Tonal memory can work against us as well, however. Singers have impressive abilities to memorize where pitches are.
On the positive side, Robert Fountain used to do an exercise in
tonal memory with an Eb Major chord (from the bottom up: root, 5th, root
3rd), asking his choirs to be able to produce it from memory at any
time. I've known other conductors who've worked on that kind of memory
(not perfect pitch, but to develop a memory for a particular chord or
pitch).
When I'm working on a piece intensively, I almost always find that
if I don't think about it, but simply begin singing it, I'm almost
invariably in the correct key (I don't have perfect pitch). My choirs
can often do this as well.
But it also takes little time to memorize pitches incorrectly. An example:
With my PLU choir I did John Gardner's wonderful and dramatic, A Latter-Day Athenian Speaks
(published by Oxford, now available only on rental, it's a
fabulous--and difficult--a cappella setting ca. 13 minutes long). We'd
been working on it, preparing for a January-Term tour to the mid-west
and east coast. The end of the piece has a dramatic double-choir fugue
and, even though we'd been singing it well in tune through the rehearsal
process, when we got to the first performance, the choir (with all of
the energy and excitement that goes with a first concert) drove that
section of the piece a half step sharp. After that, we always
sang it sharp. I'd rehearse it with some reference pitches from the
piano and they'd lock it in, but in concert they'd be a half step sharp
within very few bars. In essence, they now memorized going sharp there, heard the opening of the fugue that way, and no matter what I did, that's what was going to happen.
The power of tonal memory is just that strong.
It's one of the reasons that you have to be very careful not to
allow your choir to flat or go sharp early in the learning process--it
quickly becomes a part of how they hear the music and tonality. It's a
reason to listen carefully early in the process. It's also why
rehearsing well, not trying to do too much too soon, or using Robert
Shaw-style count-singing/rehearsal techniques, etc., can make a huge
difference in whether your choir stays in tune or goes flat (more usual
than sharp, of course).
It's also the reason why, if your choir has been going flat in a
particular key, if you suddenly raise the pitch by a half-step, they may
be able to keep it in tune: you've moved out of the tonality where
they've memorized going flat. They can now approach it with a fresh
sense of where those pitches belong.
It's not about listening! Sometimes we say, "Listen!" . . . well,
how could they go a quarter-step flat, exactly together, unless they
were listening to each other?!
I'll write next about some ways to rehearse to avoid these kinds of
problems. The use of the piano in rehearsal is a part of that.
Until Saturday!
