Concentrating the Energy in Berlin

Women in Black Mar24

Sometimes you find a single overarching theme for a coaching visit encompasses a range of areas to work on that initially seem quite disparate. Having the chance to listen to the group in advance increases the chance of spotting this in time to set the agenda from the outset. Such was my experience with Women in Black in Berlin last weekend.

Their recordings from the previous week’s rehearsal revealed a chorus with a clear sense of expressive intent, bringing a lot of energy to their performance. (I learned afterwards that their previous coach, Lisa Rowbathan, had done a lot of work with them on story-telling; that this came over in the recordings as a conspicuous strength is a testimony to her effectiveness.) I arrived with the aspiration to help them harness that energy in a more focused fashion to help them realise that intent more efficiently, both so that they didn’t have to work so hard, and so that their intentions would be communicated with greater clarity.

Choral Breathing and the Quest for Perpetual Legato

I’m on record for feeling somewhat critical of the practice of choral breathing – that is, of singers in a choir managing their breathing points by breathing whenever they feel like, so long as it’s at a different time from their neighbours, and they do it in the middle of a vowel rather than shortening a syllable.

I have heard people promoting the idea in terms of vocal freedom, and actually this argument is a compelling one its favour. People are most likely to tense up and get anxious while singing when running out of breath, so if you remove that as something to worry about, they’ll sing with both greater emotional and physical freedom. I do like this rationale, though I am still concerned about the dissociation of technique from musical narrative, and the way that it actively prevents choral singing being a good training ground for solo singing and single-voice-per-part ensembles.

On the Writing of Parody Lyrics & Comedy Songs

I’ve had several conversations recently with people involved in writing comedic parodies and/or needing to update references in existing comedy songs. And in the process a few themes have emerged that I thought it worth pulling together a bit so I’ve got something useful to link to if I find myself having more such conversations.

Have enough jokes

Like the concept of Retroactive Inevitability, this is something that Roger Payne used to talk about. It’s very easy to get a brilliant idea for a parody, but end up with essentially just the one joke. For sure, having one major concept you build around is a good strategy for a coherent whole, but you also need regular laugh-points along the way.

On the stand-up comedy course I did way back when, the guide-line we were given was to make sure you never went more than 30 seconds without a punchline. Given that songs tend to be a more compact and less wordy form than stand-up, I wouldn’t be surprised if you need them more often than that in music. I tend to measure musical time in bars rather than seconds, and my feeling is at least every 16 bars, but with some at 8-bar intervals., is what you’re aiming for.

Practical Aesthetics: Questions to emerge

I’m coming back to the ideas Theo Hicks shared in his final plenary at the BABS/LABBS Directors Weekend back in January, as my first post on the subject produced some great discussion, but in a variety of different places. So I thought it worth bringing some of the points together, as people may not have seen all of each other’s interesting responses.

Michael Callahan said:

I’d be interested on an audience’s reception that is ignorant of musical aesthetics (which most audiences are).

If I understood Theo’s ideas correctly, the audience doesn’t need to be aware of any of the process behind the performance preparation, they just need to bring along their usual desire to listen to music. In much the way that listeners don’t need to know what the names of different chords are in order to feel their expressive flavour.

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