My title today refers to a paradox relating to Christmas repertoire in general, rather than to the specific song of that title. But now I’ve mentioned it, I am going to be self-indulgent and get a few things off my chest.

1. Why the definite article? Other Christmas songs are available
2. Nobody dresses up like Eskimos for Christmas. For sure there are all kinds of wintry clichés associated with the festival that have little or nothing to do either with its pagan origins or its appropriation to celebrate a Palestinian-born Messiah. (For example, I don’t recall the gospels mentioning penguins along with the ox and the ass). But the Eskimos line is clearly there for no other purpose than to rhyme with ‘Jack Frost nipping at your nose’.

   And you wouldn’t think it should be too hard to find something else, less absurd, that would fit. Chose, crows, doze, froze, goes, hellos, joes, lows, pose, prose, rose, sews, shows, suppose, toes, those, woes…all those possibilities…

   Yuletide carols being sung by a choir
   And played through speakers made by Bose

   Okay, so this doesn’t pass the ‘less absurd’ test, but it is likely to be more factually accurate.

3. Everybody knows that candles and some fairy lights help to keep the season bright. Turkeys and mistletoe have their seasonal uses, but not typically as lighting solutions.

I recently had some correspondence with a director who asked me for feedback on her technique after I’d been working with her chorus, and it took us into territory that feels like other directors might also be interested in. So, I’m doing the further thinking about it I promised to do publicly here.

It started with an observation I made about how she came over in action:

I observe that when your musical concept is clearer, your gestures are more neat and precise and it takes less effort to communicate. So it may be that when you are finding the physical coordination more difficult, that is a signal that you need to clarify your musical concepts more. That is a working hypothesis rather than an absolute, but one which there is no downside to exploring.

She replied that she found this plausible, and that in fact it was sometimes developing the musical concept itself that presented the challenge:

Evvry sew offen I fined mice-elf in konvasayshun with uh felloh uhraynja hoo addvokaytz spelling kawdz inkorrecktlee two mayck singing lyenz eezya. I thinck bye thiss thay meen righting awl lyenz ryzing bye semmytohn with shahps anned awl fawling bye semmytohn with phlatz.

I rooteenlee trie anned tawk them owt uv thiss on thuh baysiss that it maycks thuh myoozick mutch hahda two reed four thohz hoo undastanned hahmunny. Ewe haff two stop anned puzzul owt wot awl thee individyoual nohtz ah anned tranzlayt that ennhahmonickly intwo uh kawd rahtha than chust reeding thuh myoozick. At bessed it sloes ewe up, at wurst it chaynjezz thuh meeningz.

Unless something unexpected happens very soon, last weekend was my last coaching trip to Germany for 2018. This time I was with the Barberlights in Remseck, near Stuttgart, and we had a full schedule together, starting Friday evening and continuing all day Saturday and most of Sunday too. To say this allowed us to get a lot done together would be an understatement.

It wasn’t just the sheer number of hours we spent together, I’d add, it was the chance to sleep on our experiences together and revisit the next day. In this sense, the session on Friday, though only an hour and a half long, really punched above its weight. Not only did we start Saturday having done some groundwork together, we’d also given our brains the chance to process, sort and embed the work.

Floddy helping at a coaching sessionTen years ago I was wondering what to write in my inaugural blog post, and realising it didn’t really matter at that point as nobody at that stage knew I was writing it. This post, marking the occasion of Helping You Harmonise’s 10th birthday, makes me feel under both more and less pressure than that first one.

More, because I’m reasonably sure this one will be seen and read – it raises the stakes if what you’re doing is witnessed. Less, because I’ve learned that my policy of writing about what I find interesting and trusting that somebody else may find it interesting too usually works. Indeed, not only has blogging brought me into all kinds of interesting conversations over the years with people who share my interests, it has rewarded me with friendships with people from all over the world.

Warm-up action pic

I spent Sunday working with Endeavour, a brand new mixed barbershop chorus. They have been in the planning for some time, but actually sang together for the first time on Saturday, so I had the honour being their first ever visiting coach. Their singers are drawn from barbershop groups in Ireland, the UK and Germany, so their rehearsals take the form of intensive weekends in locations handy for airports.

It is an auditioned chorus, and many of the singers know each other from participating in the various Harmony Brigades. Hence, it is populated with people with considerable experience and skill as singers, and who are accustomed to learning music independently. Their challenge is melding these vocal and musical resources into a coherent ensemble within a short timescale so as to make the most of the artistic potential available.

About to start the warm-up...

Over dinner on Saturday night in Bonn I was informed that in that part of the world, doing something twice made a tradition, and doing something three times created a tradition that goes back to time immemorial. So with this second visit to coach The Rhubarbs had rendered our working together traditional.

This time we had two full days together, which allowed us not only to explore more different themes, but also to work on something one day and revisit after a night’s sleep to see which had embedded overnight, and which needed more work to secure them,

A recurrent theme throughout the weekend was the relationship between breath, support and resonance. Establishing a deep-set breath with bucket-cup-teaspoon exercises at the start of each session set us up to develop the clarity of tone that not only adds brightness to the sound but allows the breath to last longer, as it comes from more efficient contact of the vocal folds. Once you get the voice set up this way, it tends to stay there, only needing occasional reminders to empty the bucket completely before starting to sing to reset any time the tone loses focus.

As I write this title, I realise there’s a pleasant self-referentiality in revisiting this particular subject. Last time I wrote about it, my point was that, instead of getting frustrated with their singers when they find themselves repeating instructions, a director could more usefully consider why their instructions aren’t working and explore different ways to achieve their ends.

Today’s thought shares the point that it is counter-productive for directors to get frustrated by saying the same things week after week, but suggests that this is because sometimes repetition is exactly what is needed.