A Song Map

Last week I spent three days teaching for the annual winter intensive at the Australian Youth Choir.  It has sort of become one of the fixtures of my year since I began working for the AYC, partly because it's a really good opportunity to try out slightly different approaches to teaching repertoire.

I started exploring the idea of song maps a couple of years ago in response to a complex score layout.  One of the advantages of teaching from a map rather than a score is that it provides a really good opportunity to talk about musical structure without having to sound like a Schenkarian analyst.

Gary Barlow and Andrew Lloyd-Weber produced Sing as a diamond jubilee gift to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth in 1952.  The pieces was composed with the aim of encouraging people to join in and (as the title suggests) sing.  The melodic profile of the piece is very nice, and lends itself well to using solfa handsigns and rhythm syllables to teach the pitch and rhythm elements of the piece.  Most of the elements of the song are repeated at least twice, and here is the catch: the words are slightly different each time.

I decided to base my map on another event in the diamond jubilee celebrations, the River Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant.  The choice was pure free association: the score contains two bridges, which prompted me to think of a river connected with the diamond jubilee, hence the Thames.  Here is the map.

Some of the London geography is a bit on the iffy side, but here's how the map is meant to be read:

• Starting at the top left the song begins.  There are two phrases, each ending on a different solfa handsign.  Memory words are assigned so we remember which line goes with which handsign.
• The first bridge contains more handsigns, representing the repeated bits of melody.  For compactness, the words of each repeated motif are represented by their first letter.  There's another repeated motif on the road to the right of the bridge, again with the first letter of each word.
• The first chorus is 'under' the bridge.
• Down the river is the next verse, again with handsigns and memory words.
• The second bridge contains the repeated handsigns with their words.
• The next chorus is under the second bridge.
• The next verse has a slight variation with the second phrase ending on Reh (previously Lah).
• The coda has a long sequence of handsigns, boiled down to the first pair plus the words...and there's a chorus.

The map evolved over two days, and allowed for choristers to recall the sections learned in the first session before adding landmarks from further down the river.  By the end of the second session the choir was well familiarized with the song, and managed a completely finished performance at the end of the final day.

Here's a performance of Sing -- watch the map as you listen, and see if it all fits together.