How to be a good choir member

Last week I wrote about whether you need singing lessons in order to be able to sing. I suggested that people should simply jump in and join a choir before they ever consider individual singing lessons. I pointed out that there are important group and harmony skills that cannot be taught one-to-one.

Photo by CowGummy

This week I want to consider what qualities make for being a good choir member. Of course, this list is personal and not exhaustive, so I would welcome any additions from all you fine readers out there. Do drop by and leave a comment. I always welcome your feedback and wisdom (it can get lonely this side of the keyboard!).

So, in no particular order, these are the qualities that I believe make for an ideal choir member:

• punctuality
  It takes a while to build up a safe, creative atmosphere, but only a second to destroy it. If we’re doing some focused warm up work, we don’t want people wandering in half way through!
  
  I know some people get stuck in traffic or have to come straight from work, but persistent latecomers aren’t showing respect for their fellow choir members (or the work or the choir), and are often the ones who would benefit most from the voice training and stress-busting warm up!
   
• commitment
  Commitment to the choir can be shown in many ways (not least turning up on time!). But for most community choirs, the most important commitment is simply to turn up every week!
  
  There are many people who pay for the whole term but show up only once or twice. Again, this demonstrates a lack of respect for both the choir and its members. Also it implies that the work that we do each week rehearsing and learning songs is not that valuable and it’s possible to just turn up for the concert.
   
• responsibility
  It’s all too easy to let your choir director or other members of your part do all the work. It’s an easy cop-out. Yes, the director is in charge, but the final result depends on every single individual in the choir. It’s no good thinking that your fellow singers will back you up and cover you through the bits you don’t know that well. If every singer in the choir thought that, there would be no choir!
  
  You have to take responsibility to attend regularly (and on time), to know your part, to stay aware of rehearsal schedules, to listen to the director’s instructions, and so on.
   
• self-awareness
  Many people stumble through life not really paying attention. Or if they do pay attention, its often to the wrong thing! How many times have you been bumped into in the supermarket by someone whose focus is on the cereal packet they’re about to buy, and not the throng of people surrounding them?
  
  Often it’s simply a matter of being in the moment, being present and engaged with whatever is going on at that particular point. This can be helped by focusing on the warm up each session which assists in the transition between your busy daily life and the job of being in a choir.
  
  It’s by paying attention to what you’re doing that helps you to learn and improve. When the director points out that you’re tipping your head back, then check in with your own body and see what that feels like. When your fellow alto complains that you’re singing too loudly in their ear, check in with yourself and make a note of how it feels in that moment and what you can do next time.
   
• trust
  Some people find it very uncomfortable to be in the middle of a learning process. When you first start to learn a new song it can feel frustrating that you can’t quite nail the tune. Even when you’ve been singing a song for a while, you might still keep tripping over some of the words.
  
  Try not to get frustrated, but give yourself up to the process and trust that it will come out right in the end. Similarly, if the director’s new structure for a song seems weird, trust that she knows what she’s doing and is not setting out to make you or the choir look forward.
  
  Throw yourself into these processes wholeheartedly and trust them. If you want to analyse or question, wait until the process is over (i.e. after the concert or at the end of term) to evaluate. If you find that your trust was misplaced, you can always leave and find a better choir!
   
• attentiveness
  This is related to self-awareness and having a sense of the whole. Often an individual choir member forgets where they are and starts chatting to their neighbour for instance. After all, they’ve finished learning their part and are, in fact, talking about important singing matters after all. But what they don’t realise is that they’re missing what’s going on around them.
  
  You need to be attentive to the director (or you might miss your cue), the singers around you (you don’t want to breathe at the wrong time), the overall choir sound (make sure your part is not louder than all the others), and what your own responsibilities are (don’t miss your solo!).
   
• consideration for others
  This is all to do with respect: respect for your fellow human beings and hence respect for what you and other choir members are doing and therefore respect for the choir as a whole.
  
  Don’t be a prima donna – choirs are all about team work. Remember what it was like when you first joined the choir – help out new members. If someone in your part is struggling, don’t feel superior because you’ve nailed it – stand next to them and help them out gently.
   
• listening skills
  You may find it surprising that singing skills aren’t in this list of important things for being a good choir member. My belief is that everyone can sing and that, given time, everyone in the choir can get to the same high standard.
  
  However, to get to that point, instead of focusing on the production of the voice, you need to pay more attention to what you are hearing. Using your self-awareness, you can begin to hear when you are getting the notes right and when you are not. Listening to others in your part will help you stay in time, blend better and work as a unit. Reaching out to hear the other parts will help you stay in tune, enjoy and get a better understanding of how harmony works. And finally, listening to what the director has to say can only be a good thing!
   
• sense of the whole
  It’s no good relying on the director to give you feedback all the time. It’s also no good to just focus on those singers around you. It’s much more pleasurable to reach out and try to get a sense of the whole choir. Hear the harmonies working, check the blend, get the volume balance of each part right, wait for the choir to take a single in-breath to start the next song, feel part of a creative team – a living organism.
   
• sense of humour
  Maybe this is the most important aspect of all. Keep smiling when all around you are struggling. Laugh off the umpteenth time the director has pointed out that you’re getting a phrase wrong. Find the humour in the man standing next to you who constantly sings the wrong note – loudly! Relax, be playful, make it fun. After all, although you take the whole choir thing seriously, it’s only a bit of singing!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Do you need singing lessons in order to sing?

I often get enquiries from people looking for one-to-one singing lessons. I tell them that unfortunately I don’t offer them.

Then I say that I don’t recommend singing lessons in any case, but recommend they join a choir instead. Do singing lessons help people sing better?

why do you want singing lessons any way?

The vast majority of people who contact me for singing lessons don’t give much background information! There’s none of this: “I’ve been singing in a choir for years and would like to increase my range” or this: “I’m just starting out and don’t know whether I can sing or not.” But on closer examination (and a few emails or phone calls later) it almost always turns out that people are in the last category.

She has been “meaning to start singing for years” but just “hasn’t got around to it”. In many cases it’s very similar to those people who’ve been “meaning to write a novel for years” but never quite got around to it. Will they ever get around to it? Will it simply be a flash in the pan? How much do they really want to sing? They only need to open their mouths and let the sound out!

singing with others is different

To be fair though, there is a huge group of people who love singing, maybe sing around the house or in the car, who maybe were even in a choir at school, but have not sung with a group before (or at least, not in a long time). They may feel comfortable and confident when singing alone, but are nervous about singing in front of, or with others.

That’s when all the doubts crowd in: maybe my voice isn’t as good as the others; perhaps I’ve been kidding myself and I can’t really ‘sing’ after all; it would be terrible if I inflicted my voice on other people and it turns out to be awful; maybe I can only sing along with my CDs and am not able to learn ‘proper’ songs with other people; I don’t know anything about music, so I’ll be a fish out of water.

We’ve met these people before. They’re often the people who think they can’t sing (Why people think they can’t sing, But I can’t sing that high!) or who love singing but never actually get it together to join a group (I love to sing, but I’m not leaving the house!).

singing lessons will turn you into a proper singer

Many people in this situation (i.e. choral ‘beginners’, those with not much experience of singing with others) are drawn to the idea of having singing lessons. They think the lessons will improve their voice, teach them to sing ‘properly’, give them feedback on whether they sound OK or not, introduce them to music theory, turn a ‘singing at home’ voice into a beautiful choral voice.

In many situations though, this is simply putting off the inevitable. It’s rather like people who want to write that novel and keep buying “How to write novels” books, but never actually get round to picking up a pen! There is no easy way to walk into a room of strangers and sing with them. There is no preparation that can help this step into the unknown. In fact, having a singing lesson is probably even harder than joining a choir!

singing solo with an audience

OK, so you’re feeling a little under-confident about singing with others. You’re not sure whether your voice sounds nice or not and you don’t know if you can hit the high notes. You’ve been singing round the house for years, but nobody (except the kids and the dog) has actually heard you. What’s the next step?

Why not pay an experienced professional singer (who knows much more about music than you do, who can probably sing much better than you, and who has years of experience of performing in front of vast audiences) to give you some of their time so you can stand in front of them and sing solo for the first time? No problem! Easy as falling off a log.

In my opinion this would scare any beginning singer to death! It’s not even as scary as singing in front of your friends since they don’t know much about music any way. This is an expert who will be able to hear all the little things you do wrong, who’s sung with some of the best voices in the business. Even if they’re the kindest, most sensitive, caring teacher in the world and really want to help you, what can they do?

If you’ve not sung much before, you won’t be that familiar with your own voice or how it connects with your body and breath. You also probably won’t know much about music theory. The singing teacher might start to say things like “lower your larynx”, “make sure your diaphragm is engaged”, “sing me a minor scale”. These won’t mean much to you, and even if they do, you won’t have had the experience to put them into practice in a way that means something to you and can help you improve.

join a choir!

But if you join a choir, you are just one of many. You are not put on the spot or asked to sing solo (unless you want to). You can spend many happy months or years singing with others and slowly learning to feel your away around your own voice. You will feel supported (you’re not the only one singing your part, nor are you the only one lacking in experience or confidence) whilst you gradually extend your range and the possible comfortable sounds you can make. You can be playful in the warm ups and discover more about how your voice works, how it feels, and how it connects with your breath and body. By singing a variety of songs, you will slowly start to pick up some musical jargon (minor and major, scale, interval, legato, 4/4). They might not mean much to start with, and it’s not necessary to know this stuff, but by experiencing the music and then connecting it with some of these new terms, it will slowly begin to make sense and add to your musical vocabulary.

time for a singing lesson?

Once you have sung with others for a considerable time, you may come across a limitation in your own singing. Despite all the warm ups and voice training that the musical director weaves into each choir session, it is not possible for them to give everybody individual attention. So even though your breath control and range have improved since you first joined the choir, you feel that there’s still room for more improvement.

Now if you decide to go for one-to-one singing lessons, you are in much better position to learn something. You will be more familiar with your own voice so will be able to make more sense of the subtle instructions that the singing teacher will give about posture, alignment, diaphragm, etc. You will be able to feel and appreciate the difference these small changes can make.

You will feel much more comfortable singing solo in front of the teacher and you will also not be phased if she uses any musical jargon. If there’s something you don’t understand, you will feel confident to ask for an explanation. In short, you are now in a much better position to learn more about your own singing voice.

developing choral and harmony skills

Whatever you might learn from one-to-one singing lessons, there is a whole set of skills that you need that can only be learnt in a group. For example, it’s not possible to sing three part harmony if there are only two of you!

My next post will be on the subject of how to be a good choir member, and the week after that I’ll be looking at the skills that I believe are necessary when singing harmony with a group of singers, whether it be in a large community choir or a small ensemble.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Performing outdoors – tips and tricks

I really, really don’t like performing outdoors (I’ll come to why in a moment)! But sometimes it’s unavoidable, so what can we do to make it work?

Since I haven’t performed outdoors that often, I would love to hear any advice from those of you who do it more often, or who perhaps even like it! Do drop by and leave a comment.

why I don’t like performing outdoors

• it might rain
  You can never rely on the British weather! There’s a big danger that there will be a downpour in the middle of your performance and the audience will either run away or disappear under a sea of umbrellas. On the other hand, it may be so hot and sunny that you end up with heatstroke!
   
• the wind carries the sound in the wrong direction
  Sod’s law is that the wind will be blowing the wrong way and will carry your beautiful sounds away from the audience. Even if it doesn’t manage to do that, you can bet it will suck the sound right out of your neighbour’s mouth so you can’t hear her harmonies.
   
• the audience are often too scattered
  No matter what you try to do, there will be audience members who will try to sit as far away from where you’re performing as is physically possible. The rest will scatter themselves about so it is impossible to sing to them in any direct way without constantly rotating on the spot. Then at the end, the audience who were furthest away will complain that they couldn’t see or hear you!
   
• people might just wander off
  I hate busking! The audience can just bugger off if they don’t like you. I’d much rather get punters to pay and chain them to their seats. Similarly at a festival, if someone doesn’t like you in the first 5 seconds, they can just wander off leaving your heart to sink into your stomach: “They don’t like me!”
   
• the singers can’t hear each other well enough
  There you are, singing your heart out, when you realise that you can’t hear anybody else. There is no acoustic, the wind is blowing hard, and the audience are chatting away. You can’t hear the other harmonies so go out of tune easily, and the timing is rubbish ’cause you can’t hear the other singers.
   
• there is a tendency to shout instead of sing
  It’s the big outside world and it needs to be filled with sound, plus the audience are miles away. You can’t hear your fellow singers so figure they can’t hear you either. So you end up singing LOUDLY. Actually, it’s not really singing at all. Since you can’t even hear yourself outdoors, you end up SHOUTING.
   
• trying to amplify a group of singers is very hard
  You roll up at the gig and the sound man convinces you he knows what he’s doing. He sticks a couple of mics up, there’s no time for a proper sound check, and off we go. The monitors (if you have any!) are too quiet and pointing in the wrong direction. The mics are all directional and only pick up two singers (who sing the same part). If there does happen to be a mic each, then that’s an awful lot of cable to trip over! It’s a fine art setting up microphones for acappella singing, and there aren’t that many sound people out there who have the experience!
   
• using microphones is a new skill to learn
  You’ve spent years honing your acappella skills and work really well as a group. You lean in to hear your fellow singers, you look them in the eye, you stay close, you are aware of their every nuance. Suddenly you are at an outdoor gig and have a microphone shoved up your nose. Your fellow singers seem to be miles away, your voice sounds weird through the monitors (and you can’t hear the others either) and you can’t see anyone over the top of the mic stand.
   
• the venue might not be suited to performance
  It seemed a nice idea when the local village fete booked you, but when you turn up there is no obvious place to stand, the field (which is still wet and muddy from last week’s rain) is a strange L-shape and full of trees, there is no fixed place for the audience, and even if there was, the huge marquee in the middle makes it difficult for them to see you wherever you stand.
   
• competing with background noise and attention
  It’s outside. There are cows, planes, passing cars, trees rustling, fireworks, audiences talking, overspill from the reggae tent next door, much more interesting things to look at, crying babies, people selling shiny things, tannoy announcements – why would anyone want to listen to you?
   
• no control over the situation
  No matter what the organisers say, don’t believe them. They will lay it on thick about what a wonderful venue it is, how the audience always sit along that bank at the back (honest!), that the PA system is state of the art, that there will be lights (it’s just that the truck hasn’t arrived yet) so the audience can see you in the dusk, that the ice cream van won’t be there on the day. They are lying!
   

what you can do to make the best of a bad situation

• don’t shout!
  Resist the temptation to try to sing loudly and fill the space. Focus on your breathing and resonance and make sure you listen carefully. You don’t have to be big just because the space and the audience are big. Being small and subtle can draw an audience in.
   
• focus on each other
  Forget the audience (well, not totally – you might like to face in their direction at least). Make sure you focus on the other singers. Stay close, listen carefully, look at each other often.
   
• do it for yourselves
  Imagine that the gig is just for you, an intimate experience that will be so excellent that it will draw the audience in. This will make the space seem smaller and the occasion not so intimidating.
   
• take the songs to the audience
  If you’re not restricted to a stage, you can wander around and really use the space to literally take the songs to the audience. Move the group around and within the spectators. They will feel more involved, the people being focused on will feel special, and the rest will feel that they’re missing out so will pay more attention.
   
• it’s a completely different gig to the indoor version
  Don’t try to replicate the experience you had the last time you did the gig indoors. Outdoor gigs are a completely different experience, each one being totally unique. Go into it well-prepared, but try not to have expectations. There is much more scope in an outdoor gig for improvisation and playing it be ear.
   
• have a dry run
  If at all possible, have at least one rehearsal in the space. Get used to any acoustics (if there are any!), figure out where the audience will be, try out different groupings, etc.
   
• be in control
  Take as much control as you can. If you need PA and/ or lighting, then bring your own if at all possible, or at least have your own sound person. Find the best place to perform and insist upon it. It might be a good idea to have a wall behind you to help with the acoustics. See if there’s any way you can help the audience to gather in a tighter group as near to your performing space as possible (e.g. tape an area off, set chairs out in advance).
   
• see what else is on
  Check to see if any other acts are due on at the same time and if they’re going to be loud, see if you can negotiate different timings for your set.
   
• don’t take the audience reaction to heart
  They might look bored, they might just walk away, but don’t take it to heart. They may just have a naturally looking miserable face, or they might have to get home to feed the baby and wished they could stay longer. I’ve written on this subject in an earlier post (How audiences affect us)
   
• stay close!
  Make sure you are physically close to the other singers. You will probably need to be even closer than usual. And I mean close! If you’re using microphones, try to set these up so you can stand as close together as possible.
   
• always have a back-up plan
  However carefully you’ve planned, something will go wrong, that’s guaranteed. So consider all eventualities (weather, lack of audience, tuning going out, PA system breaking down) and think of an alternative to get you out of the fix.
   
• don’t do it!
  I’ve saved the best piece of advice for last: if you have the choice, just DON’T EVER PERFORM OUTDOORS!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Finding out about songs: don’t believe everything you read!

I was in the middle of planning a workshop I’m running this weekend and was checking through a few songs to make sure I had the correct lyrics, source, meaning, background, etc. I came across a few that I couldn’t figure out so I went searching and ended up with several contradictory pieces of information!

find a trustworthy source

How do we go about finding out the correct background information to a song? How can we be sure that the lyrics are correct, especially if it’s in a foreign language? What about the translation: is it accurate, a poetic interpretation, or just plain hearsay? Are the lyrics accurate in the source language, or are they phonetically written? Are you sure that the country of origin and source language are correctly attributed?

The internet is an extremely valuable tool when trying to track down song information. But, like all media, it is not to be trusted! Many is the time that a false story has appeared in print and been picked up by other outlets then spread like wild fire without anybody bothering to check the facts. With the internet, this process just happens faster.

chinese whispers

The same with songs. Somebody mis-hears a song at a workshop or whilst singing around the camp-fire. They go home and write down the lyrics (phonetically), note down the country of origin (incorrectly), and half-remember what it was supposed to be about. Through a process of Chinese whispers, this song gets passed around from mouth to ear to mouth until it bears little relation to when it was first heard (and we don’t even know if it was accurate the first time!).

Very soon the song is widely known and its origins and meaning become fixed in people’s minds. The song then gets printed in a songbook and the myth gets perpetuated. Nobody has bothered to go back to the source or try to find out from scratch if the story and background is accurate or not. Now it’s in print, people believe that it must be true.

You can see this happening on the internet too, but it becomes a little easier to spot the myths. When searching for a particular song, it may come up on many different websites, but you soon realise that the text on each site is exactly the same! Somebody has written something once and it’s just got passed around intact without anybody bothering to question.

There is an apocryphal story of this process at work (I’m not sure how true it is, but it’s very believable!). A well-known workshop leader taught one of her own songs in a workshop. This song was then spread by various people who attended the workshop. Many years later, she was teaching it at another workshop when a participant came up to her and said that she’d got it wrong and proceeded to correct her tune and lyrics and tell her a long, involved story about the origins of this ‘traditional’ song. And she’d written the thing in the first place!

getting to the source

Before I teach a song I try to check that the information I have is accurate. If I learnt it from an individual, I go back to them and ask them where they got the information from. I then try to go back to that source and so on. If it’s in a book, I look to see what their sources are and if they credit someone in particular. If I’m not sure about something I’ll search on the internet (I’ll be writing a post on this later) and make sure I come up with at least two different sources for the information. I also try to contact an individual from the culture or country concerned (either through personal contact or via the internet), especially if they speak the language.

an example of song hunting

I’d like to give a concrete example that I’ve dealt with recently.

I got a song from a songbook recently which simply said “African greeting song”. It is called ‘Baba lagumbala’. The score said that it had been shared at a singing camp by someone in 2006. I contacted that person and was told that she’d got it from someone in Canada and told me that she thought it was a harvest song from West Africa.

I managed to track down the song on the website of the Canadian concerned. He didn’t say where he’d learnt it from, but on his site it said that it was in Zulu! He did usefully point out that he’d “learned it aurally so may not have the spelling correct. My apologies to anyone who speaks the language of origin. If anyone can inform me further I would appreciate it and will post it here.”

I searched for the song using Google and the spelling I found on his site and only four separate sites came up. One was the Canadian’s, one was about an Arkansas choir who sang it in one of their concerts, and one was of an arranger who had arranged the song in 2003 and credited it as “An African harvest song”. The fourth site was a resource site in the UK for children’s singing in schools. This contains a video of two black guys in traditional costume playing percussion and singing the song. The site mentions Ghana and harvest, but gives no more details. It looks fairly authentic, but I need to know more! Next step would be to contact someone through that website.

Google then suggested an alternative spelling: ‘Baba la gumbala’ and a whole new set of pages came up, mostly from Germany and Eastern Europe. This shows that it’s worth trying alternative spellings, but I’m still no wiser about the song!

more to meaning than meets the eye

No single person has the monopoly on the meaning of a song, especially if it is written poetically or metaphorically. You can ask two natives of the same culture about a particular song and get two widely different answers! Also, you need to be careful about what you are asking for. Sometimes a direct translation of the lyrics are not enough.

For example, I was taught a song called Inkonkoni iyajama by a group of Zimbabwean lads in Derby. The direct translation of the nine words in the song comes to something like:

The wildebeest strikes a pose. We will wait and see. They think we are blind.

Seems a bit boring on the surface so I asked the guys for a bit more background information and a whole story emerged about the nature of the wildebeest, the fact that the wildebeest is a rare animal and it is a bad omen if you see one (although any bad things might not happen today), and that older people have a longer view of life. So the song ends up meaning something like:

The wildebeest has the sweetest meat in the forest and is not very strong, yet it manages to survive the many lions and leopards which prey upon it. The wildebeest is poised ready to strike. This represents a problem approaching the community. But although the wildebeest is a bad omen, we will not be scared today, but will wait and see what happens. The very old members of the community may appear not to see well, but have great spiritual insight and take a long view of things. So the community will wait to see if the approaching problem will distract them from their traditional ways.

Not bad for a nine-word song!

So make sure you ask the right questions and get the views of several people before pinning a song down.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

The problem with men: getting them, handling them, keeping them

May 2010 Since this post was written, I’ve done some more research which you can find at Why men won’t sing: a discussion

What is it with blokes and singing? In most open-access adult workshops that I run, only 10% of the participants are men. Many male voice choirs have an aging membership. Most mixed community choirs find it hard to recruit male singers (the 10% figure also applies to many choirs that I know).

I’ve looked briefly at this subject before (Where are all the male singers?), but thought it merited further examination. I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had any male problems in your choir, especially if you’ve found an interesting solution.

men and the arts

When I used to run theatre workshops, there were similar low numbers of men. I’m sure the same applies to dance, pottery, life drawing, etc. In fact, when I attend any kind of ‘arty’ workshop, I am often the only man there! Yet in the professional art world, many of the top names are men, so they must get their training and inspiration from somewhere.

There are many reasons I have heard why men won’t join any kind of arty class:

• arts aren’t a macho subject
• blokes like to hang out with other blokes
• men prioritise their careers, not their leisure time
• guys like to be in control and know what they’re doing, they don’t like the vagueness of art subjects
• some men are intimidated by a room full of women
• most chaps like to look good and competent, so they tend to do their learning in private
• blokes are not particularly social animals and shy away from group activities (unless it’s football!)
• community choirs are too egalitarian – men like hierarchical structures, competition and goals (maybe this is why there are so many barbershop singers?)

men and singing

Even if none of the reasons above apply to a particular man, he may still not want to join a choir or singing workshop, even if he loves singing. He might simply be hesitant to join a group that’s been going for a while. But as I pointed out in an earlier post, it’s not that daunting and Everybody has a place in the choir. Like many people, he may not think his voice is ‘good enough’ (whatever that means!) and most men don’t like to be vulnerable in public. Even if a guy thinks his voice is ‘OK’, he may have had experiences where the songs are too high or too low for his voice, so he figures that he just doesn’t fit in. This is because most men are natural baritones, not basses or tenors (see But I can’t sing that high!).

And if a bloke is not persuaded by the fact that singing in a choir is good for your health and he will be surrounded by eligible women, he can always check out that There are plenty of good reasons to sing.

It’s not only male singers who are thin on the ground, but also male choir and workshop leaders. For example, the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network has around 270 members of whom only 40 are men (many of whom are called David for some reason!). This means that most mixed community choirs (at least those run on Natural Voice lines) are run by women. This leads us onto …

men and pitching

Men can get easily confused (ah, bless ‘em!) when a woman is trying to give them their note. I’ve talked about this in an earlier post: Singing the same note – differently. A woman can sing the note at pitch for the tenors (in which case they might try to sing an octave higher!), but usually can’t get down low enough to pitch the bass part. And if a woman choir leader is (un)fortunate to get a male bass who sings an octave below all the other men, she will have a difficult job getting him back on track.

Sometimes you get a confident male singer who can blast out as good as the next man, but never seems to be able to hit the right notes. There are women who do this too, but the male voice tends to be louder and more noticeable. So we have this chap merrily singing along at the top of his lungs, really enjoying himself, oblivious to the fact that what he’s singing bears little relationship to his part (or even the main tune).

Often the bass part has only a few notes so is harder to remember than the tune. For someone not used to harmony singing, it is often the case that a bass can find himself trying to sing the tune rather than the bass part (usually without realising it!).

There is nothing inherently wrong with a guy not getting his part right, but if he ends up singing so loud that he puts the other men around him off, or if he stands out in the overall blend in the choir, then we need to do something.

it’s not just the men!

This is not just limited to men, of course, but it is perhaps more noticeable with male voices. The alto who is a little bit out usually manages to gently blend in with the others and nobody notices. Unfortunately, men tend to have louder voices, and perhaps more importantly, the male sections are usually much, much smaller than the other sections.

If a 60-voice choir only had six altos, then they would really be put on the spot, be very noticeable, and have to deliver their part forcefully and accurately. But that’s not usually the case, and that pressure ends up being put on the poor basses. Fortunately, the men usually have a good sense of humour and can put up with the barbed wit that I often send in their direction!

learning to listen

If, for any reason, you have a singer (male or female) who sings loudly and wrongly, then you have to do something for the greater good of the part they’re in, and of the choir. In fact, the only time I have ever, ever asked someone to leave a choir or workshop since I started doing this back in 1997, was when an over-enthusiastic member of the bass section used to consistently sing loudly and wrongly. I felt awful asking him to leave – we are, after all, an open-access choir, and I believe that everyone can sing. But he was putting the other guys off so much that they couldn’t learn their parts properly or sustain them accurately, and I was worried that some of them might leave.

So I took this chap to one side and pointed out that he needed to develop his listening skills. Too often we think there is a problem with the production of the singing voice, whereas often it’s just because somebody is not listening: to themselves, to the other voices in their part, to the harmonies, to the person teaching the song.

If someone is a bit nervous or unused to singing with others, they become focused on their own voice and stop listening to those around them. That’s when mistakes are made. We need to constantly bring singers’ focus of attention back to the here and now (“watch what I’m doing, listen to what I’m singing/ saying”) and to the overall mix of voices in their own part and of the choir as a whole.

Unfortunately in a choir, it’s not possible to give particular singers individual attention. As choir leaders we can introduce listening training into our warm ups, but that can only go so far. So I told this man that he would need to go away and do some work on his own to develop his listening skills. It wasn’t that he less able than the other choir members, just that he hadn’t had as much listening experience as them. I suggested he seek out opportunities to do unison singing: church, karaoke, football matches, folk club sing-alongs, etc. Once he had become more aware of his own voice and that he was fitting in exactly with the other singers, then he could come back to choir and begin to develop his harmony singing abilities.

male singers are for life, not just for Christmas

I don’t have any answers in how we can recruit and retain more male singers. I’ve tried running a men-only workshop each year. It’s great fun and we make a wonderful sound, but it’s usually men who sing in choirs already. It’s hard to attract new singers.

We’ve tried “bring a man, get 50% off” and similar variations on workshop fees. This can result in more men attending a particular workshop, but doesn’t convert into more regular membership of choirs.

Often, after a concert (usually at Christmas) I get several blokes coming up to me afterwards to say they want to join the choir. Last year I had four. One of them came for a few sessions, but I never heard from the others!

If I had the time and the energy, there is one thing I would like to try: instead of asking the men to come to a workshop (scary, unknown, not their kind of thing, too busy, need to get off my backside, etc. etc.), bring the workshop to the men! Find places where men gather naturally (pub, rugby club, snooker hall, freemasons) and just turn up to run a taster workshop for half an hour. I bet that there will be a few individuals who will be enthused enough to want to take it further.

Do let me know if you have had any similar problems, have found other solutions, or have any good ideas on how to recruit young(er) men to choirs.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Read more!

I’ve made a slight tweak to my blog this week. From now on, there will only be a summary of each post on the ‘home’ page of the blog. If you want to read the rest, simply click on the ‘Continue reading ...’ link and you will be taken to the full post.

I hope this will allow people to scan more posts on the home page to see what interests them. Let me know what you think!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

From the back of the choir 2 - a typical choir session

This is the second guest post from Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Her first post was From the back of the choir 1 — first steps which looked at her experience of joining the SOAS World Music Choir. In this post, Deb describes a typical weekly choir session.

Chris was kind enough to ask me to contribute some thoughts about what it’s like to be involved in a natural voice style world music choir from the choir member’s perspective. The promise that there would be no auditions and no requests for anyone to sing alone was very important to me. Like lots of people I’ve previously been given messages suggesting that I “can’t sing”, but I still enjoy trying. In this kind of choir, that’s not a problem, I fit right in. I’ve no desire whatsoever to be a soloist, or in any way to draw attention to myself, so I always prefer to stand at the back of the choir for performances.

A typical practice session with the SOAS World Music Choir

Practice starts at 7pm on a weekday, actually people tend to drift in over the first 20 minutes or so … We form a big loose circle and the choir director starts with a physical warm up, shaking out tight muscles and a bit of stretching. No standing in prim rows, it’s shoes off and stand straight (in my case, at least for as long as I can stand!).

Then onto some noise-making: sirens, humming, nonsense sounds, whatever the director suggests, really, sometimes we add the sound effects for a funny story. Then we might move on to some kind of vocal scales, perhaps in the form of a counting song, moving up and down the range of our voices — don’t strain, but reach as low or high as you can. It’s surprising, but the group manages to start sounding like a choir, even this early in the session.

Learning songs

For a first song, the director will probably choose something very easy. It might be something silly, like a tongue-twister, or something we have practised often before.

Or perhaps a simple piece that can be easily turned into a multi-part round (that’s where the choir is formed into many sections and each sings the same, but they start at different times, so the sound has many layers).

The second piece might be some work on a more difficult song, in our case that’s usually something in a language other than English (more about that later). It’s usually best to do the toughest stuff before people get too tired.

Usually we work by first all learning the tune, that provides a basic structure into which we fit the parts. Then the director teaches each section their part. She breaks down the part into shorter phrases and first we repeat them to try and establish the words and rhythm, then we start to sing them. It takes only a handful of repetitions of simpler songs to allow the people singing the part to get enough confidence to allow the choir to run through all of the parts together.

In a typical session we might manage to fit in a refresher of one or two more songs we have learned before, maybe adding more verses or adding extra parts. So typically we cover three or four songs in an evening. This means that over the course of the Autumn and Spring terms (about 40 practice-hours) we learn a repertoire of about 10-12 pieces. Since the SOAS choir has about two-thirds new members each year (as many students move on) we tend to learn a new repertoire each year, though we might carry over one or two favourites.

How do you learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before?

The simplest answer is: by any means that works for you! Basic repetition works in the very short term, for example, to allow us to sing the part immediately after it was taught, but it may not be enough to allow us to remember a part from week to week.

So apart from repetition, how do we learn? Most people use one or more of the basic learning modes: visual, auditory, kinaesthetic and semantic. In other words we might remember by associating the sounds with an image; or by associating the sounds of the song with a rhythm or with sounds we recognise (perhaps a foreign phrase sounds like a name, or a phrase in English). Another possibility is to learn by the movements (kinaesthetic links), how that strange sound feels as you say it, distinctive mouth movements. The other possibility is to find, or to assign, a meaning (semantic content) to the unfamiliar sounds. This can be through understanding the translation, but it can also be just a matter of attaching an arbitrary meaning to the sounds to help you to remember them.

How do you remember all those songs??!!

The other thing that can help us to remember is a specific cue: I find it helpful to be given the first line of a piece, after that I can often drag the rest out of my memory as I sing it. Other people might remember from the title, or they associate it with the language or the country of origin (“let’s sing the one in Zulu …” or “what about that Georgian song?”). Other times people remember the narrative content (“I like the one about the orphan hawk”)

If this all sounds too much, don’t worry. I got through my whole first year as a choir member, including a performance, without properly learning any of the songs: my memory was blank until the director gave the first line as a cue. The second year was easier and this year I actually did learn in full several of the songs — which suggests that learning by ear does improve one’s auditory memory. So keep working on it!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

But I can’t sing that high!

When you join a choir that sings in harmony, you will find that some parts are too high for you and some parts are too low. Just like Goldilocks, you will gravitate to the part which is “just right” — the place where you feel comfortable and are not straining your voice.

But if you’re a beginning singer you might find that none of the parts feel right! This is because the range of notes that you can sing can be quite narrow at first. As you sing more regularly, you will find that you begin to reach higher and lower notes with more ease.

However, even when you’ve been singing for some time, you might well come across a particular song that has a note that is outside your range, that you can’t sing comfortably or even can’t reach at all. What’s the problem here?

you may be in the wrong part

It may be that you’re simply in the wrong part. When women first join a choir, they often go to the alto part because it’s not too high, and not too low. This is a safe place to be at first since it’s comfortably in the middle ground. Or they may end up with the sopranos because that’s what ‘proper’ women’s singing is like (more on this later). Sometimes people join a part because they reckon that it's the part that always has the tune. But in my kind of choirs, no one part consistently has the tune, and even if it did, they songs are not familiar in the first place so it is of no real advantage!

I’ve known some women to stay in the ‘wrong’ part for several years before they realise that they actually have a far greater range than they first thought, or that they could sing much higher/ lower than they had imagined.

Women with very low voices usually head for the tenor section. In most community choirs this is usually where the ‘low ladies’ live because it’s never really that low.

But what about the poor blokes? They have only two options: tenor, which is usually too high for them, or bass which is often too low. So they get put off thinking they can’t sing properly or that they don’t have much of a vocal range. Trouble is, most men are really baritones which means that they hover somewhere between tenor and bass. In which case there is no real home for them, nowhere where they feel “just right”.

what does ‘contralto’ mean anyway?

I’m tossing these terms around like I know what I’m talking about: alto, tenor, baritone, etc., but what do they actually mean? And what about all those other terms that we might have heard of: mezzo-soprano, counter-tenor, bass-baritone?

Actually, there are no absolute strict definitions of any of these terms. They are simply names which give an indication of the range of notes that a person singing that part is expected to be able to sing. A composer will bear this in mind when writing a choral piece (usually!), but there is no exact agreement on what those ranges might be. It is simply an attempt to categorise the wide range of vocal possibilities out there. Since it is a generalisation, there will inevitably be some people who don’t fit comfortably into any category. There will always be a few male altos and female basses, for example.

Very simplistically, the sopranos are the women with high voices, and the altos are women with lower voices. The tenors are the high men, and the basses are the low men. In classical music and professional choirs, the sopranos go really high and the basses go really low. Most untrained women are probably at the low end of the altos and won’t be able to hit some of the high alto notes. Most untrained men are baritones: they won’t be able to hit the really high tenor notes or the really low bass notes.

In most community choirs, songs are chosen and arranged to fit a smaller vocal range. In particular, the soprano part will never go too high, and most women will be able to get the lowest note of the tenor part (although not necessarily comfortably). Most men will be happy in the bass section because it won’t go too low.

how high is ‘high’?

For those of you who are musically trained, in a community choir I tend to not go much higher than the D an octave and a bit above middle C, or lower than the G below middle C for women’s voices, and the same an octave lower for men. I usually find that everybody in the choir can cope with this range, so it gives people the flexibility to move around and try out different parts.

When I’ve been working with a group for some time, I find I can cheat the high notes up (the highest I’ve gone up to so far is the G above the high D I mentioned earlier) for both women tops and male tenors (an octave lower). But I’ve only ever really taken the lowest note down to the F just below the G I mentioned earlier.

Many people with a little musical knowledge come to a choir with preconceptions about voice types and vocal ranges, so try not to use technical terms like alto, tenor, etc. with a beginner choir, but just say tops, middles, low ladies/ high men, and bass.

how to find which part you sing

When you’re trying to find out which is the most suitable part for you to sing, it’s not just about which notes you can reach. During the warm up, the choir leader will gradually take you through a wide range of notes. Over the weeks you will often find that you will gradually be able to sing higher and lower than you first thought. As you warm up you will get a sense of which are the absolute highest and lowest notes that you are able to sing. You might be surprised!

This will give you an indication of which part you sing. If you find it easiest to hit the higher notes, then you probably belong in the ‘tops’ (soprano for women, tenor for men). If you find it hard to reach the extreme high and low notes, then you’re probably a middle (alto for women, bass for men). And if you find the low notes the easiest, then you’re probably a low lady (tenor) or a real bass man!

But this isn’t the whole story. I’ve mentioned the concept of tessitura in an earlier post (Everybody has a place in the choir). It basically means the range of notes that you feel most comfortable singing (i.e. without any kind of strain — your ‘sweet spot’) rather than the absolute range of notes that you can reach. As I pointed out earlier, with most community choirs, everybody will probably be able to sing any of the parts, but there will be one part that you feel most comfortable with.

role models and ‘real’ singing

Many people come to singing with a huge number of preconceptions. When people say that they can’t sing at all, they usually mean they can’t sing as well as somebody famous, or they find it hard to reach the same notes as an opera singer, or that their voice doesn’t sound like their favourite pop star. You can read more about this in Why people think they can’t sing.

Many women think that ‘proper’ singing is when you use your high ‘churchy’ voice. They think of opera singers with their soaring vibrato. So when they join a choir, they feel that they always need to be singing in their ‘choir voice’ which means just the high notes. At school they might never have come across their ‘chest voice’ which is more akin to our speaking voices, and is the voice that is used in a lot of traditional singing, especially in Eastern Europe. Because they haven’t used this part of their voice much, it might appear ugly or feel unfamiliar, so they stick with what they know. In some cases it might mean that a woman ends up singing with the tops even though she has an amazingly powerful low voice.

For many men with low voices, there simply aren’t enough role models out there. I have a reasonable range, and can sing quite low, but never much liked the singing of Paul Robeson when I was growing up. I was much more attracted to pop music and voices like those of The Beatles or David Bowie. So I tried to sing like them and found that there was no way I could hit the high notes that they did, so I assumed that I couldn’t sing. Many men are in this situation. Most pop singers use their high tenor voice (and even drift off into falsetto like Thom Yorke, Tim Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, Antony Hegarty, etc.) and the most famous opera singers (like Pavarotti) are tenors. These ranges are usually beyond the reach of us mere mortals. Most men then think they can’t ‘sing’ properly or strain their voices trying to reach notes that are much too high for them.

Even if they like the low voices you can find in opera or Russian singing, most men can’t get down there. There just aren’t enough role models out there for us baritones!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

From the back of the choir 1 – first steps

This is a guest post by Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. It is about her experience of joining a new choir where harmony songs from around the world are learnt by ear.

The very first evening …

I really can’t remember how I heard about the SOAS World Music Choir but I know I loved the idea: a choir with no auditions, a promise we would never be asked to sing alone, learning music from all over the world, all by ear, in the original languages, anyone and everyone welcome, no experience necessary. I’d been missing music since I started my new job in London, so I thought I would give it a try.

The first session was actually only a little scary. The room was full of newcomers, so none of us knew what to do. I think there were about thirty of us that first evening. We stood in a loose circle, clearly all wondering what would happen next. The choir director started with a physical warm up – kicking off our shoes, shaking out tight muscles and generally getting used to the idea of making strange noises by adding sound effects to a silly story. But then (amazingly fast!) we started to make much the same sound – even by the end of warm up, we sounded pretty good.

I was really amazed how fast we could learn at least the basics of a song — this was my first experience with a choir and three or four part harmonies. The director would teach each part in turn, singing each part herself, then allowing us just a few repetitions, then on to the next part, then putting them all together, so quickly. In under 40 minutes we were raising the roof (or at least shaking the basement windows) with a song that sounded fantastic to me as a newbie!

I think we learned two or three pieces that first session, but now, nearly three years on, I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were. However, I do remember I told someone the next day that it was the most fun I had had at work in ages!

And did I mention the surprise at the end of the session? It turned out that the previous year the choir had acquired some ‘traditions’, one of which was an impromptu performance in the School’s main reception area at the end of each practice session. So we all trooped off with our coats and bags, and we just stood around the director and repeated the songs we had just rehearsed. There was no chance to be scared and it was a great way to get people used to performing.

If you are interested you can find some of our rough recordings on YouTube. Those performances turned out to be a good recruiting tool, too!

SOAS World Music Choir

In 2007 and 2008 the choir was led by SOAS ethnomusicography graduate, Liz Powers, who brought astonishing energy and enthusiasm to each and every session as well as a vast range of music from Africa, Australasia and Eastern Europe and a few pieces in English.

Choir membership varies between about 50 – 100 people each year. Sometimes only a small group turn up every week, the others are more transient, which can make it difficult to achieve a familiar repertoire. Also, as individual students move on, about two-thirds of the members are new each academic year. We only run in the Autumn and Spring terms as the Summer Term is swamped by exams.

In summer 2008 Liz and her husband Andy (bass) had to leave us for Yorkshire where Liz now co-leads the Manchester Community Choir. We recruited a new director, Judith Silver, who is a singer-songwriter in her own right and a member of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network. Judith has a different style, but no less enthusiasm and knowledge! With her help the choir has survived its fourth year and we are now planning for Autumn 2009.

The choir’s membership is incredibly diverse, like our School. We have had all sorts of members in those three years – Chinese, Korean and Japanese students, Muslim women in their head scarves, people of all ages — representing more than twenty nationalities from almost every continent of the world. This quite often means someone in the choir speaks the language in which we’re singing, so we work hard to get the pronunciation right! We even had enough men and ‘lower ladies’ for a modest-sized tenor and bass section. Many of us are not musicians or music students, but what we lack in expertise, we make up for in enthusiasm.

Next time I’ll tell you what a typical practice session is like and say something about what it’s like to learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before and don’t understand …

Deb will be following up with another guest post in the near future.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Music notation – do singers need it?

I teach songs without using any kind of musical notation. Like other members of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network I believe that singing should be accessible to all.

You can learn songs by ear without ever having to know anything about music theory, notation, composition, harmonic structure, musical jargon, etc. But notation obviously has a role in singing. I’d like to look at what that role might be, and why many people are intimidated by musical knowledge (see Mind your language).

music notation — what is it?

Wikipedia defines musical notation as:

“any system which represents aurally perceived music, through the use of written symbols.”

It goes on to say that the earliest know examples of notation date back to Sumeria more than 4,000 years ago.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that musical notation is a

“visual record of heard or imagined musical sound, or a set of visual instructions for performance of music. It usually takes written or printed form.”

chasing shadows

Why do we need musical notation? One main reason is as an aid to memory (since I have a huge repertoire of songs to teach, and I have to know all the parts, I often find myself using sheet music when I’m teaching in case I forget how one of the harmonies goes!). It also allows us to preserve music over long periods of time. Our memories may be fallible, but the written score doesn’t change.

However, notation is not an exact science. As many composers have discovered, even though they try to describe their music as accurately as possible, it is always open to interpretation. Otherwise there would only ever be one perfect, canonical performance or recording of any piece of music!

When trying to notate an existing piece of music, there will always be errors. The annotator may not hear correctly; they may refuse to acknowledge unfamiliar harmonies or rhythms (many folk song collectors edited songs that they found because it didn’t fit in with their perception of how the music should sound!); the singers performing may make a mistake (which will be faithfully recorded).

music is a living thing

One of the biggest problems when trying to notate living music is that – even if we could notate it perfectly – it would only represent one particular performance at one specific time. If you came back and listened the next day, the song might sound different.

There are many apocryphal tales of people hearing wonderful South African singing during a church service and notating it. But when they came back the next week, they discovered that all the harmonies were different! People were making it up as they went along and improvising around well-known structures.

So many song collectors come back from their travels with a supposed definitive example of a particular song, whereas if they had collected it at a different time, or if they had travelled to the next village, they would have heard a different version.

We are trying in vain to capture a living thing. Bearing this in mind, we shouldn’t get too upset when, in rehearsal, there may be more than one harmony going on in the alto section for example!

not written in stone

Singing should be fun, creative and alive. But often we hear people say: “that’s not how it’s supposed to sound!” The danger here is that musical notation can often take on the role of dictator. It can imply that there is only one way – and certainly only one ‘right’ way – to sing a song.

However, throughout history songs have changed over time. The folk tradition is a living tradition. People have adapted words to fit their times, have changed (or stolen) tunes to suit them, have added new harmonies, have misheard or mis-remembered lyrics and melodies, have performed a song in the style of their own community. That is what makes music a living force.

Having a written score can represent an academic and tyrannical view which may well intimidate those new to music-making.

inventing new notations

Many people claim not to understand musical notation. They wouldn’t know what to do if presented with a musical score. Yet quietly in choir they are inventing a whole new notation system!

This especially applies to the basses who may often not have a particularly memorable or melodic part in a song. They find it hard to remember where the pitches go up and down so they begin to draw horizontal lines on a piece of paper to indicate this. The higher the line relative to the rest of the line, the higher the note. If they need to indicate a large pitch change, then the line will have a big gap from the previous line. If the pitch only changes very little (by a semitone for example, or by a note that is not in the scale of the song) then they may add a mark like a dot or small arrow to indicate this.

To show when the pitch changes, they make the length of the lines connect with how long the notes are to be sung. You can see examples of this in Northern Harmony’s song books where they notate some Corsican songs using this method (see Complex songs and learning by ear).

When you point out to the basses that they are, in fact, both reading and writing music, they usually strenuously deny it!

learning styles

Most teachers know that individuals have very different learning styles. They are usually divided into visual, auditory and tactile/ kinaesthetic. I am a very visual learner, and although I can learn songs by ear quite easily, I usually have to have at least one quick glance at the lyrics in order to be able to remember them more easily. I also like the song teacher to use their hands or some kind of diagram to indicate how the melody line works.

Auditory learners are perhaps the most suited to learning songs by ear. Most visual learners will need to see something, although not necessarily written notation. Most people respond well to the teacher indicating by hand where the melody goes up and down using, for example, a very simplified version of the Curwen Hand Signs developed by Kodály.

Tactile/ kinaesthetic learners learn by moving, doing and touching. Such learners often find it easier to mirror the hand movements of the person teaching the song. They also find it much easier when taking the song’s rhythm into their body.

notation as a security blanket

Some visual learners will prefer to have a written score. But many who insist on having written music, may actually be aural or tactile learners. They are just so used to having music that they need it as a security blanket! This also appeals to those people who don’t like making mistakes and believe that the written score will help them to get it perfectly right (forgetting that the notation itself is error-prone!).

Sometimes, taking the music away can free people up and introduce them to a new way of learning. Learning songs by ear is like exercising a muscle. Once you’ve done it for a while, it just gets easier. Many people who insist on written music are reluctant to spend time in that fuzzy, uncomfortable place where we don’t know exactly what we’re doing and we haven’t fully grasped the song yet.

learning by ear is a different experience

Being able to sight read gives immediate access to a vast range of songs from a huge range of cultures and time. If we want to have a good old sing song with a bunch of strangers, then just get the songbooks out and we’re off! But a couple of hours later, with no songbook available, we just have the memory of the good time we have. It’s very unlikely that we’ll remember any of the songs themselves.

If we learn a song by ear it will take us much longer, but it also gives us the chance to explore it in detail, discover all the subtle nuances within it, really listen to the harmonies, enjoy playing around with the words. Songs learnt like this will stay with us and become part of us. Once we have truly learnt a song like this we can start making it our own and putting something of ourselves into the singing of it. We will have made a much deeper connection with the music.

the advantages of not having sheet music

• the singers will actually look at the teacher/ conductor
• there are no papers to drop on the floor/ leave at home/ lose
• you can incorporate movement and gesture to aid song learning
• it looks better in performance – the audience will be able to see the singers!

when to use notation

I can’t think of that many times when having written notation is necessary, but here is what I’ve come up with:

• if you want to sing a whole bunch of songs quickly with a group of people who have no songs in common (e.g. Shape Note conventions)
• if a song is fiendishly difficult and has lots of sustained notes (I tried to teach Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei" by ear and it just didn’t work!)
• if a song is long and either complex or repetitive (although Ysaye Barnwell has apparently said that she would like to teach the Messiah by ear!)

I’m really interested in how complex a song can be and still be taught by ear. I’ve written a previous post about it: Complex songs and learning by ear, but am still not sure. I’ve tried using diagrams to help with the overall structure of a song. This helps some people, but not all!

 

 

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Singing what you mean and meaning what you sing

Last week I started to pick up on a discussion about stage presence for singers that began in the comments section of my post Getting the most out of your choir: preparing for performance PART 1.

This week I want to look at the second aspect of that discussion: where the ‘meaning’ of a song might reside, and how that affects the way we sing it.

song lyrics

First off, I need to ’fess up that I’m not particularly a ‘lyric person’. Sometimes I have been listening to a song for years before I actually realise what it’s about! I respond to the whole package of sounds: syllables, music, harmonies – rather to any single element. I’m not that interested in storytelling songs, but just in the emotion and sensation or feeling that a song conveys.

I believe that songs are very different beasts from, say, poems. Any ‘meaning’ that a song expresses is carried pretty much entirely by sound (which is why I’m not that excited by choral performance – see What are you looking at?), I don’t need to see the singers. The sung ‘words’ (syllables, vocalises, ‘ahs’, whatever) and the music (melody, harmony, dynamics, etc.) form an indivisible whole. Which is why most song lyrics do not work as written poetry, and why some melody lines are pretty boring without the singing voice.

Personally I am not interested in “communicating the sense of the text”. The text is simply one component of the music and its meaning can be subverted, obscured, emphasised, destroyed, or changed at will. Any song can be expressed in a variety of ways (otherwise there would be no such thing as a cover version!). So what is it that guides us to present a song in a particular way? Is it the ‘meaning’ of the text, the ‘heart and soul’ of the song, the ‘emotional content’? And who decides what these are? And why are there so many different answers?

words and music

When commenting on my earlier post, Tom introduced his notion of the ‘heart and soul of the music’ and suggested that this was connected with the “textually connected singer who has created a specific story-based purpose for singing”. The implication here is that the ‘meaning’ or ‘heart and soul’ of any song lies in its ‘text’.

I responded by asking about songs which had simplistic foreign lyrics, nonsense syllables or just ‘ahs’. Tom replied thus:

“Most (or at least ‘much’) of the choral music out there has text and music. The music usually (or ‘often’) attempts to communicate the sense of the text – either through particular rhythms, harmonies, melodies, voice leading, chordal progressions, or textual settings. Thus, ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Loch Lomond’ have a similar feel, but both are very different from a Mozart ‘Gloria’ or a celebratory African ‘freedom song’. And ‘Happy Birthday’ is different from your usual ‘Requiem’.

“Perhaps the clearest example would be the difference between ‘Weep, O Mine Eyes’ (Weep, O Mine Eyes on YouTube) and ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves’ (In These Delightful Pleasant Groves on YouTube). There are HUGE differences in the above, and they have mainly to do with the textual meaning and the musical communication of that meaning. (Or, if the music was written first, then the text attempts to fit the music.)

“Do you agree with the above?”

Well, sorry Tom, but I don’t! I guess the first problem for me is that you limit our discussion to ‘choral music’ whereas I thought we were talking about singing in its widest sense. In any case, I can present ‘Danny Boy’ in the style of a Mozart ‘Gloria’ or ‘Loch Lomond’ as an African ‘freedom song’. Or vice versa. For some wonderful examples of this, see the Spooky Men’s Chorale on the Australian music show Spicks and Specks or the Bulgarian Women’s Choir on the Tonight Show. I’ve often used songs in theatre shows and completely changed the usual context and style to serve the performance. Although I haven’t used ‘Happy Birthday’ as a ‘Requiem’ I have used the jazz standard ‘All of me’ as a song of suicidal despair!

I’m not familiar with ‘Weep, O Mine Eyes’ or ‘In These Delightful Pleasant Groves’ but I tracked down a couple of versions and yes, they appear to be different. I wouldn’t say that they were HUGELY different and I didn’t pay any attention to the words (but hey, that’s just me!).

You then go on to say that nonsense syllables and ‘ahs’ can also be imbued with meaning, it doesn’t just have to be recognisable text.

song interpretation

Tom then says:

“I think we might be actually agreeing more than we even know, because you might be just letting the music guide your ‘interpretation’, while I let the words lead. However, since (I believe) they are intricately tied, in many songs it won’t matter which you let lead since they’re both ‘telling the same story’.”

The clue here is in Tom’s use of the word ‘interpretation’. How do we interpret a particular song? What clues do we use to discover how we might decide to sing or present a particular song? Tom clearly uses the ‘text’ (or lyrics) and believes that somehow they are used to tell a ‘story’. The expression of this ‘story’ is somehow the ‘meaning’ of the song and that is what guides his instructions to the singers and the way that the song is performed.

I, however, sing mainly foreign songs, many of which have no clear ‘meaning’ and even if they did, cultural differences would mean that we might not want to express that meaning in the same way as the songwriter originally intended. I know quite a few Eastern European love songs which sound more like a call to arms!

I go entirely on the ‘feel’ of the song, that is the emotional and physical (hairs on the back of the neck) effects that it has on me personally as an entire piece of music: words, melody, rhythm and harmony. It is a gut instinct and I have to be affected immediately or a song just doesn’t speak to me. Another person may have an entirely different response, it is very personal. Then, when I am working on the song with singers, I use everything at my disposal to help them present the song so it has the desired effect on me, their only audience at the rehearsal stage. I then trust (and hope!) that it will have the same effect on the audience at our next concert. I might make up a story or use visual imagery or invoke technical vocal exercises – I’ll use anything as long as it gets the job done.

the tyranny of text

Sometimes people can get far too hung up on the text and its meaning, especially if it is in English. Occasionally, even if it’s just for fun, it’s good to play around with a song just to see what happens. An actor knows this as ‘the tyranny of the text’ which can sometimes inhibit good acting. We need to free ourselves from any strict adherence to what we think a song might mean and how it should be presented in order to explore all of its many nuances. We then have choices which we can make rather than being a slave to what we think might be the case.

I sometimes hear people say things like: “That’s not what the composer intended” or “What the playwright means here is …” or “My character wouldn’t do that”. But we are not usually the composer or the playwright and have no idea really what they intended. All we (usually) have are words and notes on a piece of paper (or a scratchy field recording), but no matter how accurate and detailed the writer was, this notation can never encapsulate everything that the author intended. If it could, there would only ever be one, canonical performed version of every single piece of music ever written!

Since we can never know exactly what the author intended, we have to fall back on our own instincts and detective abilities. We are possibly living in a different time, a different place and presenting our song in a different context to when and where it was written, and we have to take that into account too. We must learn to be playful and not too respectful of a song’s lyrics or meaning!

playing with songs

Sometimes in rehearsal I might play around with a song and try it in as many ‘wrong’ ways as possible. For example, if a song seems sad, I might ask people to sing it as if it were a very happy, light-hearted song. If a song is clearly a folk song, I might ask people to sing it as if it were high opera.

Recently I was rehearsing a song which I know to be a lullaby from Croatia (although the ‘feel’ that I get from the song wouldn’t have told me that). Just for fun, to loosen the song up, and to help tighten the (difficult) harmonies, I asked the singers to present it as a funky jazz song in a smoky late-night club. The song was immediately energised and more accurate than before! As a rehearsal tool it worked because when we went back to the original way of presenting the song, it sounded much better. But … we had also discovered an interesting and novel way of presenting the material which we will now try out in our next performance.

not knowing what you’re singing

So, in short, I believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: those for whom lyrics and their meaning is very important, and those who don’t really pay attention to lyrics at all. There is room for both kinds of person, but neither one will persuade the other that their approach is the ‘right’ one.

There are people in my choir who, as soon as I first introduce a new song, ask me what it means: “what’s it about?”. They can’t contemplate singing until they know what it is that they are singing about. Then there are other people who you can teach a song to who don’t understand a single word of the foreign lyrics, but who soon get into the ‘feel’ of the song and bring it to life.

Finally, I just want to mention an article I read recently about the latest CD from the Manic Street Preachers: Journal for Plague Lovers. They have just finished writing and recording a set of songs using lyrics written by Richey Edwards who vanished in 1995. The article said that some of the songs contained “lyrics not even the performers understand”. And they wrote the songs!

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com