Music for Sunday 31 July 2011

Readings for this week can be found here, following the Roman options.  The psalm setting we will be using can be found here.

The service setting will be Philip Matthias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757), with the Kyrie from Colin Smith's Mass Shalom.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: From all who dwell beneath the skies [72]
Sequence: Break now the bread of life [429]
Offertory: Praise, my soul, the King of heaven [134]
Communion: In God alone my soul [Taize]

Music for Sunday 24 July 2011

This week the parish is keeping the feast of St James the Great.  Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to a home-baked setting.

The service setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).  The Kyrie will be sung to a setting by Colin Smith.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: What a friend we have in Jesus [590]
Sequence: What shall we offer our good Lord [439]
Offertory: When morning gilds the skies [227]
Communion (St George's): Bless the Lord, my soul [706]
Communion (All Saints): See us, Lord about your altar [527]

Le Quatorze Juillet

Done and dusted: day three

The final day of a winter intensive is always worth sticking around to see.  It's always the day with the least vocal demonstrating from the conductor, which is just as well because things were a bit rough this morning. I probably won't have much of a voice to sing with for the next day or two.

Here's the statistics.  One recording session program, comprising five songs.  One half of a concert program, another six songs.  In addition, most of the year's remaining curriculum was taught, with nearly all the worksheets completed.  At the end of the day the choir performed three songs, drawing on material from both programs.

The transformation in the ensemble was clearly audible from the middle of the choir's warm up.  One of my standard tricks is to write up a treble stave and put a semibreve on the G line.  No prompting here, all the choristers are to do is try to remember what part of the voice that note falls in and sing it to a good ah.  Once the note comes into focus you can check it against the piano, whereupon you discover how good your choristers pitch memory is.  On Monday there were around as many pitches as there were people in the room.  Yesterday they were a tritone above.  Today they were a semitone below.  If we were to have had a fourth day, the group would probably have been within closer sight of the note.

Another aspect of the discipline for me was the extent to which I had to keep my conducting gestures under tight control.  The majority of last week's choristers rehearse with me every week, so they are used to following the logic of my gestures.  From the first day it was possible to be a bit freer and work with broader brushstrokes.  This week I was working with choristers where the largest groups came from centres where I might have conducted the level 2 singers at a concert in May, but otherwise the students have never worked with me.  This week's group found it a bit challenging to work out the relationship between the size of gesture and dynamics.  Conducting was a bit more like painting a detailed watercolour.  A bit of wash here and there, but all the rest was fine brushstrokes.  Keeping that up for around six hours a day is quite draining: I came home each day feeling very tired.

The end of the day was bright and happy.  Many parents wanted to visit and say how much positive feedback they had heard from their children.  Clearing the foyer took considerably longer than the scheduled fifteen minutes.

The best response from the whole workshop was at the end of today.  Three choristers made a special effort to say to me how much they had enjoyed the program, and to thank me for working with them.  What can one say?  It'd be pretty dull attempting this work without the choristers!

Music for Sunday 17 July 2011

Readings for the week can be found here (follow the Roman options), and we will be using this psalm setting.

The setting will be Philip Matthias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757), but we'll be singing the Kyrie from Missa de Angelis again.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: When morning gilds the skies [227]
Sequence: Father of mercy, God of consolation [472]
Offertory: Guide me, O thou great Redeemer [569]
Communion: Bread is blessed and broken [707]

Winter intensive redux

I've been teaching at another winter intensive for the Australian Youth Choir this week, of which today is the second day.

It's interesting to see the differences between the groups from last week to this week.  Last week the focus was straight on from the word go, this week it takes a bit more work to retain the choristers' concentration.  There's also more plowing back over worked furrows, fixing up mistakes before they become part of the performance.

The general sound finally came together after lunch today.  Getting over 100 young singers to listen can be challenging at the best of times, but it can be done.  Tomorrow's question of the day will probably run along the lines of asking which of the five senses is the most important when you're singing.  The golden moment came today, when the whole choir finally managed to sing softly without falling through the floor. 

The differences in room arrangements between the two intensives is interesting.  Last week the choir rehearsed in a large drama classroom, so all were on the same floor level.  It wasn't really all that easy to walk around the choristers while they were singing, so a lot of the sound shaping was done from the front of the room.  This week the choir is rehearsing in a theatre, so the big advantage is that the seating is set up in raked rows.  I spent a good deal of today's sessions walking around and listening to each block of choristers.  There's still a bit of work to do on unifying the sound from one side of the room to the other.

Tomorrow's the final day, so it will be interesting to see how the sense of ensemble develops.  Last week we ended up with a really thrilling sound before lunch on the last day: this week it's going to be anyone's game right up to the last second.

Teaching difficult scores

As readers here will have gleaned, I spent the first half of this week teaching at a winter intensive for a youth choir.  One of my tasks was to teach material intended for a recording session scheduled for early next term.  This was comprised of five pop songs, for which scores were provided.

One of these is Daniel Powter's Bad Day, which you'll have to trip over to YouTube to hear.

A lot of people who make their living from art music tend to get a bit sniffy when it comes to pop songs.  I've been no exception to this in the past, but having been in a job where this is the bread-and-butter of the work I'm beginning to revisit this attitude.  While I am inclined to question the aesthetic value of pop music generally, it's always interesting to look more closely at the design of some songs to see how some of them push the boundaries.  There is a lot to learn in some unlikely places when you stop to have a closer look.

Bad Day poses some interesting challenges when you come to teach it.  The melodic structure is pretty irregular until you hit the chorus, which has a couple of swings and roundabouts that take you off into different territory.  Teaching it by rote without a tailor-made strategy would be a forbidding task for ordinary mortals, while the clearest and most straightforward way of typesetting it would be to treat it as a through-composed song.

The score handed out at the staff meeting a couple of weeks ago was optimized for economy of layout.  It was very tightly-packed (a melody-line score with about 16 lines squeezed onto an A4 sheet), with directions to various parts of the page.  After seeking out a recording on YouTube, I took to the score with a coloured pen and a highlighter, both to fix up some misplaced labels and to make the chorus -- buried away in the middle of the page -- easy to find.  The song is not difficult in itself.  The major challenge was that the score provided by the office succeeded in obscuring the underlying structure, and contained a number of confusing directions.

Because the score was so daunting to unravel I decided it would be better to teach the song in a different way, preferably avoiding any need to hand it out.  This gave me the opportunity to put the Ph.D. to some practical use and do a spot of analysis to figure out how to present the song in order to teach it effectively in under half an hour.  The aim was to have choristers getting 85% of the song accurate within the very first session.

I developed a diagram -- let's call it a song map -- to put up on the whiteboard while teaching the song to the choristers.  If you listen to the linked track you'll see how the map highlights the main structural elements of the song.  As each box went up we sang the relevant part, then connected it to the previous section.

I restricted my labels to what was in the score handed out at the staff meeting a couple of weeks ago.  The main reason for this was to make communicating with the accompanist a bit simpler, but also to respect the choices made by the people who set the score up.  I could have modified Coda 1 and labelled it as a third verse, or as a bridge, but it was called Coda 1 in the score so that's what it remained.  The salient feature of that part of the song is that it veers westwards from the home key (A flat major) into the flattened sub-tonic (G flat major).

This song map emphasizes the chorus, as this is the part of the song that remains most consistent.  I taught the chorus and the link to Coda 2 first, then the second verse, followed by the first verse.  Once these elements were consolidated, I added Coda 1.  The reason for this order is that it covered the parts of the song where the choir has the most to do.  After that the choristers read the map from top to bottom, following the arrows.

I taught the song from scratch on the first day.  On days two and three I used the song map as a revision exercise, getting the choristers to tell me the order in which the boxes came, and what text was in each one.  Of course, it helped immensely that a good number of the older choristers knew the song.  Teaching with a song map helped to illustrate that pop songs have a structure.  Being able to talk in a simple way about basic analytical concepts such as repetition and return, identifying how fragments presented in the opening were used later in the song, the fact that the melodic structure of the verses is irregular, and so on, was a refreshing challenge for me.  It's easy to bore people silly when you start unpicking the design of a song, but many of the senior choristers demonstrated some fascinating and perceptive insight.  If approaching the song in this way helps to open up any interest in thinking about musical design and structure, then that's an added bonus.

This song ended up being one of the strongest repertoire items from the workshop, which is the ultimate measure of how effective a song map can be.

Day Three: Getting it Together

No early morning traffic accidents, so the trip to the final day of the winter intensive was entirely as planned.  Anyone who knows what Hoddle Street can be like will appreciate that a smooth run means something quite special at any time of the day.

All the work of the last two days finally came together as the final day progressed.  The choristers have learned a pretty large chunk of repertoire, including all the material for a forthcoming recording session.  The winter intensive really sets things up for the second part of the year.

The best bit of feedback from a chorister came from one of my juniors who was attending for the first time.  He remarked how the experience had been a bit like going on a school camp (with the comforts of going home each day!).  He then said that the best thing was how quickly all the new songs had been learnt and brought up to a good performance standard.

You work hard to earn feedback like that.  Now I've got a few days rest, and repeat the exercise all over again next week...

Music for Sunday 10 July 2011

Readings for the week can be found here, following the Catholic options.  The psalm will be sung to Anglican chant.

The service setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757), with the exception of the Kyrie, which will be sung to the setting given in the Missa de Angelis.

Anything for a spot of variety!

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Eternal Father, strong to save [138]
Sequence: Lord, your word abiding [427]
Offertory: Praise, my soul, the king of heaven [134]
Communion: Bread is blessed and broken [707]

Day Two: Revolution

My plans for a leisurely start to the day were rumbled by a traffic accident at the north end of Hoddle Street.  Instead of the easy fifteen-minute run through to the venue for the winter intensive I ended up doing a 35-minute rabbit run through Richmond, Abbotsford, and Clifton Hill to get to work.  The day went well after that.

The Greens seem to have been much in the news over the last couple of days.  I was amazed to hear a rant on the ABC news at 8.00am where some generic (Liberal?) politician was declaring that the Greens would demand that the clocks be stopped for the next fifty years and that Australia loose all the advantages of industry and development.  Frankly, these sprays from conservative politicians are becoming a bit tiresome.  I wonder if the ABC puts up whole minutes of these desperate rants just to show how desperately bereft of ideas some politicians are.

Of course, this week it's anxiety about the carbon tax.  I am looking forward to learning more about it -- but not before the weekend.  Call me what you like, but it would be far preferable to hear a worked-out policy, rather than a running series of announcements that contradict each other in various ways.  That's how we got Workchoices, one of the greatest 'reforms' ever to be assembled in a sequence of press conferences.

Carbon pricing and taxes is a totemic issue for the Greens, and the symbolic value of getting a workable framework in place for reducing carbon emissions is very high for them.  But this legislation is a very long way from a vote right now.

The Greens may have the balance of power in the Senate, but in the last two days they've lost votes on nominations for the President of the Senate and the Wikileaks Amendment to the Act governing ASIO.  It's hardly any fulfillment of their rumoured plans to burn down Parliament House and declare the rule of the proletariat.  Have they succeeded in any proposed legislation this week?

The fact is that most of the sprays from politicians (not to mention some journalists) is down to the fact that the Greens don't play by the formula of the politics-media matrix.  And that's a good thing.  I wish more politicians would talk in 'long hand' rather than the tag phrases, soundbites and talking points that can be heard falling from the Prime Minister, Mr Rabbit and everyone else in those rabbles we excuse by the name 'mainstream parties.'

The Greens are there because both Labor and the Liberal/National parties have failed.  The Democrats owed their foundation to failure in the Liberal party.  The Greens are a completely different proposition.  They are not the shadow of the old Labor left, although they have picked up support in that quarter; reducing the Greens in this way doesn't account for their appeal to a good number of Liberal voters.  They owe their foundation to atrophy on both sides of the 'mainstream,' which have ceased to have meaningfully different things to say about how the world is.  They are both essentially conservative outfits.  The Greens will only grow as long as this covenant of fate persists between the Labor and Liberal parties.

Some people seem to be worried that the change in the Senate means something imminent right now.  It's nice to have high expectations, but that's a recipe for frustration and disappointment in about a week or two.

If there is a revolution on the way (and that's very big if), I would lay London to a brick that it's not the one some of the experts on Marxism in the Liberal Party are expecting.  There might well be a revolution brewing, but the ranters are looking the wrong way.

Day One

I'm teaching at a winter intensive for the Australian Youth Choir this week.  Day one proved to be the usual disorderly delight, with all the rigmarole of organizing choristers into something approaching an orderly melee.

The funniest incident so far was that the venue didn't know about the booking, which made turning up at 8.00am a very interesting enterprise.

Only two more days to go...