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.