When I was playing about with the ideas that produced my posts on Harmonic Charge and Harmonic Charge and Voicing, I noticed something about the words I was using to describe parameters of musical energy:

High-low (tessitura)
Bright-soft (harmonic quality)
Tight-loose (voicing)

Do you see what I mean? All the high-energy words have an I sound in them, while the low-energy words are built around the letter O.

Now think about how those vowels sit in the mouth when we sing them.

I sometimes feel a bit hypocritical when I skip breakfast.

You see, I go around telling anyone that will listen that just as breakfast is the most important meal of the day, the warm-up is the most important part of the choral rehearsal. It’s harder to say that with conviction if you’ve not eaten anything before noon.

So, we all know why breakfast is important. (If not - well you’re on the internet already, go and find out.) The reason I hold a parallel view of the warm-up is because - like breakfast - it might be a thing with one identifying label and be done at one specific time of day, but it is made up of a varied and flexible number of elements that simultaneously serve several purposes, both immediate and long-term.

Today I had the pleasure of working with the quartet Eu4ia, who are currently preparing to defend their European championship title in Eindhoven in March. Eu4ia have been together for quite a few years now, having been LABBS national champions in 2001 and then having gone onto represent Sweet Adelines Region 31 at International level several times since. They are experienced performers, well in control of their technique, which makes them a treat to coach, as this meant we could focus our efforts on artistic questions.

One of the things I find fascinating when working with any singers, but particularly those performing at the more sophisticated and assured levels, is how much the sound changes when you change what’s going on in their heads.

This coming semester I will be teaching a class on arranging and performing vocal close harmony. The students are all specialist performers or composers in the 3rd year of a 4-year BMus degree, but most will have had little or no contact with close-harmony styles beforehand. So it’s a real challenge to take a bunch of intelligent musicians and see how far they can get in an unfamiliar style in just eleven weeks of teaching. It’s a small class this year, which will make it possible to give students more individual attention, so I’m looking forward to it even more than usual.

I’ve been over-hauling the course materials in anticipation, and thought I’d share the marking guidelines I’ll be using to assess them.

In this post I suggested a model to think about harmonic charge – the degree and quality of a chord’s inherent energy. This is useful for making arrangement decisions at the primary harmony/big-picture planning stage. It can also help with concrete questions of voicing.

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about what music theorists call harmonic charge – that is, the amount of inherent oomph a chord has. Quite clearly some chords are more surprising, more jangly, have more of a frisson of energy than others. Having some way to diagnose the relative level of harmonic charge is useful for making both arrangement decisions and performance decisions.

A reasonably common problem among amateur choirs is the tendency to ‘just sing the notes and words’ – that is, to sing the music in a choppy, mechanical way. We often deal with this through vocal means, introducing a more continuous vocal support to underpin a more legato approach to phrasing.

But I think this is also a musical issue; it is also about how people are thinking about what they sing.

Light has a funny dual nature: it is both particle and wave. I don’t fully understand how this is so, but I quite like the stretchy feeling my brain gets when I attempt to.

Music also has a dual nature. It is, on one hand, a static thing, as embodied in the written score; it holds still to be looked at and analysed. You can put it down and come back later and it’s still recognisably the same thing. You don’t even have to write it down for this to be true. Songs that you learn by ear have that same ability to exist as stable entities that keep the same form even if you don’t sing them for years.