Using reductive metaphors won’t solve your choir’s problems

One of my favorite choir tricks was to telling my singers to ‘aim for the top side of the pitch.’  This was, of course, because they were singing flat, and I thought the imagery would give my singers a way of thinking about an abstract concept (singing in tune) in a simplified, easily understood, silver bullet fashion.  In reality, this – and other reductive metaphors I used as a director – skimmed over all problems that needed to be tackled and reduced an endemic choral pitfall to a two second soundbite that was utterly impossible to put into practice.  No one knew where the ‘top side of the pitch’ was, or how (and with what) to aim for it.

As a singer, I heard this kind of reductive metaphor over and over again.  About singing in tune: ‘sing right in the center of the pitch’; blend: ‘get inside the sound of the person next to you’; posture: ‘like you’re hanging from a string coming our of the top of your head’; volume: ‘bounce your sound off the back wall’; high notes: ‘imagine taking off helmet.’  And many, many more. We’ve all used them, and they seem awfully like finding solutions in an incredibly short rehearsal period with a performance or service bearing down.

In the long run, however, they don’t help.  They don’t assist amateur singers, or teach them about singing, or teach them about singing in an ensemble, or instruct them on how to approach an intangible expression of an intangible art form. Reducing the act of singing to a metaphor – using terms that describe anything except singing – doesn’t make singing any more tangible.

It’s better to instruct.  It’s better to find and offer one piece of concrete direction that can ground an amateur singer’s physicality, or work to clarify one vowel across the ensemble, or make someone aware of the tension in their jaw, or hear what a tuning a perfect fifth sounds and feels like.

 

 

The singing choral director

Having been a director, I acknowledge that through the years I have fallen prey to using cheap techniques – “tricks” that skirted around the issues of posture, tone production, breathing, vowel formation, physical awareness, and aural skills. These were temporary patches over a myriad of problems plaguing the ensembles before which I stood. Why go for the slight of hand?  Why not dig deeper?

From a practical standpoint, there isn’t enough time. In any given choral situation, there is too much music and barely enough time to learn it, let alone make it performance ready.  That, in addition to the web of personality, levels of proficiency, and, frankly, psychological baggage that the average group of amateur singers brings to the table, it’s easier to keep your head down, repeat a few easy-to-remember catch phrases that may or may not work, and get the music ready to the best of your abilities.

On a more personal level, the slight of hand is easy when you are a choral director who is not a professional singer.

For a little over a week, I’ve been rolling out sections of a forthcoming book about choral singing and sight reading in a choral situation.  Originally conceived as a text and workbook for choral singers, the focus later changed to assist those in choral leadership – directors, organists, choirmasters, section leaders – as an aid to assist the singers in their ensembles, in turn.

The response I have received in the last week, however, has led me to reevaluate this focus once again.  Talking about vowels, concepts in matching pitch, communicating ideas about common vocal technique in clear language, teaching tuning, and, eventually, guiding an ensemble to better reading capabilities – these ideas are aimed squarely at choral directors.

Even when I was a professional singer (and I mean that people paid me to sing for over a decade), I wasn’t really a professional singer.  I had never taken private study, enrolled in pedagogy or repertoire courses, learned the physiology, or seriously confronted my own psychological barriers to singing through study and performance.

After being a director, I simply got more work as a singer in choral ensembles, likely because my keyboard skills were not expert to do it all alone. In that role, and with my experience on the other side, I began to witness extremely talented, expertly knowledgeable, sensitive and communicative musicians stand before a choir and proclaim that they knew nothing about singing (sometimes – I’m not kidding – by using those exact words). And then away we went, the blind leading the blind, so to speak.   I don’t have numbers, and I’m not saying that all choral directors have no concept of vocal technique.  I fear, however, that this situation is incredibly common across the thousands of amateur choral ensembles and church music programs in the US.

As leaders in choral situations, we can do better. We can be better and the amateur singers under our direction deserve it. Tuning and sight singing are still incredibly important to me and I will continue to delve into those subjects, and how to utilize them to improve the sound and musicianship of an amateur choral ensemble.  The focus, however, will now shift solely to those on the podium.

Thanks to the thousands of you who have been reading this past week.

What’s in a choir’s tone – harmonics, emotions and everything in between.

I used to sing under a conductor who, during warm-ups, would like to say things like, “Get more overtones in your sound.”  I still don’t know what that means, or how I was supposed to make that happen, but I think this director – who, by the way, was an amazing musician – was trying to highlight the importance of music’s natural property.

Or, maybe he was trying to talk politely about our tone.  Remember that Zappa quote?

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. 

The shoving around of air molecules will beget relational movement (sympathetic vibrations) in the surrounding air molecules at predictable, mathematical ratios.  The following is a graphic representation of this phenomenon – the overtone series –  identifying each overtone by its pitch class and its relationship to the fundamental. (Every pitch that “sounds the same” is in the same pitch class. This goes for pitches that are an octave, or multiple octaves apart, as well as for enharmonics).

Digging a little deeper, this legion of sympathetic vibrations will, among other things, act to give an instrument or voice its timbre. This is probably my choir director’s desired result, though the likelihood of this concept bearing fruit with the average choral amateur is hard to say.

A human creating a musical sound is an incredibly complex process.  It factors in conscious actions (as in posture and physical awareness), unconscious, involuntary, or partially involuntary actions (breathing, engaging the vocalis muscle), and subconscious baggage (how you feel about your voice, what mean things others have said about your voice, fight or flight responses, or the internalization of a multitude of unexplained directions such as Support! Blend! Don’t spread! Raise your soft palate! or, Get more overtones in your sound!).

So what can choral leaders control as they look out at an average amateur ensemble?  How, in a maximum of two hours of face time a week, can a director work on getting their choir to sing better, sing more in tune, and get them to read more accurately, all while crashing through a season’s worth of repertoire?  My experience has led me to rely on the overtone series as a guide to addressing pitch and tuning, through which one can subtly confront the technical, emotional and experiential needs of the average amateur choral ensemble.

In our last episode, I talked about trying to match pitch using one’s ears, combined with the physical sensation experienced when locking in to a pitch.

After the unison, the next step in the series is the octave. Mathematically, the frequency of the pitch one octave above the reference pitch – also called the fundamental – is exactly twice the frequency of the fundamental (for example, the ‘A’ above ‘A 440’ has a frequency of 880 Hz), the ratio of this relationship is 2:1.

Pick a drone that is at the bottom end of the comfortable range for your voice. Play it and the octave above it simultaneously. Just as before, hear the drone in your ears as you breathe – standing or sitting tall, relaxing the jaw, shoulders and neck – with your eyes closed (if that helps). Sing in unison with the higher pitch, using the I-found-my-keys “Ah.”

Then, to feel the space between the fundamental and the octave above, sing a long slide (known as a portamento) from this pitch to the pitch that is an octave above it and hold that for a moment. Stop singing, inhale again, and sing the upper octave, followed by a portamento down to the fundamental. Try not to allow the portamento change your ‘Ah’ vowel.

When you are comfortable navigating the space between the fundamental and the octave above, play only the fundamental as a drone. Once your breath and ears are set, sing the octave above the fundamental on that same, ‘ah’ vowel.  As before, continue until you can sustain the feeling of the octave in your ears and body.  You may feel a greater expansiveness with the octave than with the unison.

Sidebar: In all the examples throughout these discussions, I’ll use ‘C’ as a drone or fundamental. Don’t read too much into this – it’s only for convenience.

When satisfied with your results, change the pitch of the drone and begin again.

Everything you heard about matching pitch in choir rehearsal is a lie

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that “music is math.” Whether in relation to something simple (counting), or something more esoteric (highly-developed, academic analyses of harmony and structure), or whether it is a misguided argument to try to convince school boards that studying music will help kids excel at math and science; the phrase keeps coming up. The music/math relationship is most evident for me in terms of the simple relationships between frequencies, particularly frequencies of pitches whose intervals are generally referred to as “perfect.”

Music is sound and sound is movement (specifically, vibration). Frank Zappa said, “Music is the result of shoving around unsuspecting air molecules, usually requiring the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.” The frequency (cycles per second) of this shoving around is detected by the ear as pitch. Pitch, therefore, can be described by a frequency of vibration, which can be represented numerically. As a result, two instruments, or two voices, whose sound making properties are vibrating at the same frequency are producing the same pitch, even if the qualities, or timbre, of the sound that is produced, differ greatly.

Since there are infinite degrees of variation in frequency, parameters had to be set, so that we could talk about the same pitch. Over the years, frequencies have been arbitrarily singled out and defined, using a varying degree of names and reference points, which does not necessarily mean that everyone agreed.  Sidebar: For many years, I have searched for an answer to the question of how ‘C’ became the tonal center of keys with no sharps or flats (and, not incidentally, the ‘Do’ of a fixed Do system).  The answer probably lies somewhere in the Latin translations of the Greek musical treatises, particularly those of Hucbald and Boethius, in the 8^th and 9^th centuries.  If anybody else heard something different, please let me know.

In modern times, a generally accepted reference point is A 440, meaning, that a 440 Hz frequency (440 vibration cycles per second) is generally recognized as the “A” above “middle C.” However, depending on what part of the world you are in, this is not a universally accepted constant. Even some American orchestras adjust their “A.” The bottom line, for me, is that there is no such thing as “absolute pitch,” just agreed upon reference points (if we can actually get to the point where we do agree).

What is constant is that no matter what frequency an instrumentalist or singer is playing, if another instrumentalist or singer starts producing a tone with exactly the same frequency, the two will be in “perfect unison.” Let’s try it!

First, you will need a “drone” reference pitch. You can use a piano, guitar – anything handy. What would be better would be an instrument that can sustain a pitch without any decay, like an organ, or electronic keyboard. If you don’t have an instrument nearby, you can find drones at www.hearingandsinging.com. This is personal practice – save the joyous and wonderful experience of matching pitch with another singer until after you are able to master each exercise with a drone.

Next, focus on your breathing. Pick a seated or standing position where your upper body is tall, but without tension – especially in your shoulders, neck, and face. Take a few breaths to warm the mechanism. As you inhale, let your ribcage expand naturally. As you exhale, keep your ribcage expanded and your posture tall – don’t let it all deflate.

Now, pick a pitch that fits comfortably in your singing range. As it plays, close your eyes and focus on the sound of the pitch with your ears. Don’t forget to breathe.

When the time is right, relax the jaw to open your mouth, and match the pitch using the I-found-my-keys ‘Ah’. Try it a few times without judging your tone, your volume, how long you can make the pitch last, or the accuracy of your pitch. Make a noise until your air nearly runs out, pause, fill the tank again, and repeat, using your ears to correct your pitch accuracy as you go. Keep your eyes closed.

You may find it difficult to zero in on the perfect unison – there’s a lot working against you: emotions, physicality, technique, fear and frustration, wandering thoughts, the movement of the Earth. When a perfect unison happens, however, even for an instant, note how it sounds and how it feels in your body and your ears. A perfect unison, perfectly sounded, may seem louder and richer than you expect.

Strive for that, then change the pitch of your drone and begin again.

Talking to your choir about vowels

Click here for – Why is it so hard to sing in tune?; Hearing and Singing – a modest musical manifesto

One Sunday, I was subbing in a choir in Mississippi.  On that particular Sunday, the church in question was auditioning a candidate to be their next Music Director. He worked us a little bit, then said the following, in the laziest South Mississippi Drawl you can imagine, “Now, when you look at me, you see country, you hear country, you think country, ‘cuz I am country.” Then, switching to the Queen’s English, he said, “But when I sing, I sound like this.” Everyone laughed, and he got the gig.

Vowels play a huge role not only in the singing pronunciation of a word, so that an audience can understand what you’re singing, but equally in the tuning of the pitch that you are singing. In order for a choir to sing in tune – before sight reading comes into the picture – the vowels of an ensemble must be addressed.

Very generally – when in a choral situation, singing vowels formed in a similar way as spoken vowels (whatever your regional dialect) will result in sagging pitch.  In American English, the placement of these vowels (as well as many consonants) tends to be in the back of the throat.  It’s difficult to produce enough breath that will sustain pitches with this placement. Muscular tension and fatigue can result. All of which affects pitch production and the ability to keep a pitch from dragging. It also dulls the sound of a choir.

Talking about this tendency with the average amateur choir can be frustrating, especially when technical jargon is employed. Within the constraints of a weekly rehearsal, time cannot be wasted.  In-depth discussions of the soft palate are probably not the best use of a choir director’s time, and will likely go over the heads of the untrained singers in your group.  For me, one very helpful, and easily discussed, technique has been the “ah” syllable that sounds like the noise you make when you remember where you left your keys.  Try it.

Now, try it again, but as you inhale, think this vowel.  In doing so, you will prepare your mouth, tongue and all the space in your head for the sound you will make when you sing.  Try this a few times, each time remembering how it feels – where your tongue is, how open your mouth is (tip #1 – open it vertically, not horizontally; tip #2 – it’s not open enough), and what everything above your cheekbones feels like.  Are you listening?   Have you still found your keys?  Or is the vowel drifting to ‘Uh?’  How does ‘Uh’ feel, compared to finding your keys?

This kind of excersise will prime your choir for the self-awareness they will need when tuning, and translating the physical sensation of tuning into a sight singing practice.

Adding ‘a few drops’ of the I-found-my-keys ‘Ah’ into the mixture of any sung vowel will help to keep that vowel in the same resonant space as the ‘Ah,’ keep it out of the back of your throat, and counter the tendency of ‘spoken vowels’ ruining your chance to sing in tune. (I have to thank my wife for this observation)  Remember – we’re talking about so called “pure” vowels (only one vowel at a time) as opposed to diphthongs (two adjacent vowels in the same syllable).  The following is a table that shows the transformation of the vowel, with the addition of  ‘a few drops’ of ‘ah.’

Written Vowel	If it sounds like:	With a few drop of ‘ah,’ it will sound like:
a	apple	option
e	any	every
i	even	imp
o	open	coffin
u	food	open

Why is it so hard to sing in tune?

I brought this question up before as one of the fundamental problems of working with, and being a part of, a choral ensemble. After all, no one really wants to listen to an out-of-tune choir.

It’s a complicated issue that involves both technical and conceptual components.  Everyone’s heard a bit about the technical components, particularly in terms of breathing, vowel formation, and the tendency of ‘speaking’ vowels to drag down the pitch down when sung unmodified. Everyone who has been in a choir has also heard words like ‘resonance’ and ‘facemask,’ have been told to ‘open their throat,’ or to visualize some kind of imagery (a bullseye, a balloon, etc.) that is supposed to usher in a greater probability of singing in tune.  The success of these techniques is debatable.

More likely witnessed, is the tendency of choral directors to panic in the presence of sagging pitch, at which they commence violently pointing upward while raising their eyebrows, which in turn creates a wave of panic and tension amongst the ranks, translated into muscular tension, particularly in the shoulders and neck, prompting singers to tire out quickly, take shallow breaths, and make the pitch sag even further.  A self-defeating cycle, indeed.

Regular voice lessons with a trained professional taken by everyone from the director down to the second basses will do wonders for correcting these problems, not only in identifying technical issues, but in finding appropriate solutions and – most importantly – in providing the language so that director and singers can communicate with each other. This is the technical problem.

The conceptual problem challenging a choir’s ability to sing in tune has to do with the understanding of the interval of the major third. We live in a tertian world. A very high proportion of choral music executed by the average choir in the average choral context employs harmony in which the third is the defining interval. As a society of musicians, we have been given an inaccurate understanding of this interval, because we have been trained to use the piano as our reference.

Nothing against pianos, or pianists (or organists, for that matter).  The tuning system of the piano has been deliberately altered (the technical term is tempered), so that the instrument can move freely between tonal centers. This compromise has developed through centuries of work, and much blood and ink has been spilled over the benefits and deficiencies of various ways to divide the octave.  For a tour through this amazing history, I highly recommend Stuart Isacoff’s book, Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization

Boiling it down, the piano is tuned so that the relationship between the frequencies of any given half step is exactly the same as any other half step, anywhere on the keyboard.  This so-called equal temperament adjusts intervals in order to achieve an even relationship between all intervals.  The trade off is that this system pulls intervals away from more “natural” tuning systems (also known as just intonation) that rely on the order of the overtone series and the simple mathematical relationships that occur naturally between frequencies.

The unaccompanied choir is not a tempered instrument. It operates to its full potential when just intonation is its compass. The obvious conflict of participating in a just intonation ensemble while being accompanied by an equal temperament instrument is not lost on me, however.  More so, this duality illustrates the illusive nature of musical performance. Music is not an exact science, and it never will be, the devil is in the details and the nooks and crannies in which the devilish details hide are miniscule and everywhere.

As an example, imagine a freshly tuned, equally tempered, modern piano. The ‘A’ below ‘middle C’ on this piano will have a frequency of exactly 220.000 Hz.   In Just Intonation, the frequency of a pitch an octave higher then a reference will be twice that of the reference (later, we will refer to the reference pitch as a fundamental). Therefore the frequency of the ‘A’ above our reference – the ‘A’ above ‘middle C’ on a piano (designated in the Theory world as A4) – is 2 x 220.000 Hz = 440.000 Hz. Luckily, the frequency of A4 on our imaginary piano is also 440.000 Hz, as all ‘A’s are standardized across the keyboard.

Let’s try another one. The frequency of the ‘D’ below A4 is 293.665 Hz on our imaginary piano. The interval between this D and A4 is a Fifth. Using Just Intonation, A4 should vibrate three times for every two cycles of the D below it, or (293.665 Hz x 3)/2 = 440.498 Hz, slightly higher that the 440.000 on the piano.

Here’s a more drastic example: the ‘F’ below A4 vibrates at 349.228 Hz on our imaginary piano. The interval between this F and A4 is a Major Third. Just Intonation tells us that the ratio between the frequencies of these two pitches should be 5/4, or (349.228 Hz x 5)/4 = 436.536 Hz, which is significantly different from 440.000 Hz.

To summarize:

Fundamental	Frequency of Fundamental on imaginary piano	A4 using Just Intonation	Interval
A3	110.000 Hz	440.000 Hz	Octave
D4	293.665 Hz	440.498 Hz	Fifth
F4	349.228 Hz	436.536 Hz	Major Third

These, obviously, are not the same A4s. Singing in tune with the piano will simply not sound the same as singing in tune with the person standing next to you in the choir stalls. This is not to say that just intonation is a perfect system, but we have to remember that the secret to singing in tune is to understand what singing in tune sounds and feels like.

 

Harvest Moon

This week’s big, radiant full moon marked the end of our fourth week in Germany.  The realization of our presence here is now commonplace (Hey, we live in Europe!), and is driven home not only when all the street signs are in German and I actually understand some of them, but when an accordionist ambles down my street playing “Besame mucho” (with mucho wrong notes), when I’m in the grocery and the overhead music plays “Here I go again” by Whitesnake, only to be followed up with Tina Turner singing the theme song to “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome,” (and 20 extra points to any of you who have actually seen that movie), and when I’ve had wonderful – but unfortunately infrequent – opportunities to sample food that’s so stereotypical that it’s actually wonderful: Brats the size of my forearm, maultaschen (which is a thick pasta-like pocket filled with finely ground vegetables, turkey, you-name-it), borscht (BORSCHT!!), and pickled everything.

Bach’s assignments are coming along – with a new one every day.  Most I’ve never heard, but are lovely, some still sound like bad theory exercises, mixed in are a few classics – Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott, and Herzlich thut mich verlangen (which American choirs know as O, Sacred Heart sore Wounded) back to back at numbers 20 and 21, respectively, and with harmonizations that put those in American hymnals to shame.  My fingers are becoming more nimble by the day, so to make it extra special difficult, I’ll play the two treble parts with my right hand, the bass with the left, and sing the tenor part, which is followed rapidly by a nap.

I’ve finally been settled enough to complete work on choral scores that were awaiting editing, (so that they would be made appropriate for publication), and sent them off to my publisher this morning. My publisher is great – encouraging, but honest – and seems to be working very hard at getting my charts out into the open. However, I never hear about it from them. I get email and Facebook flashes showing my pieces in strange and unsuspected places, much like a stolen garden gnome that someone has taken on an exotic vacation.  They shows up at conferences, new music reading sessions, and, in this week’s ransom photo, at a professional recording session produced by my publisher in preparation for the Fall release.  Huzzah!

PS – apologies for my freakout last week. Alles klar.