A poor mans version of #singthescore

I started making these short videos for the singers I work with. The idea is to give a little background to the music before we rehearse it and, where it is useful, to look at some of the things in the score which we might otherwise spend valuable rehearsal time talking about. They are not rehearsals and they are not performances to copy. They are really an extension of the sort of conversation I would have with a choir in rehearsal.

There is a humongous influence from Robert Hollingworth and I Fagiolini’s Sing the Score series (look at it on YouTube, much better than mine). I have enjoyed those videos enormously. Robert is a kind and generous musician and has the ability to take a score apart without taking the life out of it. Mine are much more homespun, but that is where the idea began.

I have always thought that knowing the notes is only part of learning a piece. We need to know what we are singing about. It helps to understand why the composer has written something in a particular way. We should know where our line fits into the whole and, especially in unaccompanied music, what our note is doing in the chord. That last point has become something of an interest of mine.

I am increasingly fascinated by the tuning of acoustically pure intervals. A choir does not have to accept the tuning of a piano. In unaccompanied music we can adjust notes to one another and tune the chord that is actually being sung. The major third is perhaps the most obvious example. A pure major third is noticeably narrower than its equal-tempered equivalent. When singers begin to hear that difference, rather than simply being told about it, something rather wonderful can happen. The chord settles. The sound loses some of its tension and overtones begin to appear. You can sometimes hear the moment when a choir finds it.

It does not mean that singers need a lesson in acoustics. Most of the time they simply need to listen differently. Why does that third feel too high? Which note is stopping this chord from settling? Can we hear the fifth properly? What happens if the basses give us a cleaner fundamental?

The videos range rather widely because the repertoire does. Sometimes I talk about the composer or the circumstances in which the piece was written. Sometimes the words are the important thing. With another piece I might spend several minutes on one chord, the balance between two parts, a difficult bit of text, or the way a long phrase needs to be shaped..

There is a practical reason for all this as well. Rehearsal time is precious. If twenty singers listen to me talking for ten minutes, we have collectively used more than three hours. Some things are better dealt with beforehand. Then, when we meet, we can spend more of our time actually singing. Most of these videos have been made for Parnham Voices and relate to music we are currently singing or preparing. There is Renaissance polyphony, madrigals, Bach, Victorian part-songs and rather more besides. They are made first and foremost for my own singers, but anyone is welcome to watch them. I hope they encourage people to look a little more closely at the score and, perhaps more importantly, to listen more carefully to what is happening around them.