Improving Skills 5

More from Daniel Coyle:  Tip #8 - To Build Hard Skills, Work Like a Careful Carpenter

 

To develop reliable hard skills, you need to connect the right wires in your brain. In this, it helps to be careful, slow, and keenly attuned to errors. To work like a careful carpenter. . . . Precision matters early on, because the first reps establish the pathways for the future. Neurologists call this the “sled on a snowy hill” phenomenon. The first repetitions are are like the first tracks on fresh snow: On subsequent tries your sled will tend to follow those grooves. “Our brains are good at building connections” says Dr. George Bartzokis, a neurologist at UCLA. “They’re not so good at unbuilding them.”

 

This can have to do with building conducting skills, but has more to do with teaching our choirs.

 

As we rehearse, we help our choirs build all sorts of hard skills: the rhythms and pitches of the music we’re teaching, the way they approach a high note vocally, proper intonation, etc.. It means making sure that you build each of these correctly. It’s necessary at some points in the learning process to isolate elements to do this.

 

It’s one of the keys to Robert Shaw’s rehearsal process, which developed through his work with his large symphonic choruses (the Collegiate Chorale, Cleveland Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus) in order to build in all the different elements correctly. He’s been known to say, “You have to clean the floor before you hang the drapes.”

 

Pamela Elrod Huffman, who sang with Shaw, has written about Shaw’s techniques and done workshops on them. Here’s an article by Dr. Elrod from Southwest Musician (the journal of the Texas Music Educators Association).  Think through what this means in the careful building of the skills (rhythm, pitch, dynamics, text) to sing a given piece of music.

 

As I’ve stated before, I use some of Shaw’s techniques but work in a different way—and in doing so, run the risk of moving too quickly and the choir learning some things incorrectly (and then having to spend time unlearning them). It’s definitely something for me to think about!

 

One of the areas I’ve learned you have to be very careful is in working with intonation (you can find my Intonation series on this blog). Allowing your ensemble to sing (even for a surprisingly short period of time) under pitch can build that in so it’s very difficult to overcome.

 

Think carefully about those hard skills you teach your choir . . . and how you can work more “like a careful carpenter."

Intonation XI - Tonal Memory--A Two-Edged Sword

John Goldsmith's two guest posts (here and here) demonstrate a wonderful way to train your choirs to remember and audiate patterns, shifts of tonality, accurate half and whole steps, scales, etc. He creates ways to train the tonal memory in a positive way, which will help your choir in reading as well as to sing better in tune. It's a learnable skill.

 

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!

Intonation VII - Rhythm & Ensemble

While I haven't exhausted the topic of voice and vowel, another area that intersects with intonation is that of rhythm/ensemble. As I mentioned early on, poor (or excellent) intonation has many potential causes. That's why we have to diagnose correctly what the underlying problem is and help the singers solve it, rather than just saying, "You're out of tune!"

 

Because of the way that unified vowels affects intonation (see this earlier post), chords won't tune as well if the rhythm of the choir isn't crisp and together--because the vowels happen at different times and don't "line up" in such a way that all the overtones/partials line up as well.

 

There are two parts to this: understanding diction and that we don't really deal (technically) with words, but the sounds that make up words. "My country 'tis of thee" has five words, six syllables, but seven vowel sounds. The diphthong in the word, "my" means there are two vowels--if those vowels aren't together, the intonation won't line up either. This is the genesis of Fred Waring's "Tone Syllables" (if you've seen the old Shawnee Press editions, you know what I mean!). Robert Shaw was brought to New York by Waring to help prepare his new radio choir and Shaw certainly learned those lessons. To get the best diction, the best unification of vowel (and best unification of pitch), the choir has to be able to sing all the sounds precisely together. I remember watching/hearing the King's Singers in concert quite a few years ago from the first row, dead in front of them. The unanimity with which they closed through every single dipthong was amazing--you could literally see their mouths closing through the "oo" as the vanishing vowel of the diphthong "oh" exactly at the same time.

 

The second part of this fits with Shaw's development of the technique of count-singing. This is a way to get the ensemble (before they pronounce words) to find a precise rhythmic ensemble and sense of intonation (since they're all singing the same vowel: one-and-two-and-tee-and) at the same time. Once the choir moves from count-singing to text, each sound (not each word) has to fit precisely in place. Shaw said, "There is no such thing as good intonation between voice lines that do not arrive or quit their appointments upon mathematically precise, but effortless schedule."

 

Again, the level of your choir will determine how far you take this and how you choose to teach it, but without a good sense of rhythmic ensemble and being able to sing all the vowel sounds in a given phrase together, your choir will not sing as well in tune as they could. Building a technique/discipline (whether or not you use count-singing) of rhythmic ensemble and learning how to correctly sing all the different sounds in the words we pronounce will make a huge difference in not only diction and blend, but of intonation as well.

 

And when intonation in your choir seems to be fuzzy, ask yourself whether the rhythm and ensemble of your choir is fuzzy, too. Again, Robert Shaw (although probably paraphrased, since I'm doing this from memory--Howard Swan's chapter in Decker/Herford's Choral Conducting: A Symposium): good intonation and good rhythm make a pretty smooth couple.

 

Well said!