Practicing hymns

In a church choir, hymns rank as bread-and-butter material.  I've sung in choirs where practicing hymns took up a sizeable portion of rehearsal time, and others where the choir didn't see the hymns until the service began.  There is good and bad in both of these ways of approaching hymns: it is easy to waste rehearsal time on the trivial aspects of singing hymn, but it's just lazy to regard practicing hymns as an unnecessary chore.

Congregations know when they are being led well, which is why it is important to rehearse anything the choir sings with them.  This is a vital part of a church choir's raison d'etre, and ought not to be neglected.

There are some specifically musical ends to be pursued by practicing hymns, and I'd like to share some of these here today.

In a choir where you have a few people who are at the start of their singing career, hymnody provides a sound basis for aural training.  This includes learning to sing scales, pitch intervals, rhythm, focusing on producing well-shaped vowels and articulating consonants consistently and crisply.  There are a few steps I have followed for a few years now which I find useful for practicing hymns.

It is good to start by singing the scale and tonic chord of a hymn.  This helps to anchor the tonality of the tune, as well as building a solid element of aural training unto the more directly performance-oriented part of a rehearsal.  To get things started, you can introduce this either by playing the home chord on the piano and having the choir sing the scale from that, or -- later down the track -- see if anyone can find the new tonic from the last note of the previous hymn tune.  Bear in mind that people need to be given a couple of opportunities to get the new tonality really secure: singing a scale or an arpeggiated chord only once is of limited use at the early stages.

Another aspect of tonality awareness you can use here is asking the choristers to identify the tonic note.  It's usually the final note of a tune (there are exceptions, I know -- Gonfalon Royal is the classic case).  This helps to reinforce recognition of the notes of the stave.  You might use this as a first step before playing the note/chord on the piano.

The second step is to see if anyone can pitch the first three or four notes of the hymn tune.  It'll be wobbly at the beginning, but things will improve as people develop their ears.  You could link this up with using solfa.  If you use handsigns, you've just incorporated an element of kinesthetic learning that should help to speed things along.  If you've already asked a chorister to identify DOH on the stave, you could use solfa to sing the notes of the tune before linking it up with the stave.  At the moment, I'm using solfa in this way quite a lot.  I wish I had known more about it when I started out as a choir director, as it would have saved me a lot of anxiety.

Rhythm is very important.  If it's sloppy, people will notice.  If it's well-articulated, people will appreciate it.  It's just got to be right.  I always insist on having my younger choristers clap the rhythm -- they love doing it, although they have to be constantly challenged to get it absolutely right.  I always try to make sure everybody gets to clap a tune on their own.

A further aspect of rhythm which is frequently neglected is the gap between the verses of a hymn.  If the pulse isn't maintained, then the singing won't be secure in the first lines of each verse.  Always try to make sure the pulse is constant: in duple-metre tunes, the break should be two whole beats; in triple-metre it should be three whole beats.  There has to be some flexibility in applying the rule where a tune starts with an anacrusis, but you will find that maintaining the pulse (and the order of strong-weak) will clarify how to do things.

Then there's vowels and consonants.  My practice is never to sing a hymn straight off in a rehearsal.  The last step before introducing the words -- we've already dealt with pitch and rhythm -- is to sing the tune, either in the performance tempo or close to it.  My choristers can usually pick the syllable: mah, pah, rah (with a rolled r), tah, boo, yeah, oo, ehr, uhse, zoo, zee, zah, and so on.  You can even challenge your choristers' consonant-producing faculties with delights such as singing a whole tune to words such as kite, tack, zap, zat, disc, dud, dave, tack, suds, slop, sludge.  In each case, the vowel must be pure, and the consonant must be short and crisp.  I apply a rule along the lines of 80/20: in any given word, 20% is consonant, 80% is vowel.

By the time you spend five minutes doing this sequence of things, your choristers should be eager (not to say relieved!) to finally get to sing the words.  They'll be lazy at first: no amount of practice syllables can make a chorister translate a concept without some prompting.  I often get choristers to sing in foreign accents to make sure they pick up the consonants properly.  German and hillbilly seem to be firm favourites at the moment.

The very last step is to put it all together.  This is the moment to insist on good phrasing of each line, and to concentrate on the one or two verse couplets that need to be sung as a single phrase.  One perfectly-sung hymn is a fine reward for rehearsal time properly spent.  The flow-on effects should permeate the rest of your rehearsal in the form of enhanced tonal awareness and gradually-improving sight singing.  And, of course, everything here can be applied equally well in learning other music.