learning the tune, that provides a basic structure into which we fit the parts. Then the director teaches each section their part. She breaks down the part into shorter phrases and first we repeat them to try and establish the words and rhythm, then we start to sing them. It takes only a handful of repetitions of simpler songs to allow the people singing the part to get enough confidence to allow the choir to run through all of the parts together.

In a typical session we might manage to fit in a refresher of one or two more songs we have learned before, maybe adding more verses or adding extra parts. So typically we cover three or four songs in an evening. This means that over the course of the Autumn and Spring terms (about 40 practice-hours) we learn a repertoire of about 10-12 pieces. Since the SOAS choir has about two-thirds new members each year (as many students move on) we tend to learn a new repertoire each year, though we might carry over one or two favourites.

How do you learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before?

The simplest answer is: by any means that works for you! Basic repetition works in the very short term, for example, to allow us to sing the part immediately after it was taught, but it may not be enough to allow us to remember a part from week to week.

So apart from repetition, how do we learn? Most people use one or more of the basic learning modes: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and semantic. In other words we might remember by associating the sounds with an image; or by associating the sounds of the song with a rhythm or with sounds we recognise (perhaps a foreign phrase sounds like a name, or a phrase in English). Another possibility is to learn by the movements (kinaesthetic links), how that strange sound feels as you say it, distinctive mouth movements. The other possibility is to find, or to assign, a meaning (semantic content) to the unfamiliar sounds. This can be through understanding the translation, but it can also be just a matter of attaching an arbitrary meaning to the sounds to help you to remember them.

How do you remember all those songs??!!

The other thing that can help us to remember is a specific cue: I find it helpful to be given the first line of a piece, after that I can often drag the rest out of my memory as I sing it. Other people might remember from the title, or they associate it with the language or the country of origin (“let’s sing the one in Zulu …” or “what about that Georgian song?”). Other times people remember the narrative content (“I like the one about the orphan hawk”)

If this all sounds too much, don’t worry. I got through my whole first year as a choir member, including a performance, without properly learning any of the songs: my memory was blank until the director gave the first line as a cue. The second year was easier and this year I actually did learn in full several of the songs — which suggests that learning by ear does improve one’s auditory memory. So keep working on it!

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But I can’t sing that high!

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 10:25:00 +0000

When you join a choir that sings in harmony, you will find that some parts are too high for you and some parts are too low. Just like Goldilocks, you will gravitate to the part which is “just right” — the place where you feel comfortable and are not straining your voice.

But if you’re a beginning singer you might find that none of the parts feel right! This is because the range of notes that you can sing can be quite narrow at first. As you sing more regularly, you will find that you begin to reach higher and lower notes with more ease.

However, even when you’ve been singing for some time, you might well come across a particular song that has a note that is outside your range, that you can’t sing comfortably or even can’t reach at all. What’s the problem here?

you may be in the wrong part

It may be that you’re simply in the wrong part. When women first join a choir, they often go to the alto part because it’s not too high, and not too low. This is a safe place to be at first since it’s comfortably in the middle ground. Or they may end up with the sopranos because that’s what ‘proper’ women’s singing is like (more on this later). Sometimes people join a part because they reckon that it's the part that always has the tune. But in my kind of choirs, no one part consistently has the tune, and even if it did, they songs are not familiar in the first place so it is of no real advantage!

I’ve known some women to stay in the ‘wrong’ part for several years before they realise that they actually have a far greater range than they first thought, or that they could sing much higher/ lower than they had imagined.

Women with very low voices usually head for the tenor section. In most community choirs this is usually where the ‘low ladies’ live because it’s never really that low.

But what about the poor blokes? They have only two options: tenor, which is usually too high for them, or bass which is often too low. So they get put off thinking they can’t sing properly or that they don’t have much of a vocal range. Trouble is, most men are really baritones which means that they hover somewhere between tenor and bass. In which case there is no real home for them, nowhere where they feel “just right”.

what does ‘contralto’ mean anyway?

I’m tossing these terms around like I know what I’m talking about: alto, tenor, baritone, etc., but what do they actually mean? And what about all those other terms that we might have heard of: mezzo-soprano, counter-tenor, bass-baritone?

Actually, there are no absolute strict definitions of any of these terms. They are simply names which give an indication of the range of notes that a person singing that part is expected to be able to sing. A composer will bear this in mind when writing a choral piece (usually!), but there is no exact agreement on what those ranges might be. It is simply an attempt to categorise the wide range of vocal possibilities out there. Since it is a generalisation, there will inevitably be some people who don’t fit comfortably into any category. There will always be a few male altos and female basses, for example.

Very simplistically, the sopranos are the women with high voices, and the altos are women with lower voices. The tenors are the high men, and the basses are the low men. In classical music and professional choirs, the sopranos go really high and the basses go really low. Most untrained women are probably at the low end of the altos and won’t be able to hit some of the high alto notes. Most untrained men are baritones: they won’t be able to hit the really high tenor notes or the really low bass notes.

In most community choirs, songs are chosen and arranged to fit a smaller vocal range. In particular, the soprano part will never go too high, and most women will be able to get the lowest note of the tenor part (although not necessarily comfortably). Most men will be happy in the bass section because it won’t go too low.

how high is ‘high’?

For those of you who are musically trained, in a community choir I tend to not go much higher than the D an octave and a bit above middle C, or lower than the G below middle C for women’s voices, and the same an octave lower for men. I usually find that everybody in the choir can cope with this range, so it gives people the flexibility to move around and try out different parts.

When I’ve been working with a group for some time, I find I can cheat the high notes up (the highest I’ve gone up to so far is the G above the high D I mentioned earlier) for both women tops and male tenors (an octave lower). But I’ve only ever really taken the lowest note down to the F just below the G I mentioned earlier.

Many people with a little musical knowledge come to a choir with preconceptions about voice types and vocal ranges, so try not to use technical terms like alto, tenor, etc. with a beginner choir, but just say tops, middles, low ladies/ high men, and bass.

how to find which part you sing

When you’re trying to find out which is the most suitable part for you to sing, it’s not just about which notes you can reach. During the warm up, the choir leader will gradually take you through a wide range of notes. Over the weeks you will often find that you will gradually be able to sing higher and lower than you first thought. As you warm up you will get a sense of which are the absolute highest and lowest notes that you are able to sing. You might be surprised!

This will give you an indication of which part you sing. If you find it easiest to hit the higher notes, then you probably belong in the ‘tops’ (soprano for women, tenor for men). If you find it hard to reach the extreme high and low notes, then you’re probably a middle (alto for women, bass for men). And if you find the low notes the easiest, then you’re probably a low lady (tenor) or a real bass man!

But this isn’t the whole story. I’ve mentioned the concept of tessitura in an earlier post (Everybody has a place in the choir). It basically means the range of notes that you feel most comfortable singing (i.e. without any kind of strain — your ‘sweet spot’) rather than the absolute range of notes that you can reach. As I pointed out earlier, with most community choirs, everybody will probably be able to sing any of the parts, but there will be one part that you feel most comfortable with.

role models and ‘real’ singing

Many people come to singing with a huge number of preconceptions. When people say that they can’t sing at all, they usually mean they can’t sing as well as somebody famous, or they find it hard to reach the same notes as an opera singer, or that their voice doesn’t sound like their favourite pop star.

Many women think that ‘proper’ singing is when you use your high ‘churchy’ voice. They think of opera singers with their soaring vibrato. So when they join a choir, they feel that they always need to be singing in their ‘choir voice’ which means just the high notes. At school they might never have come across their ‘chest voice’ which is more akin to our speaking voices, and is the voice that is used in a lot of traditional singing, especially in Eastern Europe. Because they haven’t used this part of their voice much, it might appear ugly or feel unfamiliar, so they stick with what they know. In some cases it might mean that a woman ends up singing with the tops even though she has an amazingly powerful low voice.

For many men with low voices, there simply aren’t enough role models out there. I have a reasonable range, and can sing quite low, but never much liked the singing of Paul Robeson when I was growing up. I was much more attracted to pop music and voices like those of The Beatles or David Bowie. So I tried to sing like them and found that there was no way I could hit the high notes that they did, so I assumed that I couldn’t sing. Many men are in this situation. Most pop singers use their high tenor voice (and even drift off into falsetto like Thom Yorke, Tim Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, Antony Hegarty, etc.) and the most famous opera singers (like Pavarotti) are tenors. These ranges are usually beyond the reach of us mere mortals. Most men then think they can’t ‘sing’ properly or strain their voices trying to reach notes that are much too high for them.

Even if they like the low voices you can find in opera or Russian singing, most men can’t get down there. There just aren’t enough role models out there for us baritones!

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From the back of the choir 1 – first steps

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 31 May 2009 11:21:00 +0000

This is a guest post by Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. It is about her experience of joining a new choir where harmony songs from around the world are learnt by ear.

The very first evening …

I really can’t remember how I heard about the SOAS World Music Choir but I know I loved the idea: a choir with no auditions, a promise we would never be asked to sing alone, learning music from all over the world, all by ear, in the original languages, anyone and everyone welcome, no experience necessary. I’d been missing music since I started my new job in London, so I thought I would give it a try.

The first session was actually only a little scary. The room was full of newcomers, so none of us knew what to do. I think there were about thirty of us that first evening. We stood in a loose circle, clearly all wondering what would happen next. The choir director started with a physical warm up – kicking off our shoes, shaking out tight muscles and generally getting used to the idea of making strange noises by adding sound effects to a silly story. But then (amazingly fast!) we started to make much the same sound – even by the end of warm up, we sounded pretty good.

I was really amazed how fast we could learn at least the basics of a song — this was my first experience with a choir and three or four part harmonies. The director would teach each part in turn, singing each part herself, then allowing us just a few repetitions, then on to the next part, then putting them all together, so quickly. In under 40 minutes we were raising the roof (or at least shaking the basement windows) with a song that sounded fantastic to me as a newbie!

I think we learned two or three pieces that first session, but now, nearly three years on, I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were. However, I do remember I told someone the next day that it was the most fun I had had at work in ages!

And did I mention the surprise at the end of the session? It turned out that the previous year the choir had acquired some ‘traditions’, one of which was an impromptu performance in the School’s main reception area at the end of each practice session. So we all trooped off with our coats and bags, and we just stood around the director and repeated the songs we had just rehearsed. There was no chance to be scared and it was a great way to get people used to performing.

If you are interested you can find some of our rough recordings on YouTube. Those performances turned out to be a good recruiting tool, too!

SOAS World Music Choir

In 2007 and 2008 the choir was led by SOAS ethnomusicography graduate, Liz Powers, who brought astonishing energy and enthusiasm to each and every session as well as a vast range of music from Africa, Australasia and Eastern Europe and a few pieces in English.

Choir membership varies between about 50 – 100 people each year. Sometimes only a small group turn up every week, the others are more transient, which can make it difficult to achieve a familiar repertoire. Also, as individual students move on, about two-thirds of the members are new each academic year. We only run in the Autumn and Spring terms as the Summer Term is swamped by exams.

In summer 2008 Liz and her husband Andy (bass) had to leave us for Yorkshire where Liz now co-leads the Manchester Community Choir. We recruited a new director, Judith Silver, who is a singer-songwriter in her own right and a member of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network. Judith has a different style, but no less enthusiasm and knowledge! With her help the choir has survived its fourth year and we are now planning for Autumn 2009.

The choir’s membership is incredibly diverse, like our School. We have had all sorts of members in those three years – Chinese, Korean and Japanese students, Muslim women in their head scarves, people of all ages — representing more than twenty nationalities from almost every continent of the world. This quite often means someone in the choir speaks the language in which we’re singing, so we work hard to get the pronunciation right! We even had enough men and ‘lower ladies’ for a modest-sized tenor and bass section. Many of us are not musicians or music students, but what we lack in expertise, we make up for in enthusiasm.

Next time I’ll tell you what a typical practice session is like and say something about what it’s like to learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before and don’t understand …

Deb will be following up with another guest post in the near future.

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Music notation – do singers need it?

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 24 May 2009 14:04:00 +0000

I teach songs without using any kind of musical notation. Like other members of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network I believe that singing should be accessible to all.

You can learn songs by ear without ever having to know anything about music theory, notation, composition, harmonic structure, musical jargon, etc. But notation obviously has a role in singing. I’d like to look at what that role might be, and why many people are intimidated by musical knowledge (see Mind your language).

music notation — what is it?

Wikipedia defines musical notation as:

“any system which represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.”

It goes on to say that the earliest know examples of notation date back to Sumeria more than 4,000 years ago.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that musical notation is a

“visual record of heard or imagined musical sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance of music. It usually takes written or printed form.”

chasing shadows

Why do we need musical notation? One main reason is as an aid to memory (since I have a huge repertoire of songs to teach, and I have to know all the parts, I often find myself using sheet music when I’m teaching in case I forget how one of the harmonies goes!). It also allows us to preserve music over long periods of time. Our memories may be fallible, but the written score doesn’t change.

However, notation is not an exact science. As many composers have discovered, even though they try to describe their music as accurately as possible, it is always open to interpretation. Otherwise there would only ever be one perfect, canonical performance or recording of any piece of music!

When trying to notate an existing piece of music, there will always be errors. The annotator may not hear correctly; they may refuse to acknowledge unfamiliar harmonies or rhythms (many folk song collectors edited songs that they found because it didn’t fit in with their perception of how the music should sound!); the singers performing may make a mistake (which will be faithfully recorded).

music is a living thing

One of the biggest problems when trying to notate living music is that – even if we could notate it perfectly – it would only represent one particular performance at one specific time. If you came back and listened the next day, the song might sound different.

There are many apocryphal tales of people hearing wonderful South African singing during a church service and notating it. But when they came back the next week, they discovered that all the harmonies were different! People were making it up as they went along and improvising around well-known structures.

So many song collectors come back from their travels with a supposed definitive example of a particular song, whereas if they had collected it at a different time, or if they had travelled to the next village, they would have heard a different version.

We are trying in vain to capture a living thing. Bearing this in mind, we shouldn’t get too upset when, in rehearsal, there may be more than one harmony going on in the alto section for example!

not written in stone

Singing should be fun, creative and alive. But often we hear people say: “that’s not how it’s supposed to sound!” The danger here is that musical notation can often take on the role of dictator. It can imply that there is only one way – and certainly only one ‘right’ way – to sing a song.

However, throughout history songs have changed over time. The folk tradition is a living tradition. People have adapted words to fit their times, have changed (or stolen) tunes to suit them, have added new harmonies, have misheard or mis-remembered lyrics and melodies, have performed a song in the style of their own community. That is what makes music a living force.

Having a written score can represent an academic and tyrannical view which may well intimidate those new to music-making.

inventing new notations

Many people claim not to understand musical notation. They wouldn’t know what to do if presented with a musical score. Yet quietly in choir they are inventing a whole new notation system!

This especially applies to the basses who may often not have a particularly memorable or melodic part in a song. They find it hard to remember where the pitches go up and down so they begin to draw horizontal lines on a piece of paper to indicate this. The higher the line relative to the rest of the line, the higher the note. If they need to indicate a large pitch change, then the line will have a big gap from the previous line. If the pitch only changes very little (by a semitone for example, or by a note that is not in the scale of the song) then they may add a mark like a dot or small arrow to indicate this.

To show when the pitch changes, they make the length of the lines connect with how long the notes are to be sung. You can see examples of this in Northern Harmony’s song books where they notate some Corsican songs using this method (see Complex songs and learning by ear).

When you point out to the basses that they are, in fact, both reading and writing music, they usually strenuously deny it!

learning styles

Most teachers know that individuals have very different learning styles. They are usually divided into visual, auditory and tactile/ kinaesthetic. I am a very visual learner, and although I can learn songs by ear quite easily, I usually have to have at least one quick glance at the lyrics in order to be able to remember them more easily. I also like the song teacher to use their hands or some kind of diagram to indicate how the melody line works.

Auditory learners are perhaps the most suited to learning songs by ear. Most visual learners will need to see something, although not necessarily written notation. Most people respond well to the teacher indicating by hand where the melody goes up and down using, for example, a very simplified version of the Curwen Hand Signs developed by Kodály.

Tactile/ kinaesthetic learners learn by moving, doing and touching. Such learners often find it easier to mirror the hand movements of the person teaching the song. They also find it much easier when taking the song’s rhythm into their body.

notation as a security blanket

Some visual learners will prefer to have a written score. But many who insist on having written music, may actually be aural or tactile learners. They are just so used to having music that they need it as a security blanket! This also appeals to those people who don’t like making mistakes and believe that the written score will help them to get it perfectly right (forgetting that the notation itself is error-prone!).

Sometimes, taking the music away can free people up and introduce them to a new way of learning. Learning songs by ear is like exercising a muscle. Once you’ve done it for a while, it just gets easier. Many people who insist on written music are reluctant to spend time in that fuzzy, uncomfortable place where we don’t know exactly what we’re doing and we haven’t fully grasped the song yet.

learning by ear is a different experience

Being able to sight read gives immediate access to a vast range of songs from a huge range of cultures and time. If we want to have a good old sing song with a bunch of strangers, then just get the songbooks out and we’re off! But a couple of hours later, with no songbook available, we just have the memory of the good time we have. It’s very unlikely that we’ll remember any of the songs themselves.

If we learn a song by ear it will take us much longer, but it also gives us the chance to explore it in detail, discover all the subtle nuances within it, really listen to the harmonies, enjoy playing around with the words. Songs learnt like this will stay with us and become part of us. Once we have truly learnt a song like this we can start making it our own and putting something of ourselves into the singing of it. We will have made a much deeper connection with the music.

the advantages of not having sheet music

the singers will actually look at the teacher/ conductor
there are no papers to drop on the floor/ leave at home/ lose
you can incorporate movement and gesture to aid song learning
it looks better in performance – the audience will be able to see the singers!

when to use notation

I can’t think of that many times when having written notation is necessary, but here is what I’ve come up with:

if you want to sing a whole bunch of songs quickly with a group of people who have no songs in common (e.g. Shape Note conventions)
if a song is fiendishly difficult and has lots of sustained notes (I tried to teach Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei" by ear and it just didn’t work!)
if a song is long and either complex or repetitive (although Ysaye Barnwell has apparently said that she would like to teach the Messiah by ear!)

I’m really interested in how complex a song can be and still be taught by ear. I’ve written a previous post about it: Complex songs and learning by ear, but am still not sure. I’ve tried using diagrams to help with the overall structure of a song. This helps some people, but not all!

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Singing what you mean and meaning what you sing

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 17 May 2009 14:25:00 +0000

Last week I started to pick up on a discussion about stage presence for singers that began in the comments section of my post Getting the most out of your choir: preparing for performance PART 1.

This week I want to look at the second aspect of that discussion: where the ‘meaning’ of a song might reside, and how that affects the way we sing it.

song lyrics

First off, I need to ’fess up that I’m not particularly a ‘lyric person’. Sometimes I have been listening to a song for years before I actually realise what it’s about! I respond to the whole package of sounds: syllables, music, harmonies – rather to any single element. I’m not that interested in storytelling songs, but just in the emotion and sensation or feeling that a song conveys.

I believe that songs are very different beasts from, say, poems. Any ‘meaning’ that a song expresses is carried pretty much entirely by sound (which is why I’m not that excited by choral performance – see What are you looking at?), I don’t need to see the singers. The sung ‘words’ (syllables, vocalises, ‘ahs’, whatever) and the music (melody, harmony, dynamics, etc.) form an indivisible whole. Which is why most song lyrics do not work as written poetry, and why some melody lines are pretty boring without the singing voice.

Personally I am not interested in “communicating the sense of the text”. The text is simply one component of the music and its meaning can be subverted, obscured, emphasised, destroyed, or changed at will. Any song can be expressed in a variety of ways (otherwise there would be no such thing as a cover version!). So what is it that guides us to present a song in a particular way? Is it the ‘meaning’ of the text, the ‘heart and soul’ of the song, the ‘emotional content’? And who decides what these are? And why are there so many different answers?

words and music

When commenting on my earlier post, Tom introduced his notion of the ‘heart and soul of the music’ and suggested that this was connected with the “textually connected singer who has created a specific story-based purpose for singing”. The implication here is that the ‘meaning’ or ‘heart and soul’ of any song lies in its ‘text’.

I responded by asking about songs which had simplistic foreign lyrics, nonsense syllables or just ‘ahs’. Tom replied thus:

“Most (or at least ‘much’) of the choral music out there has text and music. The music usually (or ‘often’) attempts to communicate the sense of the text – either through particular rhythms, harmonies, melodies, voice leading, chordal progressions, or textual settings. Thus, ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Loch Lomond’ have a similar feel, but both are very different from a Mozart ‘Gloria’ or a celebratory African ‘freedom song’. And ‘Happy Birthday’ is different from your usual ‘Requiem’.

“Perhaps the clearest example would be the difference between ‘Weep, O Mine Eyes’ (Weep, O Mine Eyes on YouTube) and ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves’ (In These Delightful Pleasant Groves on YouTube). There are HUGE differences in the above, and they have mainly to do with the textual meaning and the musical communication of that meaning. (Or, if the music was written first, then the text attempts to fit the music.)

“Do you agree with the above?”

Well, sorry Tom, but I don’t! I guess the first problem for me is that you limit our discussion to ‘choral music’ whereas I thought we were talking about singing in its widest sense. In any case, I can present ‘Danny Boy’ in the style of a Mozart ‘Gloria’ or ‘Loch Lomond’ as an African ‘freedom song’. Or vice versa. For some wonderful examples of this, see the Spooky Men’s Chorale on the Australian music show Spicks and Specks or the Bulgarian Women’s Choir on the Tonight Show. I’ve often used songs in theatre shows and completely changed the usual context and style to serve the performance. Although I haven’t used ‘Happy Birthday’ as a ‘Requiem’ I have used the jazz standard ‘All of me’ as a song of suicidal despair!

I’m not familiar with ‘Weep, O Mine Eyes’ or ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves’ but I tracked down a couple of versions and yes, they appear to be different. I wouldn’t say that they were HUGELY different and I didn’t pay any attention to the words (but hey, that’s just me!).

You then go on to say that nonsense syllables and ‘ahs’ can also be imbued with meaning, it doesn’t just have to be recognisable text.

song interpretation

Tom then says:

“I think we might be actually agreeing more than we even know, because you might be just letting the music guide your ‘interpretation’, while I let the words lead. However, since (I believe) they are intricately tied, in many songs it won’t matter which you let lead since they’re both ‘telling the same story’.”

The clue here is in Tom’s use of the word ‘interpretation’. How do we interpret a particular song? What clues do we use to discover how we might decide to sing or present a particular song? Tom clearly uses the ‘text’ (or lyrics) and believes that somehow they are used to tell a ‘story’. The expression of this ‘story’ is somehow the ‘meaning’ of the song and that is what guides his instructions to the singers and the way that the song is performed.

I, however, sing mainly foreign songs, many of which have no clear ‘meaning’ and even if they did, cultural differences would mean that we might not want to express that meaning in the same way as the songwriter originally intended. I know quite a few Eastern European love songs which sound more like a call to arms!

I go entirely on the ‘feel’ of the song, that is the emotional and physical (hairs on the back of the neck) effects that it has on me personally as an entire piece of music: words, melody, rhythm and harmony. It is a gut instinct and I have to be affected immediately or a song just doesn’t speak to me. Another person may have an entirely different response, it is very personal. Then, when I am working on the song with singers, I use everything at my disposal to help them present the song so it has the desired effect on me, their only audience at the rehearsal stage. I then trust (and hope!) that it will have the same effect on the audience at our next concert. I might make up a story or use visual imagery or invoke technical vocal exercises – I’ll use anything as long as it gets the job done.

the tyranny of text

Sometimes people can get far too hung up on the text and its meaning, especially if it is in English. Occasionally, even if it’s just for fun, it’s good to play around with a song just to see what happens. An actor knows this as ‘the tyranny of the text’ which can sometimes inhibit good acting. We need to free ourselves from any strict adherence to what we think a song might mean and how it should be presented in order to explore all of its many nuances. We then have choices which we can make rather than being a slave to what we think might be the case.

I sometimes hear people say things like: “That’s not what the composer intended” or “What the playwright means here is …” or “My character wouldn’t do that”. But we are not usually the composer or the playwright and have no idea really what they intended. All we (usually) have are words and notes on a piece of paper (or a scratchy field recording), but no matter how accurate and detailed the writer was, this notation can never encapsulate everything that the author intended. If it could, there would only ever be one, canonical performed version of every single piece of music ever written!

Since we can never know exactly what the author intended, we have to fall back on our own instincts and detective abilities. We are possibly living in a different time, a different place and presenting our song in a different context to when and where it was written, and we have to take that into account too. We must learn to be playful and not too respectful of a song’s lyrics or meaning!

playing with songs

Sometimes in rehearsal I might play around with a song and try it in as many ‘wrong’ ways as possible. For example, if a song seems sad, I might ask people to sing it as if it were a very happy, light-hearted song. If a song is clearly a folk song, I might ask people to sing it as if it were high opera.

Recently I was rehearsing a song which I know to be a lullaby from Croatia (although the ‘feel’ that I get from the song wouldn’t have told me that). Just for fun, to loosen the song up, and to help tighten the (difficult) harmonies, I asked the singers to present it as a funky jazz song in a smoky late-night club. The song was immediately energised and more accurate than before! As a rehearsal tool it worked because when we went back to the original way of presenting the song, it sounded much better. But … we had also discovered an interesting and novel way of presenting the material which we will now try out in our next performance.

not knowing what you’re singing

So, in short, I believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: those for whom lyrics and their meaning is very important, and those who don’t really pay attention to lyrics at all. There is room for both kinds of person, but neither one will persuade the other that their approach is the ‘right’ one.

There are people in my choir who, as soon as I first introduce a new song, ask me what it means: “what’s it about?”. They can’t contemplate singing until they know what it is that they are singing about. Then there are other people who you can teach a song to who don’t understand a single word of the foreign lyrics, but who soon get into the ‘feel’ of the song and bring it to life.

Finally, I just want to mention an article I read recently about the latest CD from the Manic Street Preachers: Journal for Plague Lovers. They have just finished writing and recording a set of songs using lyrics written by Richey Edwards who vanished in 1995. The article said that some of the songs contained “lyrics not even the performers understand”. And they wrote the songs!

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Stage presence for singers

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 10 May 2009 12:36:00 +0000

A few weeks ago my post Getting the most out of your choir: preparing for performance PART 1 generated quite a lot of heat in the comments section! Most of this focused around the concept of stage presence and where the ‘meaning’ of a song might reside.

I think this discussion warrants more time, so I’ve decided to devote two posts to it rather than limiting it to the to and fro of the comments section. This week I want to talk about stage presence for singers, and next week I’ll look at the ‘meaning’ of a song and how it might affect the way it is sung (Singing what you mean, and meaning what you sing).

introducing Tom Carter

I wrote a post some time ago that set out my personal attitude to lyrics in songs and how we might express the ‘meaning’ of a song which has foreign lyrics (Sing it like you mean it). That’s when I first ‘met’ Tom Carter, author of Choral Charisma: singing with expression. Since then Tom and I have had several lively exchanges on this topic. I’m sure that at some fundamental level we agree since we are both very keen to find ways of getting the best out of a choir in performance. But on the surface we seem to have very different approaches and understanding of certain concepts.

I think Tom and I represent two clear and different approaches to singing. I think both our approaches are useful and possibly produce the same results. I think whichever point of view you adhere to is very personal, and neither is ‘better’ than the other. However, considering these two approaches does allow us to look in more detail at several important concepts in singing and performance.

being present or ‘stage presence’?

I said that

“presence simply means that the performers are totally in the present and only engaged on the task at hand. That’s what makes them so watchable.”

Tom fundamentally disagreed with this and said that

“presence is much more than just focusing ‘on the task at hand.’ Indeed, the SPECIFIC nature of the task makes all the difference […] A singer will have presence if they are connecting specifically with the meaning (passion, poignancy, power ...) of the text and its musical expression – while at the same time being free of all impediments to that presence.”

Deb suggested that maybe Tom and I were talking about two different things. That Tom was talking about ‘stage presence’ whereas I was simply talking about ‘being present’. But I am actually talking about the same thing!

being in the moment and serving the song

I’m sure that there will always be two very views in this discussion, and that neither side will never agree with or completely understand each other. In my previous incarnation as a theatre performer, teacher and director, I was also in a different camp from many of my peers. My belief then, and now, was that an actor/ performer on stage needs to be totally engaged in a task which serves the play at that particular moment. It may or may not have anything to do with the text at that point.

An apocryphal example of this was when a famous actress was complimented on her acting in a very moving scene in a play. Her character had just been told of the death of someone close to her. She appeared stunned and lost in thought whilst she stared off into the middle distance. When asked how she had achieved this (maybe she’d been thinking about someone in her own life who had died?) she responded: “I was wondering whether to have steak pie or chicken pie for tea”. She knew, as an experienced actress, that what served the play best at that moment was stillness and the impression that her character’s focus was entirely on her inner thoughts. And, from the perspective of the audience, that’s precisely what she achieved.

At that moment she had enormous stage presence, she was totally watchable because she was simply engaged on the task at hand. No more, no less. What is most important at that point is what the audience experience, not what is going on for the performer.

Another example is when a famous theatre director came into an empty theatre one day. The stage lights were on and the house lights were out. On stage a man entered sweeping the floor. The director was mesmerised and watched until the man left the stage. The man on stage had enormous stage presence because he was simply and totally engaged on the task at hand: sweeping the stage – no more, no less. What made him particularly watchable was the context: being on stage in a theatre.

To have presence as a singer is to simply be engaged totally with the task at hand: singing the song. Not thinking about the effect it may have on the audience, not worrying about whether they are standing with the correct singer’s posture, not focusing on their breathing, not struggling to remember the words of the second verse. It is not important whether or not the singer experiences the emotional content of the song, but it is of vital importance that the audience does.

Tom’s notion of ‘charisma’

Tom wrote in the comments section:

“Chris, it occurs to me that your presence is my ‘full commitment.’ As Deb mentioned, my presence IS what I also call ‘stage presence’ or ‘charisma.;’ That requires full commitment, but it also requires a particular focus on the ‘human’ elements of the performance (as in character, meaning, story, yada yada).

For example, if we transplant the discussion to the opera hall, take two singers performing the role of Carmen – both are committed and not self-conscious, but singer A has a more technical focus, and singer B has a more ‘human’ focus.

Singer A: Is focused like a laser beam on following the conductor, hitting her marks on the stage, and on creating her most beautiful sound. She’s also allowing herself to enjoy the rhythms and cadences of the music.

Singer B: While a part of her is focused on technical elements, she is more dominantly focused on seducing, taunting, and teasing the men around her. Her thoughts are primarily ‘character’ thoughts rather than ‘singer’ thoughts – when she successfully teases a man, she experiences a victory and that victory is clearly seen on her face and in her body. When she is done taunting one man, she looks around to see who looks like the next easy mark.

To me, only Singer B has ‘stage presence.’ The other singer’s technical focus and commitment might make her more watchable than if she were self-conscious and self-doubting, but she lacks true charisma.”

my understanding of ‘character’

David Mamet is a playwright and theatre/ film director who believes that there is no such thing as ‘character’, there is just the performer, the text and their actions. I’m with him on this one! In the context of singing in a performance there is simply the singer, the music (which included lyrics and melody/ harmony) and the singing.

To comment on Tom’s opera example above I’d need to see these two singers myself before I decide which one has ‘stage presence’. My claim is that Singer A, if engaged with the appropriate tasks and actions, may well have as much stage presence and ‘charisma’ as Singer B. Singer B doesn’t need to have any understanding of ‘character’, she just needs to behave and act in a manner required by the opera at any given moment.

Singer B’s job is to make the audience to believe that she is taunting and teasing those around us. Most of that work will have been done by the composer of the music and lyrics, the rest will be by done by the way in which the song is sung and the actions carried out by the singer. The audience don’t care what’s going on inside the singer. She may be using internal imagery of talking to her cat or imagining she is a snake. It doesn’t really matter.

But we digress … Tom’s example has used opera which is very much a storytelling medium and has more in common with plays than with concerts. What about songs that have no story, no ‘characters’, or maybe even no recognisable words?

My claim is that as long as the singers are in the moment and focused on doing their job properly (singing the song to the best of their ability), following whatever instructions the director has given (e.g. which passages are loud, which sections go faster, which verses should be sung more gently, what imagery might be useful, etc.), then they will have stage presence, be eminently watchable and will communicate the music and its emotional content in the way in which the director has intended. No more, no less.

It’s the director’s job to help the singers convey whatever ‘meaning’ or emotional content that she believes the song contains. That work will have been done in rehearsal. In performance the singers just need to get on with the job!

next week

My division of this discussion into two parts is rather arbitrary since they both impinge on each other. Tom in particular would claim that connecting with the ‘meaning’ of a song is vital to creating any kind of stage presence. So next week I will look at what a song’s ‘meaning’ might be, where it resides and how it affects the singing of the song: Singing what you mean and meaning what you sing.

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Getting the best out of your choir 6: self-reflection

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 03 May 2009 11:48:00 +0000

It’s very quiet here today. A typical English spring day: grey and overcast with a soft drizzle gently falling. Tomorrow it’s a ‘bank holiday’ here in England. This was once a holiday for all of us to celebrate May Day, but now it’s just a day off for the banks and financial institutions, most of the shops and supermarkets stay open. And for us freelancers too, it’s business as usual!

On a Sunday the world outside is definitely much quieter than usual. Hardly any traffic, no kids on their way to school, no postman. Just the kind of day when we can step outside our normal routine and take stock.

always rushing

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that there never seems to be enough time to do everything we want to!

“I’ve been meaning to sit down and really learn the words of that second verse.”

“When I get some free time, I’d like to do a better arrangement of that Ukrainian song.”

“Next time I get a spare moment I want to listen to the practice CD again so I can definitely nail my part.”

“Roll on the holidays when I can do some proper research to find some tasty songs for next term.”

We always seem to be in some kind of ‘crisis’ mode, just about delivering what we need to at the last minute. This means that we never really get a chance to take stock, to look back over the last term’s work or most recent concert and think about what happened.

condemned to repeat history

As George Santayana famously said:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Basically this means that studying our history is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. If we don’t look back on our past actions and reflect on them, then we are condemned to constantly repeat our errors.

Of course, the flip side of this is that if we do something well, then it’s good to take note of it so that we can repeat it in the future! There is nothing worse than accidentally producing an excellent result without knowing why it happened.

the self-aware singer

Considering our past actions and reflecting on what happened in previous rehearsals, concerts, song learning, etc. is the job of both choir leaders and choir members. The responsibility of getting the best out of a choir lies with all members of the team.

This means that singers need to be self-aware at all times. It is not possible to reflect on earlier experiences if you don’t remember what you were doing! This applies to:

warm ups (where are the tensions in my body now? what can I do to release them? how can I carry out this exercise better than the last time I did it? what is the point of this particular warm up exercise and how can I learn from it?);
song learning (how does my part fit in with the alto part? why is it particularly difficult to find the start note each time? why is that line/ interval difficult to nail? is there a better way of connecting the words with the music? I must remember to sing my part against the other parts on the practice CD – I forgot last time and it didn’t help!);
rehearsal (how come I missed that important note that the director gave last time we rehearsed? why am I always coming in late on that phrase? I need to remember to pay more attention to the tenors this time so I can get my tuning right! this time I’ll write down the verse order so I won’t forget it like last time);
performance (at our last concert I couldn’t see the director properly because the lights were in my eyes – this time I’ll make sure I stand in a better place to avoid this; I noticed recently that in every concert I get so nervous that I’m taking shallow breaths most of the time – this time I’ll consciously focus on breathing long and slow before each songs starts; at our Christmas concert I was thrown when the director got us to repeat the last verse – this time I’ll not zone out, but pay close attention all the time!).

I’m sure there are many other things that I’ve missed out, but you get the idea!

the reflective choir leader

Part of a choir leader’s job is to be a teacher. Week on week the choir leader tries to improve the singers’ vocal and aural skills as she constantly strives for improvement in singing quality and performance technique. In order to do this successfully it is important to have an overall strategy, a programme of development work, but alongside this, you must take note of what works and what doesn’t work in order to refine this programme constantly. It’s no good initiating a series of exercises to improve tuning if you don’t take note of whether the tuning has improved or not!

I’m assuming that it is part of any good choir leader’s method to practice your craft in a self-reflective way. If not, maybe you shouldn’t be doing the job! This self-reflection works at several different levels:

from moment to moment within each choir session
You’ve planned the session in detail with built-in developmental work as you move through the session, but you must be prepared for when things don’t work out as planned, or if something goes exceptionally well. You need to be in the moment and prepared to go ‘off script’ at any moment in service to the bigger picture.

from session to session (rehearsal to rehearsal)
Many of us plan an entire block of work in advance with development from session to session. But even if you only plan week by week, you need to look back over previous sessions in order to work out what is best to do in subsequent sessions. Is it worth going over stuff again? Perhaps that tricky song you planned is too adventurous for this block of work. Or perhaps the choir are picking up the new songs extremely quickly, so maybe here’s an opportunity to raise the bar and put in something more advanced like clapping or choreography.

from concert to concert
That tricky song you’ve attempted in the last three concerts has always ended up as a disaster. Maybe it’s time to drop it from the repertoire or find a way of making it work by planning specific rehearsals around it.

The audience always seems to get restless about half an hour into your concerts. Why is this? Is it to do with the structure of the concerts or the repertoire?

For some reason, the Christmas concert was a resounding success, even though it was pretty much the same as the autumn concert. Why was this? Was it just that particular audience, or the different venue, or the new staging?

from season to season
It’s always good to keep the choir on its toes. You may notice that you always start the season of in the same way. Or perhaps every spring season is a classical one. Or you never tackle long, difficult songs in the winter season. Whatever you do: is there a pattern? Do you want to continue that or break it?

from year to year
I always choose the start of the autumn term to look back over the previous year. You may choose a different point, but it’s always good to have a long view. After the long summer break I archive everything we’ve done over the last year and start to think about the year ahead. I like to have an overall view of where we’re heading, what new challenges we may take on, if we’re heading for some significant end of year concert or not. It’s not something I necessarily need to articulate or formally bring into my planning process (although you may well choose to do that), but just thinking about the long view helps me to plan the immediate season in front of me.

from choir to choir
And finally, there comes a day when you may well move onto a different choir. That is the perfect time to reflect on what you have achieved with your last choir. Given your time over again, would you do things the same way? Here is an opportunity to do things better/ differently, to reinvent your self and your process, to start with a blank sheet. It’s all to easy to sleepwalk into a new situation and soon find ourselves up to our old habits!

building on success

This is the happy side of self-reflection: note all the things that go really well and find ways of doing them again! It is just as bad to let a good thing slip through your fingers as it is to constantly repeat bad habits. This is also the time to take the opportunity of not resting on your laurels or of becoming complacent. Just because something went really well, doesn’t mean that it can’t be better next time. The mark of a good, self-reflective practitioner is one who is always on the lookout for ways of making things better.

learning from failure

When something goes really badly wrong, we can get trapped in a period of self-chastisement. We suddenly doubt whether we are actually any good at what we do. We forget all the wonderful things that have happened with the choir in the past. We focus entirely on all the negative aspects of the situation. But this is precisely the time when we need to be in the moment in a non-judgmental way. We need to stand back from the situation and try to note why things went wrong. Analyse the situation dispassionately and learn from it so that next time you won’t make the same mistake.

Somebody once said that rehearsals are the opportunity to try all the ways of getting things wrong, of finding all the ways that don’t work. Then afterwards we are simply left with the things that do work! This is a fantastic example of how we learn from failure and mistakes.

end of the series

That’s the end of this series on how to get the best out of your choir. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and its given you some food for thought. I’d love to hear from your own experiences. Maybe you have something to add to what I’ve said, or perhaps you’d like to recount a specific example of something that’s worked for your choir. Or maybe you just want to let me know that something I’ve said is plain wrong! Whatever it is, I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment.

next week

A few weeks back, there was a flurry of activity in the comments section on stage presence and the ‘meaning’ of songs. This is a big and interesting subject, so rather than let it languish in the backwater of comments land, I thought I’d make a whole post about it. So next week I’m going to look at stage presence for singers and the week after that, singing what you mean. In the meantime you may like to read those comments and chip in yourself!

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Getting the best out of your choir 5: preparing for performance PART 2

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 10:53:00 +0000

Last week in part 1 of preparing for performance, I looked at some of the difficulties choirs face when it comes to performance: nerves, fear of failure, not being in the moment, having unrealistic expectations, and not being prepared. In this post I’ll cover the rest of the issues that I consider to be important when preparing for performance.

take your time

When the nerves kick in, or when you think the audience aren’t enjoying it, or when you’re not truly in the moment, everything starts to speed up. The songs race, the choir leader gabbles, and the whole thing’s over before you realise it. This nervous speediness mainly affects the breathing and attention to detail.

To avoid this, make sure you are breathing deeply and easily. What might be just a few seconds in real time can feel like and age in ‘stage time’. You will get used to this and gradually learn to take things much more slowly. The audience will be patient and attentive if you need time to find the right starting notes, or if you stumble over an announcement.

Although you know the songs inside out, this is probably the first time that your audience has heard them. They need to have time for the words and the music to sink in. They will happily listen to several repeated verses of a song, and will need more time if the song is telling a story in English.

To help the singers take their time, don’t start the concert with anything tricky. Choose something simple but effective like a round or a chant with simple words and long sustained notes. This will calm the breathing down and give the choir a chance to settle into their new surroundings. The choir need a little time to get used to the stage lights, size of the auditorium, acoustics of the space and the particular audience.

One of the most vital times not to rush is when starting a song off. Many novice choir leaders who are nervous think they need to get every song off to a perfect start in quick order. But if you get the start wrong, everything else will fall apart. Take time to give out the starting notes properly and make sure that the choir have received them. Let every singer know that they should ask if they haven’t heard their start note properly. Make sure all eyes are on you before you begin the song. And if (heaven forbid!) you do go wrong or give the wrong notes out, just start the song again. The audience will visibly relax now that they realise you are all human after all! In fact, it’s sometimes a good idea to build a ‘mistake’ into the concert for this very reason.

the shock of the new

No matter how much you’ve rehearsed and prepared for your concert, much of the experience will be totally new. You will never have done this exact concert before, there will always be an element of novelty. There may be new songs in the repertoire, new choir formation on stage, new members standing next to you, new venue, new structure for some of the songs, new ways of entering and exiting.

This novelty is exciting, keeps us on our toes and breathes life into old material. It is entertaining for an audience to see a different kind of concert every time you perform. It is thrilling to try out your new songs on an audience. But you have to realise that new means unfamiliar and untested. It won’t always go swimmingly, you may stumble slightly. So factor this into your performance and don’t expect everything to be perfect every time. There will always be a balance between slick and well-rehearsed material and the danger and edginess of new, even improvised, elements in a concert. Be prepared!

stand and deliver

Your last rehearsal was wonderful. Everyone was firing on all cylinders and the overall sound was awesome. But now you’re on stage and it all sounds a bit off, rather muddy, and not resonant at all. You begin to doubt that the choir is that good. Maybe the last rehearsal was a fluke?

Singing in an unfamiliar venue can be a real shock. The acoustics will be different from your familiar rehearsal space. You may end up standing in a choir formation that is not optimal due to the size or shape of the stage. Because of this you may not be able to hear the other harmony parts as strongly as usual. You might find it harder to produce the required dynamics because it feels like you need to be singing loudly all the time just to hear yourself.

Your perception may be very different from your usual rehearsals, but for the audience, the sound may be totally spot on. In this instance you have to trust your director totally as she is the one out front who can hear the overall mix.

So don’t let the venue put you off. Take your time to tune into the new sound and new positions. You may need to adjust where you stand slightly, or incline your head differently. Especially in smaller ensembles, you may need to stand much closer than usual in order to hear each other properly.

what you feel, what they feel

You can’t judge the overall quality of a performance by what you feel as an individual. This may seem strange at first since surely if you feel that the concert was a real belter and that you sang better than you’ve ever done before, then surely the concert must have been brilliant with the audience loving every moment?

But there is a strange kind of effect that goes on in any kind of performance. What you feel, what your fellow singers feel, what the choir leader feels, what the audience as a whole feel, and how good the concert was overall can all be different!

I’ve written about this before (How was it for you?), but it’s worth stating again.

You are just one part of a team, and each audience member is just one part of a much larger organism. Individual experiences don’t reflect the whole. If you remember this, then you can focus on the songs, being in the moment, doing your job well, and performing as well as you can.

As soon as you get carried away with how you or the audience feel, you can get knocked out of the present moment and everything can go pear-shaped.

Perhaps the whole of the front row look bored and sleepy. You assume they hate the show and that puts you off your stride. You begin to doubt that you’re any good. But after the show, those same audience members come up to you in the bar and tell you it’s one of the best concerts they’ve ever been to.

You get to the end of a particularly tricky song and really nail it. You feel so proud that you didn’t make any mistakes and feel that you are on particularly good form tonight. You look around at the other smiling singers and feel that you can do no wrong. You are bathed in a warm glow of self-satisfaction and pride. You know you will knock the audience dead and that every other song in the concert will be performed superbly. You take your eye off the ball and start focusing on the audience rather than the song. You sing loudly and proudly without noticing that you’re drowning out your fellow singers. You are so full of yourself that you forget that the director has cut the repeat at the end and you find yourself singing out loud, wrong and alone.

Tonight you’ve discovered that sweet spot in your voice. You just soar through the songs and have more fun than ever before. You can’t wait to get to the bar after the show and share your joy with the other singers. But you are faced with a lot of gloomy faces. The majority of the choir think it’s one of their worst performances. The director is depressed because nothing went as well as in the dress rehearsal. The responses from audience members are lacklustre. You begin to doubt your own judgment and feel depressed. Maybe you’re not such a good singer after all.

To help avoid these ups and downs, you simply need to focus on the job at hand, do what is expected of you to the best of your ability and really be in the music. At the end of the concert you will feel whatever you feel. Hopefully you will have had fun and done the best you can. Everything else is outside your control. The next concert is the next concert, and when that arrives, you will treat it with beginner’s mind as if it’s the first time you’ve ever sung in a performance.

on with the show!

I do hope these points have been of some use. Performing in public is a very different beast than the normal weekly choir sessions or a concert rehearsal. Sometimes things won’t go as smoothly as you’d hoped, but by considering some of the points I’ve raised, I hope you can find ways of avoiding some of the pitfalls. And if something does go awry, then maybe you’ll now know why!

next week

Next week, in the sixth and final post in this series on how to get the best out of you choir, I want to look at the importance of self-reflection, how to build on your successes, and how to learn from your mistakes.

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Getting the best out of your choir 4: preparing for performance PART 1

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:56:00 +0000

Sometimes, no matter how much you’ve rehearsed or prepared your choir, the concert just doesn’t quite measure up to your expectations. What worked perfectly in rehearsal ends up sounding quite ropey. Those confident singers suddenly look like a bunch of startled rabbits in the headlights. That wonderful resonant sound you had comes across as thin and lacking in energy. What went wrong? Is there anything you can do to prevent this happening next time?

Of course, I don’t have all the answers, and every choir is a different beast. However, I’ll jot down a few musings here that may be of some use. I’d love to hear from all you silent readers out there if you have any useful tips that might help us get the best out of our choirs in performance.

As usual, I seem to have run away with myself and written a much longer post than I’d intended! Just so you don’t feel overloaded, I’m going to split the post in two so you can read Part 2 next week. There’s no obvious division into two parts, but it may give you time to absorb some of the ideas better.

the butterfly of nerves

Nerves are a good thing. A few butterflies in the tummy means that we care about what we’re doing. A bit of adrenaline raises our game and keeps us on our toes. The day we have no nerves at all before performing is the day that we have become complacent and aren’t really bothered about what happens.

But nerves can get out of control and turn into performance anxiety. Even at a low level, if a singer hasn’t performed much, then nerves can get in the way of a good performance. Inside flutterings and anxiety can:

produce quick, shallow breathing
make our mouths dry and our tongues stick
cause tension in our necks and throats
make us forget things (words, song structure, which part we sing, etc.)
focus our minds on the wrong thing (i.e. the mistakes that we might make)
stop us from noticing our surroundings and fellow singers
make things run much faster than we would like

One excellent way of countering these nerves is to simply take a big, deep, long breath. If you also raise your shoulders high when breathing in, and drop them on a sigh when you breathe out, it helps to release any tension in the neck and throat.

fear of failure

One of the reasons we get nerves in the first place is that we want to do good. We want to:

get things right and not make mistakes;
please and entertain the audience;
make everyone like us and think we’re wonderful;
support our fellow performers and not let them down;
please our choir leader and make them proud;
appear skilled, professional and in control — we don’t want to make fools of ourselves!

All good aims indeed. However, we must remember that we’re not in this alone. It’s team work. As long as you know you’ve put the work in, know what you’re supposed to be doing, then you can trust that the whole team will gel and you will carry it off. A large group has a force of its own. Although you’re a vital component of the choir, a minor mistake from one individual will go unnoticed. Prepare well and keep a perspective at all times. It’s only a concert after all!

be here now

When our nerves get the better of us it means that our mind ends up focusing on all the wrong things. We worry about remembering words that we spent all those weeks learning, we fear all the mistakes that we might make in the performance to come, we are concerned about what the audience will think when the concert is over. Instead, we should be focusing on the task at hand and staying in the moment.

Easier said than done, but if you focus on the here and now — how you are breathing, what your posture is like, preparing to sing the first note, being attentive to the conductor — then there will be no room in your head for any worries! You are just here to sing, so that is all you need to do. Stop holding onto the past (“It was better last time we did it”) or being concerned about the future (“I hope I remember to repeat the last verse”) and just be with the music as it arises.

When we see performers on stage and marvel at their ‘presence’ we think that it’s some kind of magic. But the word ‘presence’ simply means that the performers are totally in the present and only engaged on the task at hand. That’s what makes them so watchable.

expectations and beginner’s mind

It’s very hard just to stay with the present moment. We all anticipate and bring expectations with us. We remember that last concert when everything went pear-shaped, or the performance last year which was one of our best and everyone was firing on all cylinders. We know that the tickets have sold out so we expect a large and attentive audience. We are so proud of the complicated song that we’ve been working on for the last few months and are convinced that it will go down a storm.

Unfortunately, our expectations are seldom met! We are often disappointed when things don’t turn out as we had hoped, or are totally surprised when something goes extremely well. The way to avoid disappointment and to bring freshness to every performance is to imagine that this is the first time you’ve ever done a concert and the first time you’ve ever sung these particular songs. Have no expectations other than to do your best under the given circumstances. What will happen will happen regardless of what you expect. You have no control over it.

I’ve written before about this idea which Zen Bhuddism calls ‘beginner’s mind’ (Blame it on the weather). If you approach a song each time as if for the first time, it will be forever fresh and you will continue to discover new nuances in it.

be prepared

Although you don’t want to come to your performance with expectations, you do need to anticipate things that might happen as you don’t want to be thrown by the unexpected. The most obvious thing to anticipate is that you need to know what you’re doing! So be well-prepared and rehearsed. Know the words, know your part, know the structure of the songs and the order they will be sung in, know where you will be standing, know if you have an encore song and know how to bow at the end.

But this preparation may not be enough to cover all eventualities. There is a big difference, for example, between knowing your words at home and remembering them in a performance situation. You may think you are well-rehearsed, but you need to practice songs in many different circumstances, not just in the familiar rehearsal room set-up. Try remembering the lyrics whilst washing up, whilst driving, whilst walking along the street, whilst making the bed. The greater the range of contexts that you practice in, the more the song will be embedded in your memory.

Similarly for any song, don’t always stand next to the same person, or always face the same way in the rehearsal room. Find all the ways of doing the song in the ‘wrong’ style (as opera, as country and western, as reggae). Rehearse a song while the whole choir is walking around the room at random. Practice a harmony song in small groups not just in the whole choir. Work out a strange dance routine to practice whilst singing a familiar song. Sing a song in reverse order. Swap parts around. Play with songs in as many different ways as you can, then when you come to doing it ‘straight’ it will be much easier.

One important thing that you can’t ever really be prepared for is the audience’s reaction. Sometimes they will applaud every song loudly and jump to their feet at the end. Other times they may appear to be sleeping and applaud in a lacklustre way. This can have a huge effect on the singers. If the response isn’t as enthusiastic as we need, then we suddenly think they don’t like us and the whole performance becomes filled with doubt and lack of confidence.

On the other hand, you can just as easily be thrown by an over-enthusiastic response to a song that you think you didn’t perform well!

You have to sing the songs for yourselves more than for the audience. Go out there to have a good time, and if the audience like it too, that’s just an added bonus. It’s impossible to work out how an audience feel towards a performance just by how they applaud or appear to be paying attention (see What you feel, what they feel next week).

that’s all folks!

Well, that’s all I’ve got space for this week. Next week in Part 2 of preparing for performance I’ll look at stage time vs. real time, standing positions on stage, how new things affect us, and why people can have such different experiences at the same concert.

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Getting the best out of your choir 3: the moderate choir leader

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 12:09:00 +0000

We first came across ‘the martinet’ in the first post in this series (Getting the best out of your choir 1: moderate or martinet?), and met her opposite number ‘the mouse’ in last week’s post. My contention is that there is a middle way between these two extremes, that the kind of leader to get the best out of a choir is one who is moderate in temper and approach.

Here is my definition of the ideal choir leader. Maybe we’re not all there yet, but it’s certainly something to aspire to!

the moderate

even-tempered
You need someone out front who can keep their calm whilst all around them is chaos and confusion (Calm down dear, it’s only a song!).

There will come a point with every choir when

the singers seem to lose all their self-confidence;
you tackle a song that seems to be just too hard to deal with;
the rehearsal is going so bad that everyone wants to go home and bury their heads in the sand;
no matter how hard you try the whole thing sounds just awful;
the hideously complicated structure of the song you’re working on is just beyond everyone’s comprehension;
the song that you’d perfected last week just falls apart in front of everyone’s eyes;
everybody is stumbling over the words of the latest foreign song;
despite weeks of hard work, the altos still can’t get their part right;
hardly anyone turns up to the final rehearsal before a big concert because there’s a vicious bug going around;
the lead soloist fails to turn up for the concert …

You get the picture: if something can go wrong, it will! In these situations it doesn’t help anyone if the choir leader gets stressed out, begins to shout, loses the plot, and generally has a melt-down. You need someone who is steady, takes it all in their stride, fills the choir with the confidence that everything is going to be all right, trusts in the process, and realises that in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a bunch of people singing songs.

fun-loving and playful
Bringing humour into the equation is a fantastic way of helping people relax and lose their inhibitions. A few laughs lets people off the hook and helps them to realise that it’s not the end of the world if they get something wrong.

In concerts, if the choir leader has a good rapport with the audience, they are immediately on your side. If you laugh at any mistakes, then the audience visibly relaxes since you’re not setting yourselves up to be perfection itself. Everybody loves it when they realise that you’re all human and therefore vulnerable.

Having fun and laughter isn’t the same as not being serious about what you do. We can make light of situations without compromising our standards. We still want to strive to be the best that we can and take our job of making music seriously, but approach it in a light-hearted way.

Being playful and child-like, using imagery and storytelling, improvising and trying things differently are all great ways of helping singers learn and to bring out the best. The focus is off the person and the music and onto imagination and risk-taking in a safe environment. Having played with a song in as many ‘wrong’ ways as possible liberates people from over-familiarity and set ways of singing, introduces the idea that there is no ‘right’ way of performing a song, and prepares people for any ‘mistakes’ during a concert which otherwise might throw them.

people person
Any half-way decent choir leader needs to actually like people! It’s not enough to just love music or singing, leading a choir is about working with people, not a bunch of instruments. Sure, it’s fun to have all those voices at your disposal, but behind each one is a unique individual. There will be vulnerabilities, rivalries, misunderstandings, frustrations, jealousies, fear, and so on – all those things that make us human beings. A choir leader has to acknowledge and work with this. You are not dealing with a bunch of robots who can deliver at will.

knows their stuff
Whether or not you use technical jargon or display your musical knowledge freely, you need to know what you’re doing! And if you don’t at any point, you need to be humble enough to admit it to the choir. They need to feel that they are in safe hands and that you know your stuff. Once you have built that confidence, you can take the choir into uncharted areas, but never ever bluff as you will soon be found out!

I like to use the analogy of an explorer. As a choir leader I am taking the choir on a journey. I have all the necessary gear: compass, ropes, warm clothing, maps, etc., together with a great deal of knowledge about navigation, finding trails, dealing with hazards, knowing the terrain, etc. etc. So I am totally equipped to lead people on a journey, but I don’t necessarily know where we will end up! I can guarantee though that we will arrive safely and have lots of fun on the way.

non-judgmental, encouraging and accepting
To get the best out of someone you need to encourage them, to praise them when they get things right or achieve something, but also to accept their limitations, acknowledge that they’re trying their hardest and to not judge them (especially in a community choir).

If you shout at someone, chastise them for making a mistake, sneer at them because they might not be as good as their fellow singers, ask them to do something that is beyond their capabilities, never acknowledge their achievements … then that person will go into their shell and not bother trying hard or taking the risk of getting something wrong. They will stop believing in themselves and will act through fear. This does not make for a good choir!

firm but fair
Being non-judgmental doesn’t mean that you can’t expect high standards. When someone gets something wrong, you can point that out and ask them to do it again. You can set standards and have expectations about a range of things: being on time, choir dress, not talking during rehearsals, learning words off by heart, tuning, etc. But you need to make your expectations clear to everyone and be consistent and fair. It’s not good changing the goal posts every time, especially if you don’t let the choir know! People respect a firm hand if it seen to be fair. Apply any rules you have equally to everyone.

one of the team
You are not the big ‘I am’, you are not the sole reason that the choir sounds good, you are replaceable, you are just one of the team: a vital component of the whole, but not special. You happen to occupy a specific role in the group that is acknowledged by everyone. You may have a particular set of skills and experience, but that doesn’t make you better than everyone else.

You are just one of the team and it is your responsibility – along with everyone else – to make the music as wonderful as possible and for everyone to have as good a time as possible.

focus on the people and the process
This is related to the fact that a good choir leader is very much a people person. To get the best out of your choir you can’t simply focus on the end product or the music alone. You need to acknowledge the individuals who make up the choir and focus more on the process of making music rather than sacrificing everything to the music.

I have talked about this before (We are not here to serve the music) and not every choir leader will agree. But I think that if you are a moderate choir leader with all the attributes that I have outlined above, you will end up making wonderful music, plus have the bonus of a committed group of choir members who work out of love and not fear and who have built a strong sense of community and friendship through their love of singing. A group who come together each week to have a laugh and sing together to make something greater than any particular individual involved.

By following this approach, you can produce great music to a high standard. There are other choirs which are run by martinets who also produce great music, but I know which choir I’d rather be associated with! I truly do not believe that the end justifies the means.

Next week I will be looking at preparing for performance. How come everything was great in rehearsal but it all seemed to fall apart in the concert? I don’t claim to have all the answers by any means and, as always, would love to hear from you and your own experiences.

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Getting the best out of your choir 2: not too gentle, not too tough

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:53:00 +0000

In this post I’m going to look at two extreme kinds of choir leader, the mouse (unassuming, easily frightened, under-confident, feels small and insignificant) and the martinet who we met last week (loud, strict, stickler for perfection, dictator). I’m going to suggest that neither of these extremes is best for the choir, but there is the middle way of being the moderate.

Why are there different kinds of choir leaders? What turns ordinary people into the extremes of mouse or martinet? Even if we don’t think of ourselves as mice or martinets, we all occasionally drop into such extreme behaviour even if only for a moment. So it’s maybe worth giving some thought to where this behaviour might come from.

Here are a few things which might give an insight into a particular choir leader’s style. Not an exhaustive list by any means, and I’d love to hear from you if you have any other possibilities.

the martinet

control freak
Needs to be in charge of everything. The idea of uncertainty and disorder is a frightening one. People like this can be a little anal and will usually ask for complete accuracy of notes with no room for any variation. Will often use written scores slavishly.

not enough trust
Related to the above, due to their need to be in control, they take it upon themselves to be solely responsible for the music that the choir makes. They don’t see it as a team effort. If everything goes right they take the glory (see ‘look at me!’ below), but if it goes wrong it’s the choir’s fault because they didn’t obey the leader.

fear of failure: needing to get it right
This is more about other people’s perception. For whatever reason, the person is afraid of failing, or appearing to be a failure in any respect. These people don’t take risks, are averse to improvisation, come down like a ton of bricks on any mistakes, and insist on everything being perfect all the time.

look at me!
This is the choir leader as massive ego on legs. They are not really interested in the individual human beings that make up the choir, the singers are simply there to obey their leader and deliver the goods so the leader may be praised. Such leaders tend to over-conduct, like to be seen to be working hard, take the focus off the choir, indulge in pyrotechnic musical displays.

no self-confidence
Some martinets use their behaviour to mask their deep-seated insecurities. They may not have conducted much, or lack musical training, or not have worked with such a large choir, or just generally feel out of their depth. Instead of sharing this with the choir, they cover it up with appearing to be a strict disciplinarian hoping that nobody will notice.

not good with people
Some choir leaders are more interested in the music and can be a little bit ‘geeky’ in that way. They are not socially adept and would much rather be working with instruments who don’t talk back or have bad days. Because they lack social skills, they don’t know how to deal appropriately with choir members’ own insecurities, misunderstandings, and basic humanity. They will insist on over-long rehearsals and ridiculously high standards then not understand why people complain!

over-trained musically
Similar to the previous point, some choir directors are almost totally academic and are just out to realise the dots on the page. They have no understanding of the processes involved in working with human beings and translating dots into real, live music. They use inappropriate jargon when dealing with the choir without realising that most people have no idea what they’re talking about.

the mouse

lack of experience
Some choir leaders simply have little experience of leading a choir. They have no idea how rehearsals work, they don’t know the best way to bring a song to life, they’ve not conducted before, they’re not used to dealing with such large groups of people. Instead of covering this lack of experience with bluster (as a martinet would), they just crumble and are stunned into inactivity, mumbling, unclear instructions, lack of structure, etc.

out of my depth!
Even if a choir leader has a reasonable amount of experience, there will come a time when they feel that something is beyond them, either a particular piece of music, or an exceptionally big concert programme. They can’t bluff, but become even more mouse-like. They also aren’t able to admit that they’re out of their depth and lack the experience and self-confidence to change things to suit their abilities.

discomfort with leadership role/ dislike of responsibility
Some choir leaders just love music and singing, they may even have been a choir member until recently. They see other choirs and think it’s quite easy to lead a choir. But when they find themselves in that position, they realise that an awful lot of responsibility comes with the job. All eyes are on them and they always need to have all the answers. It’s much harder than they thought! But it’s too late to back out now, so they continue, but mice are not good at leading from the front.

just don’t care enough
A choir leader can end up being a mouse because they just don’t care about the resulting music or the choir members. They go through the motions, maybe the job’s been dumped on them, maybe they’ve been doing it too long and they’re bored. Their standards slip, they’re not clear when instructing the choir, they seldom give feedback.

not really musical – don’t know when it’s bad!
It is possible for someone to find themselves as a choir leader due more to enthusiasm than talent! They might love choirs and singing, but have no musical ability or deep understanding of music. They somehow expect it all to come together by magic with no intervention from them. They make a stab at leading and very quickly produce something that seems OK without realising that it’s dreadfully out of tune or the timing is wrong or they’ve taught the wrong part. They just don’t realise!

need to be liked
This is the correlate to the martinet’s “look at me!” desire. It’s not as much an ego thing, but more wanting to be liked and loved by every member of the choir (probably due to deep-seated lack of self-esteem). This means that they want to please everyone all the time. This is impossible in a choir! They will end up sending out mixed messages, and each time you come back to a song, they will approach it differently. They will confuse the choir because they are not giving them clear instructions.

fear of failure: scared of getting it wrong
Like the martinet, the mouse is frightened of failure. Their idea of hell is to be humiliated in front of the choir and an entire audience. If anything goes wrong, they will take it on as their individual responsibility. One way of avoiding this is to never actually finish a song. To have long, waffly rehearsals that don’t really go anywhere. To never commit to a clear idea of how a song should be done. To always avoid making strong choices about how to rehearse or perform a song in case their the wrong choices.

I had a dream

The other night I had a dream. I was trying to rehearse a very large choir made up of members from many choirs and groups that I have worked with over the years. They weren’t paying attention, but were generally milling around and chatting, being very relaxed and informal, not caring about the songs we were trying to rehearse. I was getting very frustrated and ended up shouting and swearing at them. In the end I just stormed outside and left them. I was standing outside leaning on a railing feeling pretty awful, when one of the choir members came out to find out how I was. She said: “That was a big shock! We hadn’t realised how you felt and the you really meant what you said.”

When I woke I had an uncomfortable thought: maybe this is the way I really feel and when I lead a choir I’m suppressing my real feelings. Perhaps I really want to shout and scream at people and all this patience is just a front. But that is definitely not the case. When I’m teaching or leading a choir, I feel calm and clear and enjoy being patient and taking time for a song to evolve. I don’t see any point in shouting, and don’t (well, hardly ever!) feel that I need to get angry or cross. Yes, I’m a dictator (I don’t believe that you can create art by committee, there needs to be one person with a vision in charge), but a totally benign dictator.

What kind of choir leader are you? If you’re a singer in a choir, what kind of leader is your choir leader? And how does it affect the end product?

Next week in Getting the best out of your choir 3 I will look at the characteristics that I believe make for a good, moderate choir leader who can bring the best out of a choir.

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Getting the best out of your choir 1: moderate or martinet?

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 12:28:00 +0000

This is the first in a series of posts about Getting the best out of your choir. The whole series looks like this:

Martinet. Interesting word that I’d not come across in ages and had forgotten what it meant. In case you’re in the same boat, a martinet is a strict disciplinarian, someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms. Whereas a moderate is person who is reasonable, temperate, judicious, just, cool, steady, and calm.

Which of these two types of person gets the best out of their choir?

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 in the car last week and caught the very end of Ken Clarke’s Jazz Greats. He and Pete Long were discussing clarinettist and bandleader Benny Goodman, and that’s where the word martinet popped up. Clarke said that Goodman insisted on:

“absolute perfection … you had a martinet making them work all the time and rehearse in between each gig”.

Pete Long told a story about Goodman in the 1970s making his band rehearse just their bows for three whole hours!

Obviously how you work with a choir depends on the aims of that particular group. A barbershop choir with a competition coming up will rehearse in a very different way from a choir that doesn’t perform and is just for fun. But I wonder, which kind of choir leader will get the best results out of a choir: a moderate or a martinet?

I’ve written before about my belief that a patient and forgiving approach to choir leading gets the best results (Calm down dear, it’s only a song!). But I do know that this doesn’t suit some choir members. They would prefer constant drilling, attention to detail, rigorous accuracy, focus on a small repertoire of songs, being told when they are ‘wrong’, etc. etc.

I’m sure it’s frustrating for some singers when I say “That’ll do” and we move onto the next song when clearly the first song needs more work. But I try to balance the need for quality, variety, fun and rehearsal by not dwelling to long on any particular song.

In some circumstances (e.g. competition, recording a CD, high profile performance) it is important to pay attention to all the details (tuning, dynamics, blend, etc.) and to rehearse the material well. However, there are very different ways of doing this!

There is the choir leader who becomes quickly frustrated when things don’t go right, who has unreasonable expectations of ‘perfect’ singing, who shouts when the choir aren’t improving quickly enough, who drills one section repeatedly whilst the others are standing around getting bored, who puts the fear of god into the singers in case they should make a tiny mistake. Yes, this is one way of going about things, but I really believe that it won’t create the best results. Also, choirs who are led like this tend to always be working on tenterhooks which is quickly detected by an audience who then also find it hard to relax and enjoy the concert.

Surely it would be better to create an environment of team-work, an atmosphere of calm and focused work where people are pulling together and where mistakes aren’t punished but just recognised as a necessary stage along a path towards a better performance. Surely such a calm, forgiving, reasonable, trusting atmosphere will bring out the best in people?

In the Radio 4 jazz programme I mentioned before, Pete Long also said that:

“Goodman was a martinet, but Jimmie Lunceford was a great teacher”.

Great teachers get good results because they bring out the best in people, they demand high standards but encourage people to believe that those high standards are achievable and within themselves already, they leave the music-makers with skills, self-awareness and understanding that they can apply to other situations rather than blindly drilling one particular piece of music. I would like to think that good choir leaders are also good teachers and that the whole choir moves forward as a team of music-makers who are constantly improving.

At the end of the jazz programme, Clarke says of Goodman:

“But when we listen to the music we can forgive some of the severity with which he treated the odd erring sideman.”

This is a case of the ends justifying the means, but personally I completely disagree. There is no need to be severe and abusive when trying to get the best out of people. It is inexcusable and should not be tolerated!

Next week in Getting the best out of your choir 2 I’m going to look at why there are different kinds of choir leaders and suggest that there is a middle way between mouse and martinet.

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How to have an English sing-along

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 10:33:00 +0000

And I mean English … not Irish or Welsh or Scottish. How is it possible to have an unplanned, spontaneous and genuine gathering of people who sing together?

Mykl Roventine on flickr

I was listening to a broadcast from 24 May 2008 of a BBC Radio 3 programme called World Routes which included a session from the London Bulgarian Choir.

The presenter asked the choir’s leader Dessislava Stefanova:

“Why is there such a strong choral tradition in Bulgaria?”

Dessi replied:

“In terms of the authentic choral tradition, it is because this was one of the main ways in which people socialised – through song”

Also on the programme were Joe Boyd and Max Reinhardt who were recommending some of their favourite CD recordings from Eastern Europe. Their wide-ranging discussion included talking about the differences between village harmony singing and the more professional, often gypsy, musicians who might play at weddings and other celebrations.

It was quite clear that throughout Eastern Europe (and probably many other countries), there are still many, many communities where the everyone sings together on a regular basis. It is typical for individuals to have up to 40 or so songs in common, so very easy for groups of people to break into song.

But in England? When was the last time you had a spontaneous sing-along other than at a football match or at a pub karaoke session? Have you ever tried to start a group singing only to fizzle out half way through the first verse because nobody can remember the words? Or you launch into what you believe to be a well-known song only to be met by confused silence as nobody joins in with you?

Community singing used to be a big pastime in this country (see Singing from the same hymn sheet, Singing together and Should singing together be a guilty pleasure?). But every now and then it dies out and people try to revive it. The last time a really big initiative was launched in the UK was in the 1920s. That was perhaps one of the last times when the majority of people knew a whole bunch of songs in common. Even now, most people know some of these same songs: “Pack up your troubles”, “Bicycle made for two”, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, “What shall we do with the drunken sailor”, “My bonnie lies over the ocean”. But they often can’t sing them right through without the lyric sheet!

The other week I tried to set up a singing evening with a bunch of friends. OK, it wasn’t entirely spontaneous, but the idea was that we would gather at someone’s house with the intention of having a jolly good sing-along. I asked people to bring instruments if they had them, and a song to share.

Worrying that it might be hard to get the evening going, I prepared a set of lyric sheets with around 20 songs, mainly from the 1960s (we are all of a certain age!). I certainly didn’t want to ‘lead’ the evening, but on the other hand knew that it might take a while to get going. In the end, a couple of people got guitars out and off we went.

I had hoped that:

the evening would go very smoothly
people would spontaneously start singing and everyone else would join in
we would have plenty of songs in common
there would be no long, awkward silences
there would be a variety of repertoire, some songs with instruments, some without

However, it didn’t quite turn out like that!

not everyone knew every song that I’d put on the lyric sheets
sometimes the guitarists introduced a song that was not on the sheet, but nobody knew all the lyrics
people were very nervous about initiating a song
people began to rely on the guitarists and it became a little bit like a ‘performance’
the focus was all on the lyric sheets and everyone appeared to forget all the other songs that they might know
most people were very self conscious and a little scared of starting a song off, even though most of the people were in choirs and had sung in public

If you’ve read this far, you might be expecting an answer to the post’s title: How to have an English sing-along. Unfortunately I don’t have the answer! I was hoping some of you out there might have some good ideas on how to make a sing-along evening work better.

Can you think of ways of making such an evening go smoothly without it being led too formally?

Why do people end up being so self-conscious, even amongst friends?

Should I just give up and accept that for us, singing together is no longer part of our culture?

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Why do you sing?

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:48:00 +0000

I came across an interesting article on Canada’s CBC Radio 2 blog the other day. It was entitled Why do you sing? and attracted several comments from people outlining their own personal reasons why they sing.

Although I’ve posted here not long ago about why people join choirs and singing groups (There are plenty of good reasons to sing), I’ve never really looked at why myself and others like singing in the first place, in whatever form.

I’m going to outline a few reasons why people sing, and tell you about my love of harmony singing, but I’d love to hear about your own reasons. Do leave a comment and tell me why you love to sing.

expressing what we feel

One of the comments on the CBC blog was “To sing is to express being alive”. There are songs for every occasion: sad songs, happy songs, angry songs, love songs. Singing is a way of giving voice to a strong emotion and sharing it with the world. It can be a means of communicating our feelings to others, but also a way of giving ourselves comfort and solace in difficult times.

feeling good

Many people realise that singing can make you feel good. But I’ve also found the opposite: feeling good can make you sing! Often when I’m engaged in something physical and pleasurable like walking or cycling I suddenly notice that I’m singing. It is a natural expression of the way I’m feeling.

Sometimes the last thing I want to do is to sing. But because it’s my job, I turn up at the singing workshop and before I know it, I’m singing (because I have to). After just a few bars however, I notice my mood lifting considerably. Singing should be part of the national health service!

private vs. public

Lots of us sing in the shower, while we’re hoovering, as we’re changing the beds. We sing alone in the house or the car. Nobody can hear or see us and we truly let rip (and think of ourselves as the best singer in the world!). But put us in front of other people and we soon clam up.

As soon as other people are present, we think that we are being judged in some way on our performance. This often affects how we sing and can sometimes be a big obstacle to allowing others to hear our song. On the other hand, there are people who sing because others are listening. They are born to perform and need an ‘audience’ to hear them.

singing together

Personally, I don’t like singing on my own. The reason I sing is to enjoy the harmonies, so I need other people (or a radio or CD playing). I sing because I love the relationship between different notes being sung at the same time. I love the way that harmony singing creates something which is greater than the individuals involved. It makes a separate thing which can’t be done alone, which needs all the participants, and yet no one participant is controlling the final result.

This can be a bit of a problem for me because if nobody is around, I can’t sing with any great pleasure! I need to have people to sing with, and they also need to know the same songs as me in order to join in.

work, rest and play

There are also wider cultural and societal reasons why people sing. There are many rituals in life which involve singing: weddings, funerals, religious services. Some cultures involve singing in their healing practices. Often when large groups of people come together for a shared activity (football matches, outdoor concerts, feasts), singing arises.

There are many examples of songs associated with work activities (work songs). Not only do these songs relieve the boredom of the work (often repetitive in nature), but can help synchronise work actions (chopping, hammering, waulking, reaping, pounding, hauling), help lift the spirits, and create a sense of community (“we’re all in this together”).

deeper meanings

There is a more fundamental reason underlying why we sing. Steven Mithin in his book The Singing Neanderthals: the origins of music, language, mind and body suggests that song and dance came before language. Mithin posits that music-making is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

why do you sing?

So there are some reasons why people like to sing. But why do you sing? Do let me know by leaving a comment.

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Singing the same note – differently!

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:32:00 +0000

The other week I was teaching songs by ear at a workshop as I normally do. There were a couple of women who seemed to be having a hard time catching on to their part. They were all over the place and seemed to be singing at random. Then it clicked: they weren’t able to find the right starting note from my voice. But when I sang the note to them at the pitch I wanted them to sing at (i.e. very high in my own range) they were spot on. I wish I’d picked this up earlier in the workshop!

But what does this mean: ‘singing at the pitch I wanted them to sing’? And why do some women get confused by my singing voice and others don’t? Do men have the same problem when women are teaching them by ear? And what on earth does ‘octave’ mean any way??!! This post is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

Pitching from the other side of the fence

You will have noticed that men generally have lower speaking voices than women. We become used to this from a very early age. This is usually the case with their singing voices too. This is such a familiar thing that we don’t really notice it.

We can understand each other’s speech with no problems. It doesn’t matter whether someone has a low or a high voice, the meaning carries across. But when the meaning is communicated by the pitch of the voice (e.g. when singing, or when speaking a pitch-based language such as Chinese), then all sorts of misunderstandings can occur.

If, as a man, I sing a note to a woman somewhere in the middle of my range, then she often automatically compensates for the fact that men’s voices are lower than women’s by responding with a note that is in the middle of her range. She will not be singing exactly the same note (i.e. at the same frequency), but she perceives that it is the ‘same’ in some sense. When I sing higher in my range, she also sings higher in her range. And when I sing lower, then she will sing lower too. We probably won’t ever be singing at the same pitch/ frequency.

Similarly, if a woman sings a note in the middle of her range to a man, then usually the man will respond with a note in the middle of his range. He will automatically make an adjustment for the differences between men’s and women’s voices. He won’t attempt so sing exactly the same note/ pitch/ frequency, but a note that he perceives to be the ‘same’.

So far so good. But some people don’t make these automatic adjustments. They try to match the exact pitch of the person singing to them. This means that men will try to sing very, very high (and usually fail) when trying to match to a woman’s voice, and women will try to sing ever so low (and usually fail) when trying to match with a man. This can be the source of a mistaken belief that someone can’t ‘sing’.

This is not too much of a problem when women sing very high notes in their range, or men sing very low notes, because we know that trying to match them is doomed to failure. But when we are dealing with middling notes, then confusion can arise. Do they want me to sing exactly the same note as they are singing, or do they want the equivalent note in the middle of my range?

This becomes even more complicated because some people think that just because they perceive two notes to be the same, then they actually are the same! If a man and a woman are singing a melody in unison together, then it can appear to the singers that they are singing exactly the same notes, whereas they will actually be singing an octave apart (more on the idea of the octave later).

In fact, when a man and a woman sing exactly the same note at the same pitch, it can feel very, very strange and unfamiliar!

Singing with the opposite sex

When I first sang in a small group with women, I found it very hard to stand next to a woman and sing. If I had to match her pitch, it felt at first like I was singing really, really high, but she was singing low! It took me a while to learn to feel comfortable and to perceive that we were actually singing the same note.

You may have come across this if you sing in the tenor section of a community which is often mixed men and women. I often find myself as a choir leader having to give out two starting notes: one low in my range for the women (who then sing low in their range), and one at the absolute pitch, high in my range, for the men. Then the men and women end up singing exactly the same note, but often perceive it to be different!

You might also find something strange when singing harmony with a member of the opposite sex. For example, a female alto and a male tenor might sing together. In absolute terms his harmony will be below her melody, but he may well perceive it to be higher than hers. This is because he will be singing high in his range, whereas she will be singing low in hers. And vice versa for the woman. It takes a while to get used to!

The same note sounding different!

To make matters even more complicated, two people of the same gender, singing exactly the same note (i.e. identical frequency) can appear to be singing different notes! This is something to take into account when considering the blend of voices in a choir.

For example, in a female harmony trio, the woman singing the middle part can sometimes appear to be lower than the person singing the lowest part because of the quality, texture and placement of her voice. This is connected with the concept of tessitura that I mentioned in last week’s post (what part do I sing?). Although two women may be singing the same note, for one it might be slap bang in the middle of her comfortable range, whereas for another it may be at the very lowest limits of her range and be rather uncomfortable to sing. This can make the two singers sound very different, even if they are singing the same note.

What is an octave?

Some community choir leaders whose choirs don’t use written scores and who don’t assume any musical knowledge on the part of their singers, often feel the need for some shorthand to creep into their rehearsals. If everyone understands “the harmony is just a third above” or “we need to have more of a crescendo at that point”, then it can save a lot of explanation. Jargon is simply a shorthand agreed between a particular group of people, and can be very useful. However, we can’t assume that everyone knows the same shorthand terms!

Many choir leaders use the term ‘octave’ as a shorthand. Personally I find this one of the most difficult concepts to explain to non-musical folk, even though it makes things much, much easier when talking to the tenors for example! If someone is pitching in the wrong place, it’s great to be able to say “No, you need to sing an octave up” or “The women will be singing in the lower octave for this part”.

All sound, including the singing voice, is made up of sound waves. We refer to a note as being ‘high’ or ‘low’ (although when considering a piano, for example, this could equally be called ‘left’ or ‘right’) depending on how often (or frequently) the sound waves hit your ears. Technically, the higher the frequency of a note (the faster rate at which the sound waves hit your ear), the higher it sounds. Similarly, the lower the frequency, the lower the note sounds.

Frequency can be measured in terms of number of vibrations or oscillations or waves arriving per second. In music, however, we tend to refer to pitch instead of frequency, although it is actually the same thing.

Any note that is double the frequency of another is said to be one octave higher. In music, such notes seem to have such a special relationship to each other that they are given the same name. For example, a note that is an octave higher or lower than a note called ‘C ‘ is also called ‘C’. Similarly, a note that is one or more octaves higher or lower than a note called ‘B flat’ will also be called ‘B flat’.

The reason that notes an octave apart have such a special place in music is that they appear to sound like each other (which is why they are given the same name). However, this is a factor of the musical tradition that one comes from. In Corsica, for example, because of its traditional harmony singing tradition, the interval of a fifth (that is, five notes apart in whatever scale you are singing in), as well as the octave are said to be the ‘same’ note because they appear to sound the same.

I’m sure many of you will have had the experience of singing in perfect harmony with a melody only to have a momentary doubt that you are, in fact, singing the melody by mistake because they fit so well together. For a brief moment, it appears that you are singing exactly the same notes!

The octave is therefore a very difficult concept to explain to those with no musical background. I have heard myself say things in the heat of the moment like: “It’s the same note, only higher”. Which is, of course, nonsense when you think about it!

The perfect match

So next time you are teaching or being taught by a member of the opposite sex and are finding things problematic, take a moment and think about where you might pitch your voice to get the ‘right’ note. Don’t make assumptions. My own choir are now used to being led by a man and pretty much all of the women make automatic adjustments (though there can be the occasional difficulty with the tenor part!). So when Michael Harper, a counter tenor, came to run a workshop and sang every part at the correct pitch, it momentarily freaked the tops out who were trying to sing somewhere in the stratosphere before they realised what was happening!

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Everybody has a place in the choir

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:18:00 +0000

… and there is a place in a choir somewhere for everybody.

Frank joined our choir a while back. He hadn’t sung for ages, but gave it his best shot for a couple of sessions. Then he wrote to me saying that although he’d had a great time and thought the choir was fantastic, he wasn’t going to continue because he couldn’t always produce a note accurately and he felt that he didn’t have much of a vocal range.

I wrote back to say that pretty much everyone else in the choir was in the same boat!

This led me to think about the experiences that people have when they first join a choir and the assumptions that they bring with them.

Will they have me?

Most people who have not trained or had singing lessons think they can’t sing. I tell people that I earn my living by running choirs and singing workshops based on the principle that everyone can sing, but they are quick to let me know that they are the exception and can’t sing a note.

This is the first obstacle for someone joining a choir. They assume that everyone in the choir can sing much better than them, and that they need to be of a particularly high standard to even have the gall to think of joining such an auspicious group of people as a CHOIR. Of course, there are professional choirs out there, and choirs who audition their members. But there are also many, many community choirs, non-performance choirs, open-access choirs, choirs who sing for fun, choirs who don’t even call themselves ‘choirs’, and so on.

There will be a choir out there for you who will embrace you with open arms and whose members’ singing skills are pretty much the same as yours. Do your homework first though. If you are really inexperienced and under confident as a singer, then probably not a good idea to audition for the local professional ensemble! Start small.

If at first you don’t succeed …

You may join a choir and not feel at home. Every choir has its own ‘flavour’ and group dynamic. The repertoire may not interest you; they might move at a learning pace that’s just too fast (or too slow) for you; they may insist on using written music and you may not be a sight-reader; they might be a performing choir whereas you just want to have fun. Whatever the reason, the first choir you join may not suit you. It’s nothing to do with you, just the wrong choir. Try another one until you feel comfortable.

New kid on the block

When you first join a choir you will assume that everybody knows more than you and they are much better singers than you. This is partly because the people already in the choir are used to the musical director’s strange ways. They’ve indulged him over time and are familiar with his foibles and teaching methods. They are aware of the kinds of songs he introduces. They are used to the warm up and way in which the choir stand (or sit) to rehearse. This is simply a matter of unfamiliarity so you’ll need to give it a few weeks before you begin to feel comfortable.

However … there is a very good chance that everybody else in the choir feels as under-confident as you! Even though they’ve been in the choir for a few years, many members will feel that they have limited range, difficulty learning the tune (and the words), are not as good a singer as the other people in their part, don’t have a particularly beautiful voice, etc. etc. But what they may be good at (and this is something I try to drum into my own choir) is to behave as if they are great singers and know what they’re doing. Just by pretending like this, they come across as confident, able singers with not a care in the world. You will learn this trick too!

I always make a point of starting each new term with completely new songs that nobody in the choir will know. I point this out to any new members, so the first few weeks are a completely level playing field and everybody is in the same boat. This helps newcomers to relax a little and discover that even the old hands take a while to learn new material and stumble badly sometimes!

Will you be my friend?

It can be a little daunting joining a large group of people who already know each other. It can appear at first glance to be a bit cliquey and hard to break into the group. Yes, it’s true that many choir members have become friends, but it’s also true that the basses, for example, won’t know all the altos, and vice versa. People also look cliquey in each part because they’re often worried about getting things wrong so cling together for mutual support!

Every choir that I’ve ever run is super-friendly and make new members welcome very quickly. They’ve been there themselves at some point in the past. A choir is all about team work, especially if it’s a harmony-singing choir. So no new individual is a threat, rather they are extra support to existing members. And who knows, maybe the new member can pick things up quickly and help the others!

What part do I sing?

Many people without a musical background don’t understand the notion of ‘parts’, certainly won’t know technical terms like ‘second soprano’, and probably won’t know where their vocal comfort zone is. When someone joins the choir I ask them whether they like to sing high or low. Even that can be confusing. How high is ‘high’? So I usually demonstrate the range for each part of a new song to help people decide.

With a community choir, none of the parts are that high, and none of the parts are that low. Probably nobody in a community choir is a true ‘soprano’ or a true ‘bass’. Most of the men will be baritones (i.e. sitting uncomfortably between the tenor part and the bass part, not truly belonging to either), and most of the women will be altos (although maybe not able to reach either the highest or the lowest alto notes). So in a community choir, the arrangements are usually for an alto/ baritone choir. The tenor part is not too high for the men, yet not too low for any women who want to sing it. In fact, pretty much everyone in the choir could sing any part.

There is, however, a difference between the range of notes you can sing (how high or low you can go) and where you are most comfortable in singing. This latter has a technical name: tessitura. It’s the range of notes that suit your voice, it’s where your particular type of voice feels most comfortable and shows itself off to its best. That is not necessarily the same as the total range of notes that you are able to sing on a good day, but may be more limited.

Melanie in our choir always sings in the tops. She sings in her ‘head voice’ (that is her voice which sounds high and light like a girl in the school choir), although not terribly well to be honest. When we do the warm ups it turns out that Melanie has a wonderful low voice hiding in there. She can hit very low notes in her ‘chest voice’ (the voice that we use in everyday speaking) and they sound wonderful: warm, dark and resonant. That is her natural tessitura. But Melanie doesn’t like singing there! For probably cultural and historical reasons she feels that ‘proper’ singing is when she sing high in her head voice. Ah, well, we’ll just have to let that one go!

Nobody will miss me if I don’t turn up

A choir can be a very large group of people. Even the smallest choirs usually have a more than 20 singers, so with a three-part harmony song, there might be six other singers in the part with you. So who will notice if you don’t show up for a concert? You’re only one voice, and not a very good one at that. Nobody will miss you, six voices sound pretty much the same as seven.

But what if everybody in the choir thought like that? What if the other six singers in your part didn’t turn up because “nobody will miss them”? Then we don’t have a choir! A choir is an organism that is defined entirely by the singers who make it up. Everyone is as vitally important as everyone else. If the singers don’t come, then the choir just doesn’t exist. Every individual’s voice makes a vital contribution to the overall sound of the choir. If it were a different bunch of singers, it would sound different. You do count, you are important, so please turn up to the concert!!!

But nobody here looks like me!

Liz Garnett made a comment on a post called Singing across the age divide that has stayed with me. She said:

“I think a lot of choir membership is driven by people turning up and seeing if the other people in the room look like them.”

Imagine you are a bloke and turn up to find a room full of women, or you are a black woman walking into a sea of white faces, or a 20-year-old surrounded by 50-somethings. It doesn’t feel like your tribe. Maybe you don’t belong. Maybe you shouldn’t be here.

Choirs in general, and community choirs in particular, are egalitarian places. Everybody is equal in status. No one singer is more important than any other. It is an inclusive group of people where you are judged solely by your willingness to join in. So, in theory, there are no barriers of race, age, gender, disability, nationality, language, etc. Oh, to have a truly multicultural choir which spans the generations!

The reality is though that any given choir often reflects the demographics of the community that it is based in. But even then, it may not be a true reflection. My first choir was based in the Midlands of the UK, a region well-known for its multicultural make-up, in a city which has a huge range of ages, races and nationalities. But the choir ended up being predominantly middle-aged white women!

So if you walk into the choir and there is nobody there like you, then see yourself as a pioneer who is helping to mix things up. You will be warmly welcomed and soon made to feel at home. Then one day, when another person similar to yourself arrives at the choir, they will see a familiar face and perhaps be more inclined to stay.

If you stay, you might never leave!

After I wrote back to Frank, he decided to give the choir another go, and now he is firmly ensconced as a bass. If he’s anything like the other members we’ve had over the years, he may well be in the choir forever! I was glad that I’d challenged his assumptions, and I think he was quite surprised to discover that most of the other choir members had the same misgiving as him, even though they’d been members for some time.

So don’t let your assumptions and pre-conceptions put you off or you’ll be missing out on something wonderful. Get out there and join a choir!

go to Chris Rowbury's website

Preparing to sing: hip wiggling and knee bending

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 10:32:00 +0000

This is a guest post from Alexander Massey of Authentic Voice™. It originally appeared in the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network newsletter in June 2005. This post is the last in the series Preparing to sing.

Chris has asked me to explain why knee bending, funny walks, and various hip wiggling and belly dancing movements can help ‘ground’ our voices, and create stronger breath support and a more centred tone. Okay, here goes with a brief (-ish!) explanation.

When we breathe in, our diaphragm (roughly horizontal dome-like sheet of muscle below the lungs, and above the viscera, guts, etc.) muscularly contracts downwards; the muscles of the ribs also make the rib cage expand; through these two actions, the lungs expand and air comes in. As the diaphragm contracts downwards, the guts and contents of the abdominal cavity are compressed, and move outwards (front, sides, and lower back). Because our front below the rib cage moves outwards, many mistakenly believe this to be the diaphragm moving outwards; it isn’t; the diaphragm can only move up and down, not in and out, so we can never see it move, however athletic we are with our breathing.

In normal everyday breathing, an out breath happens when the diaphragm simply relaxes, and springs back upwards, and the rib cage closes a little through a similar ‘elastic recoil’. Abdominal and pelvic muscles play little or no part in this.

For singing, we need to make the out breath a more ‘muscular’ event, so that the air pressure at the vocal cords is sufficient to sustain their vibration when they are flexed for vocalising. The diaphragm itself can only contract downwards; it cannot ‘push’ upwards of itself. This is why we need to use extra muscles to act upwards on the diaphragm from below. This is where the abdominal and pelvic muscles come in. In singing, abdominal muscles squeeze the viscera inwards, which in turn pushes the diaphragm upwards. If we didn’t do this, no air would come out, as the coming of together of the vocal cords would prevent its exit.

So why all the wiggling? Well, the majority of people have lazy bodies and lazy breathing; their posture tends to be slack, so that the spine curves in at the base, and the abdominal muscles are virtually ‘switched off’. When these people try to sing, they push with their rib cage, and muscles just below the sternum, but never engage the deep breath support. The result is a forced, inflexible sound, sometimes hard, sometimes breathy or thinner than it could be, limited in range, and it is difficult to sustain notes for very long. This method of breathing produces what Meribeth Bunch (in her excellent book Dynamics of the Singing Voice) calls a ‘false sense of fullness’; the singer feels upper body strength and energy, and feels full of air, with an illusory sense of ‘support’, and then is puzzled why the voice feels stiff, and the air supply doesn’t seem to last very long.

To wake up the abdominal muscles (and the muscles of the pelvic floor that also help deep breath support) - so they start doing what the singer needs them to do - the simplest thing is to bend the knees, keeping the spine as lengthened and upright as possible. If you try this, you will notice immediately how the muscles just above the groin become ‘toned’, and start supporting the lower back. Breathing is automatically deepened, and exhalation becomes more muscular. Silly walks (e.g. Frankie Armstrong’s chains of ‘elephants’) will help achieve the same thing. Either rocking the pelvis, or rotating it during a knee bend will ensure that the abdominal muscles remain accessible for ‘singer’s breathing’. If the muscles are moving, then they can’t lock. (If they lock, even if we bend our knees, we tend to revert to stiffer, upper body breathing.)

Another couple of handy tips:

put one foot up on the wall in front of you, and sing - see if it you feel a greater vocal centredness;
sit on a dining room chair facing its back, and press your thighs against the side, and sing.

So, bending your knees, and wiggling your hips helps engage the abdominal muscles needed for efficient ‘singer’s breathing’. The beauty of it is that when we do such exercises, the voice starts working more efficiently quite automatically, and we don’t have to get so self-conscious and tense about trying to work out the ‘right’ way to breathe.

I think it is helpful to distinguish the word ‘natural’ from ‘habitual’. The mechanisms I explain here may feel odd when people first try them – and can take weeks or months to absorb into our technique. That does not mean that they are ‘wrong’ or ‘unnatural’, but simply unfamiliar. What we do habitually, we often call natural, though it is not necessarily the healthiest or most efficient way of doing things. Because we live such unaware lives a lot of the time, and have such entrenched inefficient habits, we have to learn afresh how to do what is most natural - it does not come automatically. Singing IS simple, but sometimes we have to work hard to reach that simplicity.

The good news is that more efficient and healthier vocal, postural and breathing habits can be learned, given a clear understanding of the principles, appropriate application, and perseverance. Now in my 23^rd year of professional singing and teaching, I still take myself back to these basic principles, and use them in my own warming up, and monitoring myself in rehearsal and performance. Whatever our level of experience, and whatever the context in which we sing, I believe we always need to attend to the basics of what makes any voice work well; we are all subject to the same natural anatomical laws! Observe these laws, and our voices should survive well into our 70s (at least) as serviceable singing instruments, giving pleasure to ourselves and others.

go to Chris Rowbury's website

Preparing to sing: physical and vocal warm up ideas for choirs

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:53:00 +0000

Now that we know warming up for singing is a good idea (Preparing to sing: why bother?), and now that we’ve considered what kind of things we might do in a warm up (Preparing to sing: what should a warm up consist of?), I’d like to turn to some specific exercises that you might use in a physical and vocal warm up for a choir.

I’m not going to simply give a list of exercises because we’d be here all week, and I don’t want to give away my best ideas! Also, it’s hard to describe accurately some of the physical exercises (and I don’t have a video camera yet!). What I think will be more valuable is to look in detail at a few exercises that I’ve developed over time to show you how you might include all the essential elements of a good warm up (engaging the breath; adding sound; involving the body; using the imagination; working with others) into a single exercise by developing, combining and extending simple exercises. I’d love to hear from you if you have any good examples of exercises like this.

Reach for the sky!

Let’s start with a simple stretching exercise. We’ll ask people to stretch both arms up to reach for the sky. Simple, but a bit boring and people can easily be lazy and not really stretch. So ask them to imagine that they’re reaching for something: a jar high up on a shelf; a golden ball of incredible value that keeps moving just out of reach; a magic apple. You can stretch each side of the body (loosening the rib cage) by using each arm in turn.

To make the exercise more vivid you could tell people that they’re climbing hand over hand up a rope ladder. Perhaps they’re in an Indiana Jones movie trying to escape from the baddies. To make sure the stretch is full and extended, get them to hang on to the rung they’re on, look down to see if the baddies are still following, then reach up for the rung above that one. By getting them to look up at where they’re going, and down at the baddies, they are also beginning to flex their neck and release tension.

You could extend the stretch horizontally by reaching out to a partner (you’re on the polar ice cap and a crack has appeared. You begin to float away from each other and try to reach out to pull them onto your piece of ice). You could combine this with sound by sending a sustained ‘A’ vowel sound across the space to your partner. The more you reach out, the longer you can sustain your note.

Get those hips working!

Next week will be a guest post from Alexander Massey looking at why we do all these hip wiggling and knee bending exercises. Simply put, these kinds of exercise can help to ground our voices, create greater breath support and a more centred tone. Alexander will offer an explanation of how and why this works.

One of these hip wiggling exercises is to make a smooth, large circle with the hips. Many people feel a little self-conscious when they first do this because we Brits don’t really like much to do with bump and grind, especially when it involves the groin area! So I usually start with a joke around this and point out that it will make people better salsa dancers.

To help people engage with their hips, I might start with the idea that you’re in a tight huddle (jumble sale? football crowd?) and you need to bump the people either side of you because they’re getting a little too close. That deals with the side to side hip motion. Then I might get people to imagine that their pelvis is a big bowl full of spaghetti and if they tilt it forward (which will mean their bum will stick out) the spaghetti will all slip out onto the floor, whereas if they tilt it back up (so their belly button will push forward), they will keep it in. That will help people find the front and back positions of their pelvis.

Get people to slowly hit all these points that we’ve found with their hips: right side, front, left side, back and gradually make it smoother and larger. Use imagery like stirring porridge or soup. Make sure people’s knees are bent. Point out that the torso doesn’t need to move (the best salsa dancers have a completely still upper body). Ask them to imagine they are in a sweet shop at the counter. The shop keeper won’t know what they’re doing with their hips because their upper body is still. Only by the twinkle in their eye will anyone know what’s going on below!

You can take this limbering up aspect further by, for example, asking people to spin a record with their hand or stir soup in the opposite direction to their hips at the same time (a good exercise for the brain and co-ordination!). You could ask people to do something with their arms such as raising and lowering them slowly. Or to get them to roll their shoulders at the same time (creates a strange looking dance!). The possibilities are endless.

You can introduce voice by asking them to vocalise on a low ‘O’ vowel sound, as if it’s coming from the bowels of the earth. Slowly raise the pitch whilst keeping the sound rooted in the belly. Get them to imagine they’re carrying out some ancient healing sound ritual and choose someone else in the room to send this healing energy to. Pass the sound between pairs of people as a call and response. You can introduce ear-training at this stage by asking people to send the sound back to their partner a semi-tone higher each time. And so on.

Buzz those lips!

Gentle humming on a fairly low note is a common way to begin to engage the voice. Ask people to focus on trying to get their lips to buzz/ vibrate/ itch so that the sound is forward and not stuck in the throat. Extend this by gently sliding down to their lowest note until all their breath is gone (helps with breath control). Gradually cheat the topmost note upwards. Ask them to go down with their body as the notes slide down. Then reverse this: still sliding down the scale, but ask people to move from a collapsed body to an upright, more beautiful, erect position, full of confidence and charisma.

Introduce scales whilst warming up the voice. Ask people to slide from the root note up and down a third. Visit all the micro notes in between. Working as a group (by all breathing at the same time), repeat the exercise but move a semi-tone up each time without anyone leading or conducting.

Extend this by doing three slides one after the other: root to third and back down; root to fifth; a whole octave. To make things less technical and to engage the body, ask people to express the rise and fall of the note with their bodies. Use visual imagination to picture an object or animal that is expanding and contracting. Then ask them to perform the movements in relation to another person in the room (different person each time). Combine the whole exercise: three slides plus movement at the same time as everyone else in the room (nobody leading), then up a semi-tone each time and repeat.

Up scale, down scale

A simple vocalise on ‘la’. Short, staccato on the way up, smooth legato on the way down:

Gradually move the exercise up a semi-tone each time. As the top note gets higher, ask people to drop their body down for the top note (stops people from extending up to reach for high notes). Emphasise the staccato and legato. Then begin to emphasise the pause for breath at the top just before smoothly coming down.

Extend this by asking the whole room to pause at the top together for a dramatic moment (don’t conduct them). Hold their breath at this moment of suspension, then all come down at the same time. To add interest and to emphasise the staccato notes, ask people to strike a clear and separate pose for each note on the way up, and then (after the dramatic pause) to ‘dance’ the smooth descent afterwards.

Extend this by asking the whole group to work as one and to repeat the whole exercise but a semi-tone up each time. Develop this by asking people to move (quickly!) to face a different direction before each repeat of the exercise. You will then have the whole group working off each other, breathing together and tuning in to each other.

Beginners mind

If you repeat exercises often, there is a danger that people will stop engaging fully with them due to their familiarity. It’s possible to add a different focus of attention each time. For example, in the exercise above you can ask people to sing in a very posh accent in order to make the vowel sound clearer and blend better. Or you could focus on changing volume dynamics as you go up and down the scale.

Or you can add new visualisation ideas, but you could also point out to people that they have a choice. They can either go through the motions, or get the full benefit of an exercise by approaching it as if it were the first time. This enables people (if they choose to!) to learn more about their own bodies, habits and voices over time. I’ve written about this Zen notion of beginner’s mind in a previous post (Blame it on the weather).

I hope that's given you some thoughts for how you might begin to combine and extend familiar exercises, bring to life well-trod warm ups, and to bring in all essential aspects of a warm up into each and every exercise. Do leave a comment and let me know if you have any good examples of warm up exercises that use these principles.

Next week is a guest post from Alexander Massey who will explain why we need to do all this hip wiggling and knee bending in our warm ups.

go to Chris Rowbury's website

Preparing to sing: what should a warm up consist of?

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 12:36:00 +0000

OK, we’ve looked at why we should bother to take the time to prepare to sing (Preparing to sing: why bother?), but what will that preparation consist of? This week I’m going to break down the warm up into areas that I think should always be covered. I will look at some specific exercises, next week, but for now I’ll just consider the kinds of thing we might want to cover.

Dividing the warm up into different areas like this is very artificial and I’m doing it simply as a way of looking at the elements in more detail. The ideal warm up exercise will include all the different elements that I mention!

Always keep in mind

Whilst we design our warm up, invent new exercises, or get ideas from others, we must always keep in mind, at every point of the warm up, the following:

engage the breath
Even if you’re doing a simple stretching exercise, it is important to engage the breath. It begins to help people connect body and breath, it helps to extend and deepen any stretches, it encourages people to breathe correctly, it helps an awareness of your breathing (many people hold their breath whilst stretching!),

add sound
Resist the temptation to separate the physical exercises from the vocal exercises by bringing sound in at every opportunity. It’s really easy to add simply humming to many physical stretching exercises. Not only does this begin to warm the voice up, but it engages the breath automatically (see above), and connects voice with body.

involve the body
This is the converse to the point above. Just because we are doing vocal exercises doesn’t mean that our bodies cease to exist. Find ways of involving the body by moving in space, by focusing on different parts of the body (e.g. “imagine the sound coming from your belly”), mirroring breathing with body movements, reminding people of correct posture, etc.

use imagination
Yes, it is possible to do a complete warm up in a very dry, technical way, but by engaging the imagination it allows exercises to become more vivid, vibrant and fun. It helps people engage and focus rather than just going through the motions. It helps extend exercises and allows people to go into them more fully. It can also act as a distraction (i.e. different focus of attention) to allow the body and breath to just do what it does naturally rather than forcing it to happen.

work with others
In a choir you are always working with and off other people. It’s OK to have points in the warm up where people are inward looking or focusing on themselves, but don’t fall into the trap of having a room full of individual exercisers. It’s really easy to bring people’s focus onto the other people in the room whilst doing a simple exercise. This is important because they will need to be aware of other singers when singing together, but also they need to be aware of the audience when performing. In the warm up you can develop the ability to be focusing on several different things at once.

develop/ combine
It’s rather boring and limited simply to do a series of separate exercises. To make things richer and more fun, always be thinking of ways you can develop a particular exercise (“how can I make it better/ deeper/ more interesting/ more useful?”) or ways of combining several exercises together. This will help keep the warm ups fun and challenging and also help people to be able to do several things at once.

An artificial division

For the purposes of this post only, I want to divide the elements of a typical warm up into three areas: body, voice, mind. They are not, of course, separate, and as I stated at the beginning, the ideal exercise should involve all of these.

As I mentioned last week (3. connect body, breath, voice), all too often we compartmentalise and separate parts of ourselves which should actually be working together all the time. Every single thing we do – whether preparing to sing, or singing itself – should engage mind, body, and voice.

Within each division, here are the different areas that I believe should be covered in any and every warm up.

Body (physical/ relaxation/ flexibility exercises)

To wake up, loosen muscles, release tension, improve posture, get rid of bad habits, extend flexibility, reduce fatigue, develop self-awareness.

stretch/ reach
Stretch up, sideways, cat stretch (arch the back), arms apart

twist/ bend
Twist the torso, bend over and roll up, lean sideways from the waist

shake/ bounce
Act like a dog, shake off water, bounce on heels, shake the whole body

dance/ walk
Moving in space, engaging the whole body, walking action with swinging arms

rhythm/ timing
Moving in fixed beats, stepping, clapping, unusual time signatures

head/ neck/ shoulders
Tilting, dropping, leaning, lifting, shrugging, rolling

face/ mouth/ tongue
Opening, scrunching, chewing, massaging, drawing shapes with tongue

pelvis/ diaphragm
Hip wriggling, drawing circles, tilting, figure of eight

manipulation (with partner/ s)
Shoulder massage, arm pulling, shaking shoulders

relaxation/ fluidity/ calmness
Correct singing posture, being seaweed, slow motion

Voice (vocal/ breathing exercises)

To engage the vocal folds, release tension, improve muscle co-ordination, develop listening skills, avoid vocal damage, gain control.

engaging the voice
humming, sirens, croaking, soft vowel sounds

breath control/ support
blowing candles, “sh” and “ha”sounds, laughing, pulling spaghetti from mouth

range
vocal slides, simple melodies up and down the scale, rising in semitones

melody/ intervals/ scales
call and response, scales, simple tunes, interval training

pitching/ tuning
call and response, pitch matching, drones

harmony/ singing with others
simple triads, drones, rounds

articulation/ vowels
body centres, pronunciation, blend, tongue twisters

Mind (awareness of self and others)

To be present, develop awareness of your own body and voice, work effectively with others, attend to the conductor, perform better.

focus/ concentration
being in the moment, focus on self, awareness of others, focus of attention, relaxation

working as a team
group exercises, stopping and starting, working without a conductor, selling the song

Next week I will look at some physical and vocal warm up ideas for choirs by considering a few specific examples of how you might develop and extend a particular warm up exercise. Do please leave a comment if you think I’ve missed out something important!

go to Chris Rowbury's website

Preparing to sing: why bother?

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 12:22:00 +0000

I’m often asked for ideas for vocal and physical warm ups for choirs. I’m also always on the lookout for new ideas for my own choir and singing workshops. I can get bored quite quickly doing the same old exercises, and so can the singers I’m working with.

I usually do around 10 – 15 minutes of warm up stuff with my choir. This includes vocal development work since we meet each week and I can slowly build on work from one session to the next. If I’m tailoring a warm up to a specific song, or difficulty that the choir is having, then the warm up might be longer. In a one-off workshop I may do a little longer, depending on the circumstances.

No matter how long the warm up is, I can be sure of the following:

some people will think the warm up is too long, while others will think it’s not long enough;
some people will think it’s a waste of time, while some will think it’s an invaluable and important part of being in the choir;
some people will love one particular exercise, while others will simply hate it.

So you can’t win whatever you do!

Next week I’ll be looking at what a warm up should (in my opinion) consist of, but this week I want to stand back and consider why we do a warm up at all. In some cultures and contexts, there is no physical or vocal warm up at all!

I was lucky enough in 1994 to work in Cardiff for a whole week with two amazing Georgian singers and ethnomusicologists: Edisher Garakanidze and Joseph Jordania. I remember on perhaps the second day of singing, one of our group asked Edisher if we could do some kind of stretching and vocal warm up before we started. He was rather bemused but let us go ahead. Someone led us through a typical physical and vocal limber up session lasting 5 or 10 minutes whilst Edisher watched with increasing amusement. He indulged us and then we just carried on with the singing.

It made me realise that in a culture where people sing all the time, every day, or in a profession or context where you sing regularly, then your voice is pretty much ‘warmed up’ all the time, and if you have sufficient body awareness, you will be loose, relaxed and limbered up in any case. But working with ‘civilians’ who maybe sing in a choir just once a week, or who come to a singing workshop every few months, then a warm up is important and necessary.

As a singer, perhaps this post will give you an insight into why we, as choir leaders, make you do all this stuff at the beginning of a session. As a choir leader, you might want to remind your singers every now and then that there are good reasons behind the various physical contortions and strange warbling noises you make them to do!

These are elements that I believe need to be considered when preparing to sing and designing a warm up. I’m sure there are plenty that I’ve missed and would love it if you would add a comment and let me know what you think.

transition from the everyday
Many choirs are run on weekday evenings and their members have usually come from a hard day’s work, fixing a quick supper, dropping the kids off to their ballet class, driving in the cold rain, forgetting to bring their song lyrics, etc. etc. The atmosphere we are trying to create is one of relaxed informality, of focus and concentration, of silliness and imagination, of creativity and beauty, of timelessness and joy. Most of these elements are missing from our everyday lives, so we have to allow a period of transition for people to settle into a different world: a world of music-making and collaboration.

relax and release tension
Having sat all day at a PC, driven for half an hour, and rushed to get to choir on time, it’s no wonder people are rather tense and a little stressed. Their shoulders are up by their ears, their pelvises are locked, their jaws are clenched, their brows furrowed. We need to coax and persuade people to relax, release, stretch, let go and be free in their bodies (and minds!).

connect body, breath, voice
It’s so easy for us to compartmentalise in our everyday life: now we’re at the gym, now we’re sitting at our desk, now we’re giving a presentation to our colleagues, now we’re shouting at our kids, now we’re swimming in our lunch hour. When I use to teach at drama school (and you’d think performing arts students would know better!), the students would either be doing a dance class or a singing class. You could see their demeanour change as they walked from class to class. They didn’t need their body in the singing class, and they didn’t need their voice in the dance class.
We need to re-connect these three vital components of singing and point out how they are inextricably linked. Gone are the days of the clenched buttocks, feet in second position and formally held hands of the posh recital. We need to get back to the cotton fields, the chain gangs and the weaving looms and sing with our bodies, breathe with our imagination, and dance with our mouths.
engage imagination and creativity
If we just go through the motions of familiar technical exercises it soon gets boring and also we don’t really put ourselves fully into the work. However, if we can engage our imaginations, pretend we’re in a magic world, have reasons for doing things, be playful and creative, then the work comes alive and we have fun. We become totally engaged in the exercises and get the maximum benefit from them. Rather than asking someone to simply stretch upwards, ask them to reach for the stars. Rather than asking for short, sharp breaths from the belly, ask them to pretend to be a steam train.

hone listening skills
We have become a visual society. We are constantly bombarded with visual imagery through advertising, TV, cinema, the internet, etc. There is such a cacophony of noise in our everyday lives that we start to filter it out in order to cope. One way of doing this it to stuff buds into our ears and listen to music. But then we tend to zone out and not notice things happening around us.
In order to sing together, especially in harmony, we need to re-connect with the world of sound, re-engage with our ears, hone our listening skills. We need to hear our own voices to realise if we are singing at the right pitch. We need to hear the other harmonies so we know if our part is fitting in correctly. We need to hear the whole song in order to make sure we have the rhythm right. And we need to become aware if we’re chatting too much or not listening to the choir leader!
develop self-awareness
This is a tricky, but vital one! I really don’t know how to do this when working in large groups. To help people develop a strong sense of self-awareness (“is my chin jutting out?”, “am I on the right note?”, “am I stepping in the same rhythm as everyone else?”) you really need to give people individual feedback (“you’re jutting your chin out again John!”, “no, you’re slightly flat there”, “did you realise that you’re starting off with your left foot and not your right?”). That’s not possible in a room of 60 people that you’re trying to shape into a choir! I trust that by coming every week and doing the warm up, people’s self-awareness will improve naturally – but maybe I’m deluding myself!

increase confidence, lose inhibitions
It can be a very scary thing, especially for new choir members, to be in a large group and to think you’re the only one having difficulties. It’s no good if everyone thinks they can’t ‘sing’ very well because then they’ll all sing quietly and we won’t ever know if the song is coming out right! People need to be encouraged to let go and to sing out, even if they think it’s ‘wrong’. I try to persuade people to go for it, and if they make a mistake whilst learning, then make a BIG mistake. In this way you can hear where you’ve gone wrong and correct it.
Many people don’t like being in that vague, eggy state where you’re not in control and the song is not yet on its feet. Everyone is struggling, it doesn’t sound very good, and you’re having trouble getting those notes right. This is a necessary part of the process of learning a song. It will feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but we need people to soldier on regardless and trust the process. We need confident singers (who are behaving as if they know what they’re doing – that’s all that’s needed!) who have no inhibitions or worries about looking silly (we’re all in the same boat) or getting things ‘wrong’ (it may just be a ‘different’ harmony!).
improve pitching and vocal range using a centred, healthy voice
Once people have left behind their everyday life and confidently entered a relaxed, creative space, then we can get down to the business of singing! Every session we need to work on developing people’s ability to sing accurately on pitch and to help them develop and extend their own personal vocal range (even if it’s only a few notes), whilst all the time ensuring that their voice comes from the right place.

develop sense of timing and rhythm
In British culture, this is perhaps one of the hardest challenges! Especially if we are learning songs from the ‘world music’ repertoire, e.g. from Africa or the Balkans. Ours is predominantly a culture where music is melodic rather than rhythmic. Our songs, if danceable at all, tend to be in strict 4/4 or 3/4 time. In our warm up sessions we can practice off beats, all coming in at the same time, strange dances to 7/8 beats, clapping in time, stepping in time, and so on. This will all feed back into those songs that have a rhythmic basis, it will also help the choir engage their bodies with their voices.

awareness of working with others
We can always stay at home and sing ballads on our own, but these people have chosen to come out to sing with others. Even when singing in unison, we need to be conscious of everyone else in the choir in order to sing at the same time, to get be singing the same melody and to articulate the vowels similarly to enable vocal blending. In harmony singing this is even more important. There is a tendency when running warm ups to simply give out a series of individual exercises, but there should be a way of gradually helping people become aware of the rest of the choir and to introduce exercises that help people work with and off others.

And all this to be done with laughter in a fun, non-judgmental way!

Next week I will be looking at the individual components of what constitutes a warm up, and the week after that I will cover a few specific physical and vocal warm up exercises.

I’d love to hear from you and your own experiences. What kind of warm ups do you do? Do you find warm ups helpful? What are the best kinds of warm ups? Do leave a comment!

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How to teach (and learn) a song by ear

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:21:00 +0000

the oral tradition

For thousands of years all over the world people have sung — to express joy, celebration and grief, to accompany work and devotion, to aid healing. People sung before writing was invented and before musical notation developed. People continue to sing in cultures where there is no written language. People were singing complex unaccompanied harmonies long before Western classical music evolved. Singing is a natural, joyous activity which anybody can do any time.

Long ago, all cultures were oral cultures: there were no books, no writing, no advertisements, no TV. All stories, songs, information, history, secrets, gossip, news, facts were passed on by word of mouth. From their birth babies would be exposed to the same old songs time and time again. They would become familiar with the sounds, feeling and context of the music long before they understood the lyrics or remembered the melodies. But slowly and surely they would begin to join in, and very soon they would know all the songs inside out. It was a very natural, but long drawn out process. Simply put: it was rote learning by repetition.

teaching by ear

When teaching a song by ear, you are trying to short-circuit this long process and compress it into a relatively few hours. So you need to be clear, precise and accurate whilst maintaining an atmosphere of concentration, relaxation and fun. Yes, people are drilling (like when you learn your times tables), but you need to make it a pleasure!

In this post, I’m assuming that you’ll be teaching a song in parts, i.e. with different harmonies, and that it will be unaccompanied, i.e. with no piano or recorded backing. I’m going to cover everything that I think is important, but not all of it will apply to you as everyone will be at a different stage and each group will have different abilities. So excuse me if you think I’m sometimes teaching my grandmother to suck eggs!

find your starting notes

Before you even start to teach a song, make sure your arrangement is within the range of the particular group you’re teaching it to. Then ensure that you have the starting notes for each part at hand (see: start as you mean to carry on). How will you find them? Make sure you have a piano or pitch pipes or a portable keyboard or a tuning fork or whatever else you need. There’s nothing worse for singers’ confidence if you pick a note out of the air and get the wrong one!

who starts?

There might be four or more parts to a song. Which is the best part to start with? It’s not necessarily the tune! If the group aren’t familiar with the song beforehand, then all the parts seem like the tune to them. Often the bass part is useful first as it anchors the song’s harmonies and/ or rhythm. Or perhaps you might start with the main tune and teach everybody so that they get all a sense of the song and its timing.

call and response

Basically teaching a song by ear is call and response. You sing out a line and the choir sing it back to you. The easiest songs to teach then are those which are call and response in any case. Many African songs fit this bill.

One thing that I hadn’t really thought through when I started my first choir way back when, was that I would have to sing solo in front of a group of people! This is something you’ll have to get used to as you’ll need to sing confidently and accurately whilst teaching. It will come in time, so if you are nervous, start with easy songs.

breaking the song into small chunks

One of the worst things you can do is to teach, say, the whole of the Alto part in one go, especially if it’s quite a long song. The other parts will get bored, lose concentration, and even worse, get the Alto part so solidly in their heads that when it comes to learning their own part, they’ll get very confused!

So you’ll need to break the song down into short, manageable chunks. Sometimes it is quite obvious where these chunks are. They often coincide with breathing points. But at other times, there is no obvious break, so you may not stop at a natural pause, but in the middle of a run. In this case, you will have to overlap the next chunk when you come to it so the join is made clear.

By choosing small chunks, you can get the harmonies up and running in a very short space of time. People will begin to feel they are all part of the song as it builds and they will get more satisfaction and fulfilment. Parts won’t get bored or tired hanging around. People will become familiar with the nature of the harmonies more quickly.

If you do have to teach a fairly long chunk to one part, then get the other parts to either hum their own harmony quietly at the same time or, if you’ve not come to their part yet, they can speak the words in rhythm quietly to get familiar with how they fit in. This will help stop the inevitable chit chat that can occur while teaching!

using hand signals

Not everyone learns in the same way. We have become a very visual culture and people are less accustomed to listening to things attentively. In which case, some people might initially find it hard to follow what you’re singing. It is useful to accompany your own singing with some kind of visual aid (no, not a musical score!).

The most obvious one is hand signals. Use the flat of your hand horizontal to the floor and move it up and down to correspond to the pitch going up and down. If you want to indicate a big jump in notes, then indicate a bigger gap between one hand position and the next. If you want to indicate a very small interval, i.e. a semitone, then maybe just incline the hand slightly to show the notes are very close together. The Kodály method takes this one step further and has a different hand shape for each note.

As an aside, it’s a good habit to learn to take nothing for granted. I was once teaching a song to someone using hand signals, but he looked very puzzled. “Why are you waving your hands in the air?” he asked. “When my hand goes up it means the note is higher and when my hand goes down it means it’s lower” I replied. “What do you mean ‘higher’ and ‘lower’?” he asked. Then I realised that it is just a convention that we have adopted. If someone is used to playing the piano, then high notes are to the right and low notes to the left, not higher and lower physically!

teaching separate choir parts

Each different part may require a slightly different tactic. There are different issues for a mixed choir if it’s a man or a woman leading. If a woman is teaching a mixed choir, then she probably won’t be able to reach the bass notes. When she sings the tenor line, the men in the tenor part might end up singing too low as they perceive her to be singing low in her own range. Correspondingly, if a man sings the tenor line at pitch, he might confuse the women in the tenors who perceive him to be singing high in his own range. You’ll need to adapt accordingly and respond to the particular group you’re working with.

You’ll also need to decide which order you teach the parts in. You’ve already decided which part to begin with, but which part is it best to teach next? You might also change the order as the song is built up. You need to adapt to each particular song.

where are the words?

For some simple call and response songs, you’ll not need to hand out lyrics. There are often very few words, and in any case, you sing them first and everyone else repeats them. However, if a song has lots of words, what do you do? One option is to put the words in large format up on the wall (see: the writing’s on the wall). This helps people to look up and to see you clearly. If you hand out lyrics, there is a danger that everyone buries their head in a piece of paper and stops paying attention!

This can’t be avoided though with songs that have many verses. I often teach a song just using the first verse words, then when the parts are under their belt, I hand out the full set of lyrics. This does have its own problems though.

beyond the first verse

If you keep rehearsing the first verse of a new song, people will struggle when it comes to subsequent verses (see: words are flowing out like endless rain ...). The words will be unfamiliar and they may have difficulty fitting them to the tune. However, if you overload people with too many words when they’re first learning the song, then it may become overwhelming and too difficult.

One solution is to teach the first line of each part, say, then to practice that melody with the first line of words for every verse before moving on.

There is a similar difficulty with teaching in small chunks. As you build the song up, the first chunk ends up being sung far more times than the last chunk. That means that the ends of verses are sometimes not learnt as fully as the beginnings. One trick that I use in subsequent sessions when learning a song is to build up the song backwards. i.e. sing the last chunk first, then add the one before it and so on until the whole song is sung.

it all takes time!

Some people believe that ‘real’ singers only have to hear a melody once then they can repeat it and have ‘learnt’ the song. When I tell them that professional singers take many months before a song is really under their belt, they are often surprised. As I mentioned at the start, we are trying to short-circuit a process which would have taken several years in our small community hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago. We would have heard and rehearsed the same song many, many times as we were growing up. Now we are expected to learn a song in just a few sessions!

When someone new joins the choir, I point this out to them and tell them that we will be returning to the song we are learning for many weeks. Even when we think we have learnt it, we will run through it each week until it sits comfortably inside us without having to think too much about it. We might do it in different ways each time, try it faster or slower, do it in an operatic style, build up the parts slowly from verse to verse. The more ways we can explore the song, the more likely it is to stick.

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Taking care of ourselves as choir and workshop leaders

chris.rowbury@gmail.com (singingman) — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 15:50:00 +0000

It’s a dark January evening. It’s cold and raining and we’re snuggled up in the warm eating our supper. But choir starts in half an hour and we have a drive or a walk which will take us to a dark, draughty hall which takes an age to heat up. It’s that time of year when everyone is feeling under the weather and there are lots of colds and sniffles about. We’d much, much rather stay at home and watch telly, but work beckons.

Of course, we are some of the lucky few who actually enjoy our jobs, don’t have to work in an office and are often free to organise our time as we want. It’s one of the best jobs in the world, and when the choir rev up and you are awash with glorious harmonies, your spirits lift, and you’re glad you managed to get out of your comfy chair to brave the cold.

Yet sometimes it can feel like: give, give, give! We might have a few workshops and/ or gigs in a row which all need a lot of preparation. We are beginning to feel like a song factory, churning stuff out at a prodigious rate. We’re trapped in an endless cycle of arrange, plan and deliver. We are tired, run ragged, bereft of new ideas, not sleeping and fighting off innumerable germs picked up in all the different venues that we work in. Although we are not irreplacable, we do have an important role. If we don’t turn up to a session, there’s often nobody else to lead it. If we aren’t there to conduct the concert, it may not go ahead. We sometimes soldier on even when we should be in bed nursing a cold.

Our job is demanding and we need to look after ourselves. Here are some tips to help you keep sane and well.

make time for you

You can make time for your work and prioritise things like cooking and doing the laundry, so why can’t you carve out some time just for you (see also Why we avoid things that make us feel good)? Make a deal with yourself to find some regular time on your own. During this time find pleasurable things to do, just for you:

relaxation (this does not include watching TV which is stimulus!);
meditation (mindfulness can help with physical and emotional tensions which may arise when working);
reading;
listening to music (how often do we do that outside work?);
taking a long hot bath;
treating yourself to a regular massage (go on, it’s worth it!);
going for a walk;
socialising after choir;

value yourself

Make sure you are adequately rewarded for the work that you do. The time and energy you put in adds up to far more than just that used during a session. A one-day workshop might use up three to four days of your time and physical energy. Factor that in when setting prices and allowing for recovery days.

feed yourself

Instead of giving all the time, make sure you do some receiving. You need to feed your mind and body (see make time for you above). Go on a course or learn a new skill. This doesn’t have to be music, although professional development can feed you also.

Instead of viewing the choir as something that needs feeding all the time, walk in and expect support from the group instead.

you’re not alone

You don’t have to do everything yourself! Don’t accept sole responsibility for everything that happens in a session. Allocate jobs to section leaders. Send parts off to rehearse separately. Set up a committee. Find a friend or buddy who can point out to you when you’re getting a bit too intense or manic in a session. It’s all too easy to get swept up in the moment, but you will feel drained at the end! Find a deputy and take a week off.

Cultivate a peer group network or set of professional buddies who you can meet with or phone on a regular basis to have a good moan, swap war stories, get ideas from.

don’t take it personally!

There is always that one person who gives us a funny look during the warm up, or tuts when we get a note wrong. Suddenly our confidence collapses and we become unduly affected by a single person’s negativity. Think of them as a mirror to an area of weakness that needs development. How can you learn from them? How can you reflect it back to them?

take care of your voice

You don’t have to sing at full volume all the time, even if you’re working with a large group. If you sing quietly, people will be more attentive (see Little voice).

If your voice is tired, try making a croaking noise like an old door opening. It will relax your vocal cords. Be mindful when teaching (see meditation in make time for you above). We often have the tendency to jut our chin forward when teaching!

you are only there to teach songs

Have a buffer between you and the choir, a kind of psychic barrier. You are not responsible for their welfare, their relationships, their problems – you are just there to teach songs!

chill!

We do a warm-up at the beginning of a session, but sometimes forget to do a warm-down at the end. This can help the transition back into everyday life. It can bring you down from the high that often comes in a session and help to stop you buzzing so much that you won’t sleep later!

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From the front of the choir

Finding out about songs: don’t believe everything you read!

find a trustworthy source

chinese whispers

getting to the source

an example of song hunting

more to meaning than meets the eye

The problem with men: getting them, handling them, keeping them

men and the arts

men and singing

men and pitching

it’s not just the men!

learning to listen

male singers are for life, not just for Christmas

Read more!

From the back of the choir 2 - a typical choir session

A typical practice session with the SOAS World Music Choir

Learning songs

How do you learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before?

How do you remember all those songs??!!

But I can’t sing that high!

you may be in the wrong part

what does ‘contralto’ mean anyway?

how high is ‘high’?

how to find which part you sing

role models and ‘real’ singing

From the back of the choir 1 – first steps

SOAS World Music Choir

Music notation – do singers need it?

music notation — what is it?

chasing shadows

music is a living thing

not written in stone

inventing new notations

learning styles

notation as a security blanket

learning by ear is a different experience

the advantages of not having sheet music

when to use notation

Singing what you mean and meaning what you sing

song lyrics

words and music

song interpretation

the tyranny of text

playing with songs

not knowing what you’re singing

Stage presence for singers

introducing Tom Carter

being present or ‘stage presence’?

being in the moment and serving the song

Tom’s notion of ‘charisma’

my understanding of ‘character’

next week

Getting the best out of your choir 6: self-reflection

always rushing

condemned to repeat history

the self-aware singer

the reflective choir leader

building on success

learning from failure

end of the series

next week

Getting the best out of your choir 5: preparing for performance PART 2

take your time

the shock of the new

stand and deliver

what you feel, what they feel

on with the show!

next week

Getting the best out of your choir 4: preparing for performance PART 1

the butterfly of nerves

fear of failure

be here now

expectations and beginner’s mind

be prepared

that’s all folks!

Getting the best out of your choir 3: the moderate choir leader

the moderate

Getting the best out of your choir 2: not too gentle, not too tough

the martinet