Problems arising when men and women sing the same pitch: 5 relevant reads

This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past.

This summary is about the difficulties and apparent strangeness of men and women singing the same pitch together.

Leading your first ever singing group – a complete beginner’s guide

I am often asked for advice from people who want to start a singing group, but have absolutely no experience.

photo by The U.S. Army

Or sometimes people have been asked to start a workplace choir or to take over their church choir activities. Here are some tips to get you started.

Four ways that your choir can begin a song badly – and how to correct them

It’s wonderful when a choir starts a song in a crisp and precise way. But there are so many ways in which this can go wrong.



How can we ensure that every singer gets off to a good start?

Mixed tenor sections: the weirdness of men and women singing the same note

Many community choirs have mixed tenor sections with men and women singing the same part.

photo by Stefan Karpiniec

That’s when things can get weird! Let’s look at what’s going on.

How to give and receive starting notes 3: all the ways it can go wrong

There are many ways that starting notes for a song can be given out. There are also plenty of ways that starting notes can be confusing or misheard!



Here are some useful tips for making sure you start off on the right note. In Part 3 I look at all the ways in which giving and receiving starting notes can go wrong.

How to give and receive starting notes 2: receiving your note accurately

There are many ways that starting notes for a song can be given out. There are also plenty of ways that starting notes can be confusing or misheard!



Here are some useful tips for making sure you start off on the right note. In Part 2 I consider how starting notes are received by the singer.

How to give and receive starting notes 1: giving notes out

There are many ways that starting notes for a song can be given out. There are also plenty of ways that starting notes can be confusing or misheard!



Here are some useful tips for making sure you start off on the right note. In Part 1 I consider how starting notes are given out.

How male singers can successfully pitch from a woman (and how women can pitch from a man)

As we saw last week, many singers struggle with finding (and keeping) their starting notes.

photo by Albin Olsson

What can make it even harder is if a man is trying to pitch from a woman, or vice versa. Here’s what happens and how you can overcome any difficulties.

Finding (and keeping) your starting note

Many singers struggle with finding their starting note. Once they’ve nailed that, they’re off and it’s no problem.



How can you make sure you’ve got the right starting note and, more importantly, how can you keep hold of it before the song sets off?

Using world songs in the classroom: a teacher’s guide to sourcing songs and how to teach them

Some teachers find themselves having to lead singing sessions at their school, but don’t have that much experience of using songs from the world music repertoire (‘world songs’) or of teaching songs by ear.



Here is a short guide to using world songs in the classroom with some handy references to warms ups, song sources, and how to lead choirs.

How can you possibly teach songs without a piano??!!

“You can’t run a singing workshop here, we don’t have a piano.”

photo by Thomas Quine

It’s amazing how many people can’t get their heads around the fact that it’s possible to teach songs without a piano (or sheet music). How is it done?

Do you need perfect pitch to lead a choir?

This post is part of a series of occasional Questions and Answers. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

A budding choir director writes:

“Last year I got involved with helping to lead a community choir. I have a musical background in that part of my degree was in music and I play the piano and cello. However, I have never had any singing lessons or led a choir before or even been in a choir — except a school choir — so when I was asked to help I was quite nervous!

“I found that I really enjoyed conducting and teaching new songs. However, I’ve been getting a little stressed recently because when I come to teach parts, I can’t always think what the note is that I need to give the section of the choir when we’re rehearsing. Or when I need to help out a part by singing along with them, I can’t always come in with the correct note.

“Does this suggest that I haven’t got a good enough ear to lead a choir? I’m beginning to fear this is the case. I can usually pitch A and get a note from that, but I certainly haven’t got perfect pitch.”

My first response is “Gosh, you’re more musically trained than I am!”

Just like you, when I first started leading choirs I had never had singing lessons and hadn’t been in a choir since school (and even then we didn’t sing in parts)

I too was very nervous when I first started out, but it does get easier. Even so, I still get nervous before a new season or a one-day workshop. I think that’s healthy as it means I never get complacent and keep doing the same old stuff.

I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “I can’t always think what the note is”. I always, always write down the start notes of each part of the song I’m teaching. I have a chromatic pitch pipe that has all the notes in the scale and I just dial up the appropriate note and blow into it.

I don't have perfect pitch by any means and, given an ‘A’ for example, I’m rubbish at finding, say, an ‘F’. In which case you are far more accomplished than I am!

Use an instrument to get the start notes and write down what they are. Even the best professional conductors do it!

Even though I teach by ear and don’t hand out sheet music, I always have a copy of the score myself when I’m teaching. I often don’t have to refer to it, but it’s good to have it in reserve if I get confused or make a mistake. I’ve taught over 600 songs in the last ten years so it’s very hard to keep every part of every song in my head. The score is useful if you need to find the right note to come in with a part half way through a song, say.

If you need to, just stop, check the note on an instrument or pitch pipe, and then carry on. It will get easier as you (and the choir) become more familiar with a song.

I think you’re being far too hard on yourself. You don’t need perfect pitch to lead a choir.

You might like to check out an earlier post: Start as you mean to carry on (about giving out starting notes — read the comments!)

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

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

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.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

How to teach (and learn) a song by ear

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.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Start as you mean to carry on

OK, I’ll admit it up front: I’m a charlatan. I have no training for the job which gives me my income. I have not had any formal musical education other than a few guitar lessons when I was around 10 years old. All that I know about music has been gleaned from years of listening to recordings (from which I developed an innate ability to harmonise), attempts at arranging a variety of songs for unaccompanied harmony singing (where my knowledge of guitar chords is invaluable), sourcing new songs from various songbooks and online resources (thanks to my guitar teacher, I can sight-read music and play it on the guitar), and – perhaps most importantly – all the valuable lessons I have learned from leading choirs and singing groups for the last 10 years.

When I used to work in theatre (as performer, director and teacher) I was always attracted to practitioners who had come to theatre from other backgrounds. My first company in London was made up of a chemist, architect and dancer, along with me, a computer scientist and mathematician. It is often the outsider who can bring new insight to a discipline because they aren’t hampered by the rules of their new subject. They can transgress, blunder about, be naughty, do things that can’t be done, and many times re-vitalise the discipline or even discover something new about it. But of course there do need to be rules to underlie any discipline. I know many of the ‘rules’ of music and musical composition, but there’s one that stumps me and I’m genuinely asking for some help from all you qualified and experienced people out there!

It’s to do with starting notes. I have a little blowy thing (a chromatic pitch pipe) which I use to give the starting notes to the choir. We always sing unaccompanied and I don’t have perfect pitch, so that’s what I’ve come up with. I give each part their separate note and off we go. However, what I would really like to do is to just give one note to the whole choir and each section will find their own harmonising start note. Of course, it’s much simpler when all parts start on the same note (pay attention song arrangers!), but often each part has a separate note of the first chord.

Now, my question is, what note do I give the choir? The part which has the tune doesn’t necessarily start on the key note of the chord. The first chord is not necessarily the root chord of the key signature. Personally I find it quite hard in a concert when we move from one song to the next. I can't seem to wipe the key of the last song out of my mind, so am I expecting too much from my choir?

What really impresses me are those conductors who bring out a tuning fork, tap it gently on their elbow, figure out the key note of the song from the tuning fork note, give just that one note to the choir and then they all burst out with an amazing first chord! How can I achieve such a cool and professional effect?

go to Chris Rowbury's website