The explanation trap

Sometimes there are weeks when I wonder if any of the technical advice I drip-feed to my choristers has made it through.  One of the areas where this can be particularly troublesome is maintaining energy in the vocal tone.  If you have a group of singers who are inwardly or outwardly moaning about how hard their day has been, this will be evident in the sound they make.

This is a situation which calls for a simple remedial intervention.  This will involve breaking the rehearsal briefly to focus on connecting up the foundations -- breath management and tone placement.

I've tried many solutions to this.  One of the least successful is barking at choristers to breathe properly.  I tried it once, and never again.  A marginally more successful approach is a three- to five-minute sequence of questions to get the choristers to tell me what goes into producing one good note.  This approach has its limits -- you can come across as hectoring and pedantic.  Not to mention wasting precious rehearsal time with unnecessary talking.  Choir directors should be highly sensitive about talking -- especially as they're the most prone to serial offending on this front.  More about this below the jump.

So the criteria for this remedial intervention are (a) that it gives the choristers confidence while encouraging better focus on the task, (b) is oriented to the action of singing, and (c) avoids the necessity to talk in a detailed way about vocal technique.  One solution that answers this is to try a simple series of images.  The one I've found most useful has two steps, as follows.

1. Tell your choristers to stand proud and breathe right down to their toes, so deeply that they tingle.  Do this a couple of times to make sure they're really placing the breath nice and deep.  They should end up standing taller and squarer.
2. Now tell the choristers they're about to shoot the sound out from their raised eyebrows.  Try singing a short phrase a couple of times to reinforce this -- it will probably take that much to get the sound to really brighten out.  Extend this out to half a hymn tune, making sure that they keep their toes tingling while singing as accurately as possible.

If this routine is firmly established, you should find that the tone becomes much brighter as things proceed.  Tuning and intonation should also improve, as the choristers will have a clearer sense of the pitch they're singing.  Ask if anyone notices the difference between now and three minutes ago -- if they don't, they're probably pulling your leg.

I've alluded to the problem of the choir director talking, which is one of the cardinal sins regularly committed by conductors.  It's really a very simple issue that I refer to as the explanation trap.  This is off-task behaviour, which is invariably counter-productive.  The explanation trap opens the moment you talk for more than 30 seconds, which means you've either made the task too remote from the physical realities of singing or you've launched off into an episode of (probably unintended) narcissistic self-aggrandizement.

Two examples will illustrate what I mean.

At the earnest end of the scale, the more you talk about the mechanics of producing a good vocal tone, the more abstract it becomes.  When something as fundamentally physical as singing is made remote through spoken explanation, you make it vastly more difficult to achieve the result you're pursuing.  It is better to go away and think the problem through before the next rehearsal.  Be prepared to let productive bad habits persist until you have the means to correct them through doing instead of talking.

Many musicians will be familiar with the conductor-as-narcissist.  One of the worst manifestations of this in my experience was a rehearsal I sat through a few years ago where the most productive time was the final twenty minutes.  This was when the conductor realized how much time he'd idled away telling his favorite anecdotes about the music we were supposed to be singing, all the while indulging in catty in-jokes with selected members of the alto and tenor sections.  His choir didn't sound any better for the repartee; actually, most of us felt left out and wondered why we'd been called at all.  If he'd reversed the proportion of talk and singing, it would have been about right.

In choir rehearsals it is often the case that doing something well is so much more important than explanation or false bonhomie.  If you must say anything, it is far better to praise the group for sounding well-blended and on pitch -- which instills a strong sense of achievement, and conveys that these things are important -- rather than embarking on an extended spell of unnecessary talk, to which nobody will pay the slightest attention after the first ten seconds.  A smile or a pained look will convey so much more -- the latter especially if it's followed up with a brief question about what could be improved.  Make the choristers do the thinking, and this will show up in their approach.

Talk is powerful.  When used in moderation it is a force for good.  However, on balance it is better to reinforce good habits by praising them when you see them and let explanations about the subtleties of vocal technique come later.  Save your funny stories and snarky humour for the pub afterwards.