Leading Voices Day 1

I am in Utrecht, NL, at Leading Voices. I’m here with my fabulous colleagues, Sanna Salminen and Helmut Schaumberger, invited by the European Choral Association to contribute to this event that unites choral conductors, singers, and music teachers throughout Europe. And I love it. Here is a quick summary of my thoughts of the day.

Leading voices Day 1

Today, I have been mainly thinking about engaging reluctant singers in a school situation and improvisation with choirs.

Engaging reluctant singers

Sparked by a workshop by Rohan Poldervaart I have been thinking a lot about trust. Rohan suggested to start working with young singers by engaging them first in open and honest conversations. Just walking in and starting to sing with people is not necessarily a recipe for disaster but can be difficult for some. Showing our voices to other people can be a vulnerable process. Rohan’s way of doing this is through building trust, then engaging in rhythm, then in the so-called ‘energize mode’. This comes from a concept called ‘Vocal Painting’ and is an engaged way of speaking text where you work from the speaking voice but don’t do any accurate pitches yet. Then you can add pitch bit by bit without making a big thing about it. I like this way of working, but I’m still thinking that the step from speaking to singing can be quite a thing for some people, esp. when in a forced group, like school or a university module.

Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm

When I had music theory lessons as a teenager, I hated rhythm dictation. Give me any melody to notate, but no complex rhythm. So much to my own surprise, I went to a workshop called ‘Improvisational inspiration from percussive elements’ by Merzi Rajala from Finland. Needless to say, I didn’t only survive but also really enjoyed it. I have dabbled with body percussion for a long time, mainly for my students at university as an element of composing and improvising but also for my private students in order to develop better feelings for beats. However, Merzi’s workshop showed me a few ways of how to come up with beat patterns and then harmonize them in a circle singing style. I’m full of inspiration to create some rhythmical warmups for my choirs and also to use some of the patterns to build more trust with my university students. Watch this space!

Vocal Painting

After this, I had a lovely ice cream while having a quick look at Utrecht and then went to the presentation of a lab on Vocal Painting by Jim Daus Hjernoe. Vocal Painting is a way of creating a framework for a choir within which the choir takes ownership of their own improvised singing. It works with a set of gestures to indicate dynamics, pitch, harmony, loops, lengths of phrases, etc. It works in conjunction with Solfa. I have been using similar ideas in music teaching inspired by Duncan Chapman and also with my choirs through developing my own gestures, but it was interesting to see a formalised system.

Claiming innovation

However, throughout the day one thought came back to me recurrently: we have all these innovative methods to engage people in singing. However, in Britain, in most adult choirs I know we stand in rows, stock-still and sing ready-made music from sheets. Why is this? Can you only do those kinds of methods in children and youth choirs? Can we, as adults possibly claim the innovation and be a role model for the young generations? I think YES:

YES, we have to try out new ways of singing…

… we can discover so much more about our voices

YES, we have to engage with our voices free from the traditional formats…

… we will improve listening, musical communication and pitching

And

YES, we can still also have the familiar formats of singing

… but you might experience them differently

I’m thinking of putting on a course on vocal improvisation with choirs, so if you’re interested in learning more about circle singing and choir improvisation, drop me a line.

All in all, I really enjoyed my first day here. But I can’t finish this without saying thanks to Sanna for finding excellent ice cream while having lots of inspiring discussions with me.

#choirworkshops #internationaltrip #choirimprovisation #rhythmandgrooves #SiME #collaborations