Stage presence for singers

A few weeks ago my post Getting the most out of your choir: preparing for performance PART 1 generated quite a lot of heat in the comments section! Most of this focused around the concept of stage presence and where the ‘meaning’ of a song might reside.

I think this discussion warrants more time, so I’ve decided to devote two posts to it rather than limiting it to the to and fro of the comments section. This week I want to talk about stage presence for singers, and next week I’ll look at the ‘meaning’ of a song and how it might affect the way it is sung (Singing what you mean, and meaning what you sing).

introducing Tom Carter

I wrote a post some time ago that set out my personal attitude to lyrics in songs and how we might express the ‘meaning’ of a song which has foreign lyrics (Sing it like you mean it). That’s when I first ‘met’ Tom Carter, author of Choral Charisma: singing with expression. Since then Tom and I have had several lively exchanges on this topic. I’m sure that at some fundamental level we agree since we are both very keen to find ways of getting the best out of a choir in performance. But on the surface we seem to have very different approaches and understanding of certain concepts.

I think Tom and I represent two clear and different approaches to singing. I think both our approaches are useful and possibly produce the same results. I think whichever point of view you adhere to is very personal, and neither is ‘better’ than the other. However, considering these two approaches does allow us to look in more detail at several important concepts in singing and performance.

being present or ‘stage presence’?

I said that

“presence simply means that the performers are totally in the present and only engaged on the task at hand. That’s what makes them so watchable.”

Tom fundamentally disagreed with this and said that

“presence is much more than just focusing ‘on the task at hand.’ Indeed, the SPECIFIC nature of the task makes all the difference […] A singer will have presence if they are connecting specifically with the meaning (passion, poignancy, power ...) of the text and its musical expression – while at the same time being free of all impediments to that presence.”

Deb suggested that maybe Tom and I were talking about two different things. That Tom was talking about ‘stage presence’ whereas I was simply talking about ‘being present’. But I am actually talking about the same thing!

being in the moment and serving the song

I’m sure that there will always be two very views in this discussion, and that neither side will never agree with or completely understand each other. In my previous incarnation as a theatre performer, teacher and director, I was also in a different camp from many of my peers. My belief then, and now, was that an actor/ performer on stage needs to be totally engaged in a task which serves the play at that particular moment. It may or may not have anything to do with the text at that point.

An apocryphal example of this was when a famous actress was complimented on her acting in a very moving scene in a play. Her character had just been told of the death of someone close to her. She appeared stunned and lost in thought whilst she stared off into the middle distance. When asked how she had achieved this (maybe she’d been thinking about someone in her own life who had died?) she responded: “I was wondering whether to have steak pie or chicken pie for tea”. She knew, as an experienced actress, that what served the play best at that moment was stillness and the impression that her character’s focus was entirely on her inner thoughts. And, from the perspective of the audience, that’s precisely what she achieved.

At that moment she had enormous stage presence, she was totally watchable because she was simply engaged on the task at hand. No more, no less. What is most important at that point is what the audience experience, not what is going on for the performer.

Another example is when a famous theatre director came into an empty theatre one day. The stage lights were on and the house lights were out. On stage a man entered sweeping the floor. The director was mesmerised and watched until the man left the stage. The man on stage had enormous stage presence because he was simply and totally engaged on the task at hand: sweeping the stage – no more, no less. What made him particularly watchable was the context: being on stage in a theatre.

To have presence as a singer is to simply be engaged totally with the task at hand: singing the song. Not thinking about the effect it may have on the audience, not worrying about whether they are standing with the correct singer’s posture, not focusing on their breathing, not struggling to remember the words of the second verse. It is not important whether or not the singer experiences the emotional content of the song, but it is of vital importance that the audience does.

Tom’s notion of ‘charisma’

Tom wrote in the comments section:

“Chris, it occurs to me that your presence is my ‘full commitment.’ As Deb mentioned, my presence IS what I also call ‘stage presence’ or ‘charisma.;’ That requires full commitment, but it also requires a particular focus on the ‘human’ elements of the performance (as in character, meaning, story, yada yada).

For example, if we transplant the discussion to the opera hall, take two singers performing the role of Carmen – both are committed and not self-conscious, but singer A has a more technical focus, and singer B has a more ‘human’ focus.

Singer A: Is focused like a laser beam on following the conductor, hitting her marks on the stage, and on creating her most beautiful sound. She’s also allowing herself to enjoy the rhythms and cadences of the music.

Singer B: While a part of her is focused on technical elements, she is more dominantly focused on seducing, taunting, and teasing the men around her. Her thoughts are primarily ‘character’ thoughts rather than ‘singer’ thoughts – when she successfully teases a man, she experiences a victory and that victory is clearly seen on her face and in her body. When she is done taunting one man, she looks around to see who looks like the next easy mark.

To me, only Singer B has ‘stage presence.’ The other singer’s technical focus and commitment might make her more watchable than if she were self-conscious and self-doubting, but she lacks true charisma.”

my understanding of ‘character’

David Mamet is a playwright and theatre/ film director who believes that there is no such thing as ‘character’, there is just the performer, the text and their actions. I’m with him on this one! In the context of singing in a performance there is simply the singer, the music (which included lyrics and melody/ harmony) and the singing.

To comment on Tom’s opera example above I’d need to see these two singers myself before I decide which one has ‘stage presence’. My claim is that Singer A, if engaged with the appropriate tasks and actions, may well have as much stage presence and ‘charisma’ as Singer B. Singer B doesn’t need to have any understanding of ‘character’, she just needs to behave and act in a manner required by the opera at any given moment.

Singer B’s job is to make the audience to believe that she is taunting and teasing those around us. Most of that work will have been done by the composer of the music and lyrics, the rest will be by done by the way in which the song is sung and the actions carried out by the singer. The audience don’t care what’s going on inside the singer. She may be using internal imagery of talking to her cat or imagining she is a snake. It doesn’t really matter.

But we digress … Tom’s example has used opera which is very much a storytelling medium and has more in common with plays than with concerts. What about songs that have no story, no ‘characters’, or maybe even no recognisable words?

My claim is that as long as the singers are in the moment and focused on doing their job properly (singing the song to the best of their ability), following whatever instructions the director has given (e.g. which passages are loud, which sections go faster, which verses should be sung more gently, what imagery might be useful, etc.), then they will have stage presence, be eminently watchable and will communicate the music and its emotional content in the way in which the director has intended. No more, no less.

It’s the director’s job to help the singers convey whatever ‘meaning’ or emotional content that she believes the song contains. That work will have been done in rehearsal. In performance the singers just need to get on with the job!

next week

My division of this discussion into two parts is rather arbitrary since they both impinge on each other. Tom in particular would claim that connecting with the ‘meaning’ of a song is vital to creating any kind of stage presence. So next week I will look at what a song’s ‘meaning’ might be, where it resides and how it affects the singing of the song: Singing what you mean and meaning what you sing.

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Getting the best out of your choir 6: self-reflection

It’s very quiet here today. A typical English spring day: grey and overcast with a soft drizzle gently falling. Tomorrow it’s a ‘bank holiday’ here in England. This was once a holiday for all of us to celebrate May Day, but now it’s just a day off for the banks and financial institutions, most of the shops and supermarkets stay open. And for us freelancers too, it’s business as usual!

On a Sunday the world outside is definitely much quieter than usual. Hardly any traffic, no kids on their way to school, no postman. Just the kind of day when we can step outside our normal routine and take stock.

always rushing

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that there never seems to be enough time to do everything we want to!

“I’ve been meaning to sit down and really learn the words of that second verse.”

“When I get some free time, I’d like to do a better arrangement of that Ukrainian song.”

“Next time I get a spare moment I want to listen to the practice CD again so I can definitely nail my part.”

“Roll on the holidays when I can do some proper research to find some tasty songs for next term.”

We always seem to be in some kind of ‘crisis’ mode, just about delivering what we need to at the last minute. This means that we never really get a chance to take stock, to look back over the last term’s work or most recent concert and think about what happened.

condemned to repeat history

As George Santayana famously said:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Basically this means that studying our history is necessary to avoid repeating past mistakes. If we don’t look back on our past actions and reflect on them, then we are condemned to constantly repeat our errors.

Of course, the flip side of this is that if we do something well, then it’s good to take note of it so that we can repeat it in the future! There is nothing worse than accidentally producing an excellent result without knowing why it happened.

the self-aware singer

Considering our past actions and reflecting on what happened in previous rehearsals, concerts, song learning, etc. is the job of both choir leaders and choir members. The responsibility of getting the best out of a choir lies with all members of the team.

This means that singers need to be self-aware at all times. It is not possible to reflect on earlier experiences if you don’t remember what you were doing! This applies to:

• warm ups (where are the tensions in my body now? what can I do to release them? how can I carry out this exercise better than the last time I did it? what is the point of this particular warm up exercise and how can I learn from it?);
• song learning (how does my part fit in with the alto part? why is it particularly difficult to find the start note each time? why is that line/ interval difficult to nail? is there a better way of connecting the words with the music? I must remember to sing my part against the other parts on the practice CD – I forgot last time and it didn’t help!);
• rehearsal (how come I missed that important note that the director gave last time we rehearsed? why am I always coming in late on that phrase? I need to remember to pay more attention to the tenors this time so I can get my tuning right! this time I’ll write down the verse order so I won’t forget it like last time);
• performance (at our last concert I couldn’t see the director properly because the lights were in my eyes – this time I’ll make sure I stand in a better place to avoid this; I noticed recently that in every concert I get so nervous that I’m taking shallow breaths most of the time – this time I’ll consciously focus on breathing long and slow before each songs starts; at our Christmas concert I was thrown when the director got us to repeat the last verse – this time I’ll not zone out, but pay close attention all the time!).

I’m sure there are many other things that I’ve missed out, but you get the idea!

the reflective choir leader

Part of a choir leader’s job is to be a teacher. Week on week the choir leader tries to improve the singers’ vocal and aural skills as she constantly strives for improvement in singing quality and performance technique. In order to do this successfully it is important to have an overall strategy, a programme of development work, but alongside this, you must take note of what works and what doesn’t work in order to refine this programme constantly. It’s no good initiating a series of exercises to improve tuning if you don’t take note of whether the tuning has improved or not!

I’m assuming that it is part of any good choir leader’s method to practice your craft in a self-reflective way. If not, maybe you shouldn’t be doing the job! This self-reflection works at several different levels:

from moment to moment within each choir session
You’ve planned the session in detail with built-in developmental work as you move through the session, but you must be prepared for when things don’t work out as planned, or if something goes exceptionally well. You need to be in the moment and prepared to go ‘off script’ at any moment in service to the bigger picture.

from session to session (rehearsal to rehearsal)
Many of us plan an entire block of work in advance with development from session to session. But even if you only plan week by week, you need to look back over previous sessions in order to work out what is best to do in subsequent sessions. Is it worth going over stuff again? Perhaps that tricky song you planned is too adventurous for this block of work. Or perhaps the choir are picking up the new songs extremely quickly, so maybe here’s an opportunity to raise the bar and put in something more advanced like clapping or choreography.

from concert to concert
That tricky song you’ve attempted in the last three concerts has always ended up as a disaster. Maybe it’s time to drop it from the repertoire or find a way of making it work by planning specific rehearsals around it.

The audience always seems to get restless about half an hour into your concerts. Why is this? Is it to do with the structure of the concerts or the repertoire?

For some reason, the Christmas concert was a resounding success, even though it was pretty much the same as the autumn concert. Why was this? Was it just that particular audience, or the different venue, or the new staging?

from season to season
It’s always good to keep the choir on its toes. You may notice that you always start the season of in the same way. Or perhaps every spring season is a classical one. Or you never tackle long, difficult songs in the winter season. Whatever you do: is there a pattern? Do you want to continue that or break it?

from year to year
I always choose the start of the autumn term to look back over the previous year. You may choose a different point, but it’s always good to have a long view. After the long summer break I archive everything we’ve done over the last year and start to think about the year ahead. I like to have an overall view of where we’re heading, what new challenges we may take on, if we’re heading for some significant end of year concert or not. It’s not something I necessarily need to articulate or formally bring into my planning process (although you may well choose to do that), but just thinking about the long view helps me to plan the immediate season in front of me.

from choir to choir
And finally, there comes a day when you may well move onto a different choir. That is the perfect time to reflect on what you have achieved with your last choir. Given your time over again, would you do things the same way? Here is an opportunity to do things better/ differently, to reinvent your self and your process, to start with a blank sheet. It’s all to easy to sleepwalk into a new situation and soon find ourselves up to our old habits!

building on success

This is the happy side of self-reflection: note all the things that go really well and find ways of doing them again! It is just as bad to let a good thing slip through your fingers as it is to constantly repeat bad habits. This is also the time to take the opportunity of not resting on your laurels or of becoming complacent. Just because something went really well, doesn’t mean that it can’t be better next time. The mark of a good, self-reflective practitioner is one who is always on the lookout for ways of making things better.

learning from failure

When something goes really badly wrong, we can get trapped in a period of self-chastisement. We suddenly doubt whether we are actually any good at what we do. We forget all the wonderful things that have happened with the choir in the past. We focus entirely on all the negative aspects of the situation. But this is precisely the time when we need to be in the moment in a non-judgmental way. We need to stand back from the situation and try to note why things went wrong. Analyse the situation dispassionately and learn from it so that next time you won’t make the same mistake.

Somebody once said that rehearsals are the opportunity to try all the ways of getting things wrong, of finding all the ways that don’t work. Then afterwards we are simply left with the things that do work! This is a fantastic example of how we learn from failure and mistakes.

end of the series

That’s the end of this series on how to get the best out of your choir. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and its given you some food for thought. I’d love to hear from your own experiences. Maybe you have something to add to what I’ve said, or perhaps you’d like to recount a specific example of something that’s worked for your choir. Or maybe you just want to let me know that something I’ve said is plain wrong! Whatever it is, I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment.

next week

A few weeks back, there was a flurry of activity in the comments section on stage presence and the ‘meaning’ of songs. This is a big and interesting subject, so rather than let it languish in the backwater of comments land, I thought I’d make a whole post about it. So next week I’m going to look at stage presence for singers and the week after that, singing what you mean. In the meantime you may like to read those comments and chip in yourself!

 

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

Getting the best out of your choir 4: preparing for performance PART 1

Sometimes, no matter how much you’ve rehearsed or prepared your choir, the concert just doesn’t quite measure up to your expectations. What worked perfectly in rehearsal ends up sounding quite ropey. Those confident singers suddenly look like a bunch of startled rabbits in the headlights. That wonderful resonant sound you had comes across as thin and lacking in energy. What went wrong? Is there anything you can do to prevent this happening next time?

Of course, I don’t have all the answers, and every choir is a different beast. However, I’ll jot down a few musings here that may be of some use. I’d love to hear from all you silent readers out there if you have any useful tips that might help us get the best out of our choirs in performance.

As usual, I seem to have run away with myself and written a much longer post than I’d intended! Just so you don’t feel overloaded, I’m going to split the post in two so you can read Part 2 next week. There’s no obvious division into two parts, but it may give you time to absorb some of the ideas better.

the butterfly of nerves

Nerves are a good thing. A few butterflies in the tummy means that we care about what we’re doing. A bit of adrenaline raises our game and keeps us on our toes. The day we have no nerves at all before performing is the day that we have become complacent and aren’t really bothered about what happens.

But nerves can get out of control and turn into performance anxiety. Even at a low level, if a singer hasn’t performed much, then nerves can get in the way of a good performance. Inside flutterings and anxiety can:

• produce quick, shallow breathing
• make our mouths dry and our tongues stick
• cause tension in our necks and throats
• make us forget things (words, song structure, which part we sing, etc.)
• focus our minds on the wrong thing (i.e. the mistakes that we might make)
• stop us from noticing our surroundings and fellow singers
• make things run much faster than we would like

One excellent way of countering these nerves is to simply take a big, deep, long breath. If you also raise your shoulders high when breathing in, and drop them on a sigh when you breathe out, it helps to release any tension in the neck and throat.

fear of failure

One of the reasons we get nerves in the first place is that we want to do good. We want to:

• get things right and not make mistakes;
• please and entertain the audience;
• make everyone like us and think we’re wonderful;
• support our fellow performers and not let them down;
• please our choir leader and make them proud;
• appear skilled, professional and in control — we don’t want to make fools of ourselves!

All good aims indeed. However, we must remember that we’re not in this alone. It’s team work. As long as you know you’ve put the work in, know what you’re supposed to be doing, then you can trust that the whole team will gel and you will carry it off. A large group has a force of its own. Although you’re a vital component of the choir, a minor mistake from one individual will go unnoticed. Prepare well and keep a perspective at all times. It’s only a concert after all!

be here now

When our nerves get the better of us it means that our mind ends up focusing on all the wrong things. We worry about remembering words that we spent all those weeks learning, we fear all the mistakes that we might make in the performance to come, we are concerned about what the audience will think when the concert is over. Instead, we should be focusing on the task at hand and staying in the moment.

Easier said than done, but if you focus on the here and now — how you are breathing, what your posture is like, preparing to sing the first note, being attentive to the conductor — then there will be no room in your head for any worries! You are just here to sing, so that is all you need to do. Stop holding onto the past (“It was better last time we did it”) or being concerned about the future (“I hope I remember to repeat the last verse”) and just be with the music as it arises.

When we see performers on stage and marvel at their ‘presence’ we think that it’s some kind of magic. But the word ‘presence’ simply means that the performers are totally in the present and only engaged on the task at hand. That’s what makes them so watchable.

expectations and beginner’s mind

It’s very hard just to stay with the present moment. We all anticipate and bring expectations with us. We remember that last concert when everything went pear-shaped, or the performance last year which was one of our best and everyone was firing on all cylinders. We know that the tickets have sold out so we expect a large and attentive audience. We are so proud of the complicated song that we’ve been working on for the last few months and are convinced that it will go down a storm.

Unfortunately, our expectations are seldom met! We are often disappointed when things don’t turn out as we had hoped, or are totally surprised when something goes extremely well. The way to avoid disappointment and to bring freshness to every performance is to imagine that this is the first time you’ve ever done a concert and the first time you’ve ever sung these particular songs. Have no expectations other than to do your best under the given circumstances. What will happen will happen regardless of what you expect. You have no control over it.

I’ve written before about this idea which Zen Bhuddism calls ‘beginner’s mind’ (Blame it on the weather). If you approach a song each time as if for the first time, it will be forever fresh and you will continue to discover new nuances in it.

be prepared

Although you don’t want to come to your performance with expectations, you do need to anticipate things that might happen as you don’t want to be thrown by the unexpected. The most obvious thing to anticipate is that you need to know what you’re doing! So be well-prepared and rehearsed. Know the words, know your part, know the structure of the songs and the order they will be sung in, know where you will be standing, know if you have an encore song and know how to bow at the end.

But this preparation may not be enough to cover all eventualities. There is a big difference, for example, between knowing your words at home and remembering them in a performance situation. You may think you are well-rehearsed, but you need to practice songs in many different circumstances, not just in the familiar rehearsal room set-up. Try remembering the lyrics whilst washing up, whilst driving, whilst walking along the street, whilst making the bed. The greater the range of contexts that you practice in, the more the song will be embedded in your memory.

Similarly for any song, don’t always stand next to the same person, or always face the same way in the rehearsal room. Find all the ways of doing the song in the ‘wrong’ style (as opera, as country and western, as reggae). Rehearse a song while the whole choir is walking around the room at random. Practice a harmony song in small groups not just in the whole choir. Work out a strange dance routine to practice whilst singing a familiar song. Sing a song in reverse order. Swap parts around. Play with songs in as many different ways as you can, then when you come to doing it ‘straight’ it will be much easier.

One important thing that you can’t ever really be prepared for is the audience’s reaction. Sometimes they will applaud every song loudly and jump to their feet at the end. Other times they may appear to be sleeping and applaud in a lacklustre way. This can have a huge effect on the singers. If the response isn’t as enthusiastic as we need, then we suddenly think they don’t like us and the whole performance becomes filled with doubt and lack of confidence.

On the other hand, you can just as easily be thrown by an over-enthusiastic response to a song that you think you didn’t perform well!

You have to sing the songs for yourselves more than for the audience. Go out there to have a good time, and if the audience like it too, that’s just an added bonus. It’s impossible to work out how an audience feel towards a performance just by how they applaud or appear to be paying attention (see What you feel, what they feel next week).

that’s all folks!

Well, that’s all I’ve got space for this week. Next week in Part 2 of preparing for performance I’ll look at stage time vs. real time, standing positions on stage, how new things affect us, and why people can have such different experiences at the same concert.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Getting the best out of your choir 3: the moderate choir leader

We first came across ‘the martinet’ in the first post in this series (Getting the best out of your choir 1: moderate or martinet?), and met her opposite number ‘the mouse’ in last week’s post. My contention is that there is a middle way between these two extremes, that the kind of leader to get the best out of a choir is one who is moderate in temper and approach.

Here is my definition of the ideal choir leader. Maybe we’re not all there yet, but it’s certainly something to aspire to!

the moderate

even-tempered
You need someone out front who can keep their calm whilst all around them is chaos and confusion (Calm down dear, it’s only a song!).

There will come a point with every choir when

• the singers seem to lose all their self-confidence;
• you tackle a song that seems to be just too hard to deal with;
• the rehearsal is going so bad that everyone wants to go home and bury their heads in the sand;
• no matter how hard you try the whole thing sounds just awful;
• the hideously complicated structure of the song you’re working on is just beyond everyone’s comprehension;
• the song that you’d perfected last week just falls apart in front of everyone’s eyes;
• everybody is stumbling over the words of the latest foreign song;
• despite weeks of hard work, the altos still can’t get their part right;
• hardly anyone turns up to the final rehearsal before a big concert because there’s a vicious bug going around;
• the lead soloist fails to turn up for the concert …

You get the picture: if something can go wrong, it will! In these situations it doesn’t help anyone if the choir leader gets stressed out, begins to shout, loses the plot, and generally has a melt-down. You need someone who is steady, takes it all in their stride, fills the choir with the confidence that everything is going to be all right, trusts in the process, and realises that in the grand scheme of things, it’s just a bunch of people singing songs.

fun-loving and playful
Bringing humour into the equation is a fantastic way of helping people relax and lose their inhibitions. A few laughs lets people off the hook and helps them to realise that it’s not the end of the world if they get something wrong.

In concerts, if the choir leader has a good rapport with the audience, they are immediately on your side. If you laugh at any mistakes, then the audience visibly relaxes since you’re not setting yourselves up to be perfection itself. Everybody loves it when they realise that you’re all human and therefore vulnerable.

Having fun and laughter isn’t the same as not being serious about what you do. We can make light of situations without compromising our standards. We still want to strive to be the best that we can and take our job of making music seriously, but approach it in a light-hearted way.

Being playful and child-like, using imagery and storytelling, improvising and trying things differently are all great ways of helping singers learn and to bring out the best. The focus is off the person and the music and onto imagination and risk-taking in a safe environment. Having played with a song in as many ‘wrong’ ways as possible liberates people from over-familiarity and set ways of singing, introduces the idea that there is no ‘right’ way of performing a song, and prepares people for any ‘mistakes’ during a concert which otherwise might throw them.

people person
Any half-way decent choir leader needs to actually like people! It’s not enough to just love music or singing, leading a choir is about working with people, not a bunch of instruments. Sure, it’s fun to have all those voices at your disposal, but behind each one is a unique individual. There will be vulnerabilities, rivalries, misunderstandings, frustrations, jealousies, fear, and so on – all those things that make us human beings. A choir leader has to acknowledge and work with this. You are not dealing with a bunch of robots who can deliver at will.

knows their stuff
Whether or not you use technical jargon or display your musical knowledge freely, you need to know what you’re doing! And if you don’t at any point, you need to be humble enough to admit it to the choir. They need to feel that they are in safe hands and that you know your stuff. Once you have built that confidence, you can take the choir into uncharted areas, but never ever bluff as you will soon be found out!

I like to use the analogy of an explorer. As a choir leader I am taking the choir on a journey. I have all the necessary gear: compass, ropes, warm clothing, maps, etc., together with a great deal of knowledge about navigation, finding trails, dealing with hazards, knowing the terrain, etc. etc. So I am totally equipped to lead people on a journey, but I don’t necessarily know where we will end up! I can guarantee though that we will arrive safely and have lots of fun on the way.

non-judgmental, encouraging and accepting
To get the best out of someone you need to encourage them, to praise them when they get things right or achieve something, but also to accept their limitations, acknowledge that they’re trying their hardest and to not judge them (especially in a community choir).

If you shout at someone, chastise them for making a mistake, sneer at them because they might not be as good as their fellow singers, ask them to do something that is beyond their capabilities, never acknowledge their achievements … then that person will go into their shell and not bother trying hard or taking the risk of getting something wrong. They will stop believing in themselves and will act through fear. This does not make for a good choir!

firm but fair
Being non-judgmental doesn’t mean that you can’t expect high standards. When someone gets something wrong, you can point that out and ask them to do it again. You can set standards and have expectations about a range of things: being on time, choir dress, not talking during rehearsals, learning words off by heart, tuning, etc. But you need to make your expectations clear to everyone and be consistent and fair. It’s not good changing the goal posts every time, especially if you don’t let the choir know! People respect a firm hand if it seen to be fair. Apply any rules you have equally to everyone.

one of the team
You are not the big ‘I am’, you are not the sole reason that the choir sounds good, you are replaceable, you are just one of the team: a vital component of the whole, but not special. You happen to occupy a specific role in the group that is acknowledged by everyone. You may have a particular set of skills and experience, but that doesn’t make you better than everyone else.

You are just one of the team and it is your responsibility – along with everyone else – to make the music as wonderful as possible and for everyone to have as good a time as possible.

focus on the people and the process
This is related to the fact that a good choir leader is very much a people person. To get the best out of your choir you can’t simply focus on the end product or the music alone. You need to acknowledge the individuals who make up the choir and focus more on the process of making music rather than sacrificing everything to the music.

I have talked about this before (We are not here to serve the music) and not every choir leader will agree. But I think that if you are a moderate choir leader with all the attributes that I have outlined above, you will end up making wonderful music, plus have the bonus of a committed group of choir members who work out of love and not fear and who have built a strong sense of community and friendship through their love of singing. A group who come together each week to have a laugh and sing together to make something greater than any particular individual involved.

By following this approach, you can produce great music to a high standard. There are other choirs which are run by martinets who also produce great music, but I know which choir I’d rather be associated with! I truly do not believe that the end justifies the means.

 

Next week I will be looking at preparing for performance. How come everything was great in rehearsal but it all seemed to fall apart in the concert? I don’t claim to have all the answers by any means and, as always, would love to hear from you and your own experiences.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Getting the best out of your choir 2: not too gentle, not too tough

In this post I’m going to look at two extreme kinds of choir leader, the mouse (unassuming, easily frightened, under-confident, feels small and insignificant) and the martinet who we met last week (loud, strict, stickler for perfection, dictator). I’m going to suggest that neither of these extremes is best for the choir, but there is the middle way of being the moderate.

Why are there different kinds of choir leaders? What turns ordinary people into the extremes of mouse or martinet? Even if we don’t think of ourselves as mice or martinets, we all occasionally drop into such extreme behaviour even if only for a moment. So it’s maybe worth giving some thought to where this behaviour might come from.

Here are a few things which might give an insight into a particular choir leader’s style. Not an exhaustive list by any means, and I’d love to hear from you if you have any other possibilities.

the martinet

control freak
Needs to be in charge of everything. The idea of uncertainty and disorder is a frightening one. People like this can be a little anal and will usually ask for complete accuracy of notes with no room for any variation. Will often use written scores slavishly.

not enough trust
Related to the above, due to their need to be in control, they take it upon themselves to be solely responsible for the music that the choir makes. They don’t see it as a team effort. If everything goes right they take the glory (see ‘look at me!’ below), but if it goes wrong it’s the choir’s fault because they didn’t obey the leader.

fear of failure: needing to get it right
This is more about other people’s perception. For whatever reason, the person is afraid of failing, or appearing to be a failure in any respect. These people don’t take risks, are averse to improvisation, come down like a ton of bricks on any mistakes, and insist on everything being perfect all the time.

look at me!
This is the choir leader as massive ego on legs. They are not really interested in the individual human beings that make up the choir, the singers are simply there to obey their leader and deliver the goods so the leader may be praised. Such leaders tend to over-conduct, like to be seen to be working hard, take the focus off the choir, indulge in pyrotechnic musical displays.

no self-confidence
Some martinets use their behaviour to mask their deep-seated insecurities. They may not have conducted much, or lack musical training, or not have worked with such a large choir, or just generally feel out of their depth. Instead of sharing this with the choir, they cover it up with appearing to be a strict disciplinarian hoping that nobody will notice.

not good with people
Some choir leaders are more interested in the music and can be a little bit ‘geeky’ in that way. They are not socially adept and would much rather be working with instruments who don’t talk back or have bad days. Because they lack social skills, they don’t know how to deal appropriately with choir members’ own insecurities, misunderstandings, and basic humanity. They will insist on over-long rehearsals and ridiculously high standards then not understand why people complain!

over-trained musically
Similar to the previous point, some choir directors are almost totally academic and are just out to realise the dots on the page. They have no understanding of the processes involved in working with human beings and translating dots into real, live music. They use inappropriate jargon when dealing with the choir without realising that most people have no idea what they’re talking about.

the mouse

lack of experience
Some choir leaders simply have little experience of leading a choir. They have no idea how rehearsals work, they don’t know the best way to bring a song to life, they’ve not conducted before, they’re not used to dealing with such large groups of people. Instead of covering this lack of experience with bluster (as a martinet would), they just crumble and are stunned into inactivity, mumbling, unclear instructions, lack of structure, etc.

out of my depth!
Even if a choir leader has a reasonable amount of experience, there will come a time when they feel that something is beyond them, either a particular piece of music, or an exceptionally big concert programme. They can’t bluff, but become even more mouse-like. They also aren’t able to admit that they’re out of their depth and lack the experience and self-confidence to change things to suit their abilities.

discomfort with leadership role/ dislike of responsibility
Some choir leaders just love music and singing, they may even have been a choir member until recently. They see other choirs and think it’s quite easy to lead a choir. But when they find themselves in that position, they realise that an awful lot of responsibility comes with the job. All eyes are on them and they always need to have all the answers. It’s much harder than they thought! But it’s too late to back out now, so they continue, but mice are not good at leading from the front.

just don’t care enough
A choir leader can end up being a mouse because they just don’t care about the resulting music or the choir members. They go through the motions, maybe the job’s been dumped on them, maybe they’ve been doing it too long and they’re bored. Their standards slip, they’re not clear when instructing the choir, they seldom give feedback.

not really musical – don’t know when it’s bad!
It is possible for someone to find themselves as a choir leader due more to enthusiasm than talent! They might love choirs and singing, but have no musical ability or deep understanding of music. They somehow expect it all to come together by magic with no intervention from them. They make a stab at leading and very quickly produce something that seems OK without realising that it’s dreadfully out of tune or the timing is wrong or they’ve taught the wrong part. They just don’t realise!

need to be liked
This is the correlate to the martinet’s “look at me!” desire. It’s not as much an ego thing, but more wanting to be liked and loved by every member of the choir (probably due to deep-seated lack of self-esteem). This means that they want to please everyone all the time. This is impossible in a choir! They will end up sending out mixed messages, and each time you come back to a song, they will approach it differently. They will confuse the choir because they are not giving them clear instructions.

fear of failure: scared of getting it wrong
Like the martinet, the mouse is frightened of failure. Their idea of hell is to be humiliated in front of the choir and an entire audience. If anything goes wrong, they will take it on as their individual responsibility. One way of avoiding this is to never actually finish a song. To have long, waffly rehearsals that don’t really go anywhere. To never commit to a clear idea of how a song should be done. To always avoid making strong choices about how to rehearse or perform a song in case their the wrong choices.

I had a dream

The other night I had a dream. I was trying to rehearse a very large choir made up of members from many choirs and groups that I have worked with over the years. They weren’t paying attention, but were generally milling around and chatting, being very relaxed and informal, not caring about the songs we were trying to rehearse. I was getting very frustrated and ended up shouting and swearing at them. In the end I just stormed outside and left them. I was standing outside leaning on a railing feeling pretty awful, when one of the choir members came out to find out how I was. She said: “That was a big shock! We hadn’t realised how you felt and the you really meant what you said.”

When I woke I had an uncomfortable thought: maybe this is the way I really feel and when I lead a choir I’m suppressing my real feelings. Perhaps I really want to shout and scream at people and all this patience is just a front. But that is definitely not the case. When I’m teaching or leading a choir, I feel calm and clear and enjoy being patient and taking time for a song to evolve. I don’t see any point in shouting, and don’t (well, hardly ever!) feel that I need to get angry or cross. Yes, I’m a dictator (I don’t believe that you can create art by committee, there needs to be one person with a vision in charge), but a totally benign dictator.

What kind of choir leader are you? If you’re a singer in a choir, what kind of leader is your choir leader? And how does it affect the end product?

Next week in Getting the best out of your choir 3 I will look at the characteristics that I believe make for a good, moderate choir leader who can bring the best out of a choir.

 

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Getting the best out of your choir 1: moderate or martinet?

This is the first in a series of posts about Getting the best out of your choir. The whole series looks like this:

1. moderate or martinet
2. not too gentle, not too tough
3. the moderate choir leader
   
4. preparing for performance PART 1
5. preparing for performance PART 2
6. self-reflection
   

Martinet. Interesting word that I’d not come across in ages and had forgotten what it meant. In case you’re in the same boat, a martinet is a strict disciplinarian, someone who demands exact conformity to rules and forms. Whereas a moderate is person who is reasonable, temperate, judicious, just, cool, steady, and calm.

Which of these two types of person gets the best out of their choir?

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 in the car last week and caught the very end of Ken Clarke’s Jazz Greats. He and Pete Long were discussing clarinettist and bandleader Benny Goodman, and that’s where the word martinet popped up. Clarke said that Goodman insisted on:

“absolute perfection … you had a martinet making them work all the time and rehearse in between each gig”.

Pete Long told a story about Goodman in the 1970s making his band rehearse just their bows for three whole hours!

Obviously how you work with a choir depends on the aims of that particular group. A barbershop choir with a competition coming up will rehearse in a very different way from a choir that doesn’t perform and is just for fun. But I wonder, which kind of choir leader will get the best results out of a choir: a moderate or a martinet?

I’ve written before about my belief that a patient and forgiving approach to choir leading gets the best results (Calm down dear, it’s only a song!). But I do know that this doesn’t suit some choir members. They would prefer constant drilling, attention to detail, rigorous accuracy, focus on a small repertoire of songs, being told when they are ‘wrong’, etc. etc.

I’m sure it’s frustrating for some singers when I say “That’ll do” and we move onto the next song when clearly the first song needs more work. But I try to balance the need for quality, variety, fun and rehearsal by not dwelling to long on any particular song.

In some circumstances (e.g. competition, recording a CD, high profile performance) it is important to pay attention to all the details (tuning, dynamics, blend, etc.) and to rehearse the material well. However, there are very different ways of doing this!

There is the choir leader who becomes quickly frustrated when things don’t go right, who has unreasonable expectations of ‘perfect’ singing, who shouts when the choir aren’t improving quickly enough, who drills one section repeatedly whilst the others are standing around getting bored, who puts the fear of god into the singers in case they should make a tiny mistake. Yes, this is one way of going about things, but I really believe that it won’t create the best results. Also, choirs who are led like this tend to always be working on tenterhooks which is quickly detected by an audience who then also find it hard to relax and enjoy the concert.

Surely it would be better to create an environment of team-work, an atmosphere of calm and focused work where people are pulling together and where mistakes aren’t punished but just recognised as a necessary stage along a path towards a better performance. Surely such a calm, forgiving, reasonable, trusting atmosphere will bring out the best in people?

In the Radio 4 jazz programme I mentioned before, Pete Long also said that:

“Goodman was a martinet, but Jimmie Lunceford was a great teacher”.

Great teachers get good results because they bring out the best in people, they demand high standards but encourage people to believe that those high standards are achievable and within themselves already, they leave the music-makers with skills, self-awareness and understanding that they can apply to other situations rather than blindly drilling one particular piece of music. I would like to think that good choir leaders are also good teachers and that the whole choir moves forward as a team of music-makers who are constantly improving.

At the end of the jazz programme, Clarke says of Goodman:

“But when we listen to the music we can forgive some of the severity with which he treated the odd erring sideman.”

This is a case of the ends justifying the means, but personally I completely disagree. There is no need to be severe and abusive when trying to get the best out of people. It is inexcusable and should not be tolerated!

Next week in Getting the best out of your choir 2 I’m going to look at why there are different kinds of choir leaders and suggest that there is a middle way between mouse and martinet.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

How to have an English sing-along

And I mean English … not Irish or Welsh or Scottish. How is it possible to have an unplanned, spontaneous and genuine gathering of people who sing together?

Mykl Roventine on flickr

I was listening to a broadcast from 24 May 2008 of a BBC Radio 3 programme called World Routes which included a session from the London Bulgarian Choir.

The presenter asked the choir’s leader Dessislava Stefanova:

“Why is there such a strong choral tradition in Bulgaria?”

Dessi replied:

“In terms of the authentic choral tradition, it is because this was one of the main ways in which people socialised – through song”

Also on the programme were Joe Boyd and Max Reinhardt who were recommending some of their favourite CD recordings from Eastern Europe. Their wide-ranging discussion included talking about the differences between village harmony singing and the more professional, often gypsy, musicians who might play at weddings and other celebrations.

It was quite clear that throughout Eastern Europe (and probably many other countries), there are still many, many communities where the everyone sings together on a regular basis. It is typical for individuals to have up to 40 or so songs in common, so very easy for groups of people to break into song.

But in England? When was the last time you had a spontaneous sing-along other than at a football match or at a pub karaoke session? Have you ever tried to start a group singing only to fizzle out half way through the first verse because nobody can remember the words? Or you launch into what you believe to be a well-known song only to be met by confused silence as nobody joins in with you?

Community singing used to be a big pastime in this country (see Singing from the same hymn sheet, Singing together and Should singing together be a guilty pleasure?). But every now and then it dies out and people try to revive it. The last time a really big initiative was launched in the UK was in the 1920s. That was perhaps one of the last times when the majority of people knew a whole bunch of songs in common. Even now, most people know some of these same songs: “Pack up your troubles”, “Bicycle made for two”, “It’s a long way to Tipperary”, “What shall we do with the drunken sailor”, “My bonnie lies over the ocean”. But they often can’t sing them right through without the lyric sheet!

The other week I tried to set up a singing evening with a bunch of friends. OK, it wasn’t entirely spontaneous, but the idea was that we would gather at someone’s house with the intention of having a jolly good sing-along. I asked people to bring instruments if they had them, and a song to share.

Worrying that it might be hard to get the evening going, I prepared a set of lyric sheets with around 20 songs, mainly from the 1960s (we are all of a certain age!). I certainly didn’t want to ‘lead’ the evening, but on the other hand knew that it might take a while to get going. In the end, a couple of people got guitars out and off we went.

I had hoped that:

• the evening would go very smoothly
• people would spontaneously start singing and everyone else would join in
• we would have plenty of songs in common
• there would be no long, awkward silences
• there would be a variety of repertoire, some songs with instruments, some without

However, it didn’t quite turn out like that!

• not everyone knew every song that I’d put on the lyric sheets
• sometimes the guitarists introduced a song that was not on the sheet, but nobody knew all the lyrics
• people were very nervous about initiating a song
  
• people began to rely on the guitarists and it became a little bit like a ‘performance’
• the focus was all on the lyric sheets and everyone appeared to forget all the other songs that they might know
• most people were very self conscious and a little scared of starting a song off, even though most of the people were in choirs and had sung in public

If you’ve read this far, you might be expecting an answer to the post’s title: How to have an English sing-along. Unfortunately I don’t have the answer! I was hoping some of you out there might have some good ideas on how to make a sing-along evening work better.

Can you think of ways of making such an evening go smoothly without it being led too formally?

Why do people end up being so self-conscious, even amongst friends?

Should I just give up and accept that for us, singing together is no longer part of our culture?

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Why do you sing?

I came across an interesting article on Canada’s CBC Radio 2 blog the other day. It was entitled Why do you sing? and attracted several comments from people outlining their own personal reasons why they sing.

Although I’ve posted here not long ago about why people join choirs and singing groups (There are plenty of good reasons to sing), I’ve never really looked at why myself and others like singing in the first place, in whatever form.

I’m going to outline a few reasons why people sing, and tell you about my love of harmony singing, but I’d love to hear about your own reasons. Do leave a comment and tell me why you love to sing.

expressing what we feel

One of the comments on the CBC blog was “To sing is to express being alive”. There are songs for every occasion: sad songs, happy songs, angry songs, love songs. Singing is a way of giving voice to a strong emotion and sharing it with the world. It can be a means of communicating our feelings to others, but also a way of giving ourselves comfort and solace in difficult times.

feeling good

Many people realise that singing can make you feel good. But I’ve also found the opposite: feeling good can make you sing! Often when I’m engaged in something physical and pleasurable like walking or cycling I suddenly notice that I’m singing. It is a natural expression of the way I’m feeling.

Sometimes the last thing I want to do is to sing. But because it’s my job, I turn up at the singing workshop and before I know it, I’m singing (because I have to). After just a few bars however, I notice my mood lifting considerably. Singing should be part of the national health service!

private vs. public

Lots of us sing in the shower, while we’re hoovering, as we’re changing the beds. We sing alone in the house or the car. Nobody can hear or see us and we truly let rip (and think of ourselves as the best singer in the world!). But put us in front of other people and we soon clam up.

As soon as other people are present, we think that we are being judged in some way on our performance. This often affects how we sing and can sometimes be a big obstacle to allowing others to hear our song. On the other hand, there are people who sing because others are listening. They are born to perform and need an ‘audience’ to hear them.

singing together

Personally, I don’t like singing on my own. The reason I sing is to enjoy the harmonies, so I need other people (or a radio or CD playing). I sing because I love the relationship between different notes being sung at the same time. I love the way that harmony singing creates something which is greater than the individuals involved. It makes a separate thing which can’t be done alone, which needs all the participants, and yet no one participant is controlling the final result.

This can be a bit of a problem for me because if nobody is around, I can’t sing with any great pleasure! I need to have people to sing with, and they also need to know the same songs as me in order to join in.

work, rest and play

There are also wider cultural and societal reasons why people sing. There are many rituals in life which involve singing: weddings, funerals, religious services. Some cultures involve singing in their healing practices. Often when large groups of people come together for a shared activity (football matches, outdoor concerts, feasts), singing arises.

There are many examples of songs associated with work activities (work songs). Not only do these songs relieve the boredom of the work (often repetitive in nature), but can help synchronise work actions (chopping, hammering, waulking, reaping, pounding, hauling), help lift the spirits, and create a sense of community (“we’re all in this together”).

deeper meanings

There is a more fundamental reason underlying why we sing. Steven Mithen in his book The Singing Neanderthals: the origins of music, language, mind and body suggests that song and dance came before language. Mithen posits that music-making is a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

why do you sing?

So there are some reasons why people like to sing. But why do you sing? Do let me know by leaving a comment.

 

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Singing the same note – differently!

The other week I was teaching songs by ear at a workshop as I normally do. There were a couple of women who seemed to be having a hard time catching on to their part. They were all over the place and seemed to be singing at random. Then it clicked: they weren’t able to find the right starting note from my voice. But when I sang the note to them at the pitch I wanted them to sing at (i.e. very high in my own range) they were spot on. I wish I’d picked this up earlier in the workshop!

But what does this mean: ‘singing at the pitch I wanted them to sing’? And why do some women get confused by my singing voice and others don’t? Do men have the same problem when women are teaching them by ear? And what on earth does ‘octave’ mean any way??!! This post is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

Pitching from the other side of the fence

You will have noticed that men generally have lower speaking voices than women. We become used to this from a very early age. This is usually the case with their singing voices too. This is such a familiar thing that we don’t really notice it.

We can understand each other’s speech with no problems. It doesn’t matter whether someone has a low or a high voice, the meaning carries across. But when the meaning is communicated by the pitch of the voice (e.g. when singing, or when speaking a pitch-based language such as Chinese), then all sorts of misunderstandings can occur.

If, as a man, I sing a note to a woman somewhere in the middle of my range, then she often automatically compensates for the fact that men’s voices are lower than women’s by responding with a note that is in the middle of her range. She will not be singing exactly the same note (i.e. at the same frequency), but she perceives that it is the ‘same’ in some sense. When I sing higher in my range, she also sings higher in her range. And when I sing lower, then she will sing lower too. We probably won’t ever be singing at the same pitch/ frequency.

Similarly, if a woman sings a note in the middle of her range to a man, then usually the man will respond with a note in the middle of his range. He will automatically make an adjustment for the differences between men’s and women’s voices. He won’t attempt so sing exactly the same note/ pitch/ frequency, but a note that he perceives to be the ‘same’.

So far so good. But some people don’t make these automatic adjustments. They try to match the exact pitch of the person singing to them. This means that men will try to sing very, very high (and usually fail) when trying to match to a woman’s voice, and women will try to sing ever so low (and usually fail) when trying to match with a man. This can be the source of a mistaken belief that someone can’t ‘sing’.

This is not too much of a problem when women sing very high notes in their range, or men sing very low notes, because we know that trying to match them is doomed to failure. But when we are dealing with middling notes, then confusion can arise. Do they want me to sing exactly the same note as they are singing, or do they want the equivalent note in the middle of my range?

This becomes even more complicated because some people think that just because they perceive two notes to be the same, then they actually are the same! If a man and a woman are singing a melody in unison together, then it can appear to the singers that they are singing exactly the same notes, whereas they will actually be singing an octave apart (more on the idea of the octave later).

In fact, when a man and a woman sing exactly the same note at the same pitch, it can feel very, very strange and unfamiliar!

Singing with the opposite sex

When I first sang in a small group with women, I found it very hard to stand next to a woman and sing. If I had to match her pitch, it felt at first like I was singing really, really high, but she was singing low! It took me a while to learn to feel comfortable and to perceive that we were actually singing the same note.

You may have come across this if you sing in the tenor section of a community which is often mixed men and women. I often find myself as a choir leader having to give out two starting notes: one low in my range for the women (who then sing low in their range), and one at the absolute pitch, high in my range, for the men. Then the men and women end up singing exactly the same note, but often perceive it to be different!

You might also find something strange when singing harmony with a member of the opposite sex. For example, a female alto and a male tenor might sing together. In absolute terms his harmony will be below her melody, but he may well perceive it to be higher than hers. This is because he will be singing high in his range, whereas she will be singing low in hers. And vice versa for the woman. It takes a while to get used to!

The same note sounding different!

To make matters even more complicated, two people of the same gender, singing exactly the same note (i.e. identical frequency) can appear to be singing different notes! This is something to take into account when considering the blend of voices in a choir.

For example, in a female harmony trio, the woman singing the middle part can sometimes appear to be lower than the person singing the lowest part because of the quality, texture and placement of her voice. This is connected with the concept of tessitura that I mentioned in last week’s post (what part do I sing?). Although two women may be singing the same note, for one it might be slap bang in the middle of her comfortable range, whereas for another it may be at the very lowest limits of her range and be rather uncomfortable to sing. This can make the two singers sound very different, even if they are singing the same note.

What is an octave?

Some community choir leaders whose choirs don’t use written scores and who don’t assume any musical knowledge on the part of their singers, often feel the need for some shorthand to creep into their rehearsals. If everyone understands “the harmony is just a third above” or “we need to have more of a crescendo at that point”, then it can save a lot of explanation. Jargon is simply a shorthand agreed between a particular group of people, and can be very useful. However, we can’t assume that everyone knows the same shorthand terms!

Many choir leaders use the term ‘octave’ as a shorthand. Personally I find this one of the most difficult concepts to explain to non-musical folk, even though it makes things much, much easier when talking to the tenors for example! If someone is pitching in the wrong place, it’s great to be able to say “No, you need to sing an octave up” or “The women will be singing in the lower octave for this part”.

All sound, including the singing voice, is made up of sound waves. We refer to a note as being ‘high’ or ‘low’ (although when considering a piano, for example, this could equally be called ‘left’ or ‘right’) depending on how often (or frequently) the sound waves hit your ears. Technically, the higher the frequency of a note (the faster rate at which the sound waves hit your ear), the higher it sounds. Similarly, the lower the frequency, the lower the note sounds.

Frequency can be measured in terms of number of vibrations or oscillations or waves arriving per second. In music, however, we tend to refer to pitch instead of frequency, although it is actually the same thing.

Any note that is double the frequency of another is said to be one octave higher. In music, such notes seem to have such a special relationship to each other that they are given the same name. For example, a note that is an octave higher or lower than a note called ‘C ‘ is also called ‘C’. Similarly, a note that is one or more octaves higher or lower than a note called ‘B flat’ will also be called ‘B flat’.

The reason that notes an octave apart have such a special place in music is that they appear to sound like each other (which is why they are given the same name). However, this is a factor of the musical tradition that one comes from. In Corsica, for example, because of its traditional harmony singing tradition, the interval of a fifth (that is, five notes apart in whatever scale you are singing in), as well as the octave are said to be the ‘same’ note because they appear to sound the same.

I’m sure many of you will have had the experience of singing in perfect harmony with a melody only to have a momentary doubt that you are, in fact, singing the melody by mistake because they fit so well together. For a brief moment, it appears that you are singing exactly the same notes!

The octave is therefore a very difficult concept to explain to those with no musical background. I have heard myself say things in the heat of the moment like: “It’s the same note, only higher”. Which is, of course, nonsense when you think about it!

The perfect match

So next time you are teaching or being taught by a member of the opposite sex and are finding things problematic, take a moment and think about where you might pitch your voice to get the ‘right’ note. Don’t make assumptions. My own choir are now used to being led by a man and pretty much all of the women make automatic adjustments (though there can be the occasional difficulty with the tenor part!). So when Michael Harper, a counter tenor, came to run a workshop and sang every part at the correct pitch, it momentarily freaked the tops out who were trying to sing somewhere in the stratosphere before they realised what was happening!

 

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com