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

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

Not me - I'm still in Birmingham - but my blog post for today is enjoying a trip over to British Columbia at the invitation of Tom Metzger. Pop over to Owning the Stage to learn about Musical Performance and Flow, and if you've not been there before, have a browse around the archives too. I think you'll enjoy it.

Put twenty choral practitioners in a room and ask them about vibrato and choral singing, and you will hear twenty different opinions. And if choral singers’ voices were as inflexible as these opinions can be, nobody would ever achieve a blended section. So I approach this question from a section leader in a barbershop chorus with some trepidation:

I have a Lead who has some vibrato in her voice. Do I put her in the middle of the section or is there some way I can help her to reduce this?

I had an email this week from the Lead section leader of a ladies barbershop chorus, asking the following questions:

Hi Liz
I wonder if you can help me. Our M.D. has asked me to get my Leads to sing with warm air. Can you tell me how to do this? Also, I have a Lead who has some vibrato in her voice. Do I put her in the middle of the section or is there some way I can help her to reduce this?

Now, these weren’t questions that could be answered in just a word or two, and besides my guess is that my correspondent is not the only person in the world who’ll ever want to know the answers to them. So, I’m answering them here – warm air today, and vibrato in a couple of days when I’ve worked up the courage to tackle it. (Is there any more contentious subject in the world of choral singing?!)

The idea of singing with ‘warm air’ is really a metaphor, rather than a direct instruction.

‘Backing off’ is a standard metaphor for asking people to sing a bit quieter. In fact, it is so standard that we mostly don’t notice that it is a metaphor. But when you think about it, we don’t usually want people actually to move further away from us, we simply want them to sing in a way that gives that impression – i.e. with less volume.

But in real life of course, ‘backing off’ is also not just a spatial thing, it is also about attitude and behaviour.

This is a question that everyone from hard-core music theorists to folk chatting down the pub have had a go at over the years. You already have your own opinion on the answer. This post isn’t intended to change your mind, but simply to play with a few ideas to see how they resonate with your experience of memorable melodies.

The ideas come from a book called Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath It is a splendidly interesting book that analyses the common characteristics of memorable ideas, and anyone who writes or teaches (or advertises or attends job interviews) would find it useful. I was revisiting their list the other day and suddenly wondered if the characteristics also apply to musical ideas. This post attempts to answer that question.

I spent a happy four hours with Amersham A Cappella yesterday afternoon. They invited me down not only to coach the chorus, but also to work with Helen, their director, and Rose, assistant director, on conducting technique. It takes a certain amount of courage for directors to put themselves on the line like that in front of their singers, and it is a testament to the spirit of trust and mutual support within the chorus that their directors felt willing to do so.

But it really paid dividends. I’m not knocking dedicated training events for directors – they do lots of valuable things that you can’t necessarily achieve working with a conductor’s own ensemble – but equally there are things that you can only do working with both director and their singers together. Such as:

One of the challenges about running rehearsals is that there is so much to do that you rarely have time to notice how well you are doing. You can get so wrapped up in the needs of the choir and the needs of the music that there is very little attention left over to self-monitor. But we still owe it to our choirs (and our audiences) to improve ourselves, so here are several ways I’ve figured out over the years to address this: