Mahler 2 is a bit of a challenge for basses - like the Nunc
in the Rachmaninov Vespers it has a couple of low B-flats
in it. Not that low B-flat, this one:
which is just about singable if you've got laryngitis or a hangover or were baptised Vladimir, though Mahler
makes it easier by marking it ppp and sneaking down
onto it from the G-flat above, and I wish Beethoven
understood the voice as well as Mahler. I managed it
in rehearsal, but in the concert I had a frog in my
throat at the crucial moment and nowt came out.
Basses just don't really do ppp. I won't name the
well-known conductor of this festive concert, but let
me just say that the Hallé had decided by about the
third bar that he was best ignored in the interests of
music. The Hallé were very good indeed. The soprano
and contralto soloists were a joy to work with. The
chorus was a joy to work with (especially when the
basses had sobered up) even on the back row where
the ceiling keeps bashing you on the head (have you
seen the back row of the chorus seating at St David's
Hall? It was obviously designed round the general
physique of your average bowls player in action.)
The conductor flailed impotently, yet received a standing
ovation at the end. There is no justice.
Also years and years ago I had a friend whose ears were
a quarter of a tone sharp. She thought she sang in tune,
but she was always very slightly flat. Her voice was
sweet, but she had this problem with intonation (a posh
word singists use for"tuning"), so I chipped in half the
cost of a lesson for her with a well-known and
much-recommended local singing teacher, as a more
subtle hint than saying "Gladys Prawnsmuggler [not
her real name] - had you ever thought of taking up all-in
wrestling or rock-juggling as a hobby, instead?"
That lesson was a complete waste of time. One third of its
£15 cost was taken up with my friend's lying on the floor for
the first 20 minutes, "relaxing", according to what this
teacher understood to be the Alexander Method, which
might be handy if you're an actor or heavily gravid, but
about as much use to a singer in preparation as a mouthful
of dried peas and eleventeen lagers. The rest of the lesson
was spent readying my friend for her first concert, at which
this teacher intended to parade her and other suckers to
a paying audience. I went to the concert. It was dire.
The alleged teacher hadn't seemed to notice, or care, that
my friend's ears were slightly out of tune.
So, children - beware of charlatans who would part you
from your pocket money. They are everywhere.
Except, fortunately, in the RSCM, and most particularly that bit
of it which resides in the hinterland of Morecambe.
One recent Saturday seven of us from St Oswald's had
the rare opportunity to work under, or observe, one of
the best teachers in the singing world that I have ever
seen, and I've seen a few. Rachael isn't (as far as I know,
though she might be) a voice coach: she teaches junior
(and probably adult) choirs, and members of junior (ditto)
choirs, how to sing church (and probably secular) music
together, and at that she is quite outstanding, and her
enthusiasm is infectious. And if she's not a voice coach
she knows enough about the voice to know when to stop.
I imagine that if she came across a really special voice she would interfere as little as possible with itsdevelopment and pass it on to a specialist. For nothing damages a voice more than a bad singing teacher - generations of singers have spent the first year at their academy or conservatoire laboriously unlearning the bad habits they had had forced on them by poor teachers. The voice is a delicate instrument, and it changes with time. The singing technique that lasted you so well for four or five years may not last anotherfour or five, because some muscles will have become tired with overuse and others allowed to grow flabby by neglect. It may surprise you to know that professional singers at the very peak of their performance and fame continue to take lessons, for that one simple physiological reason.
There are some general principles that are of universal applicability, however, and if they are ignored you are never going to make the best of your voice. It was wonderful to see how an inspired teacher applies them, yet makes the singing job fun at the same time. The second principle is that your voice - or rather the musculature that produces it - needs to have a bit of preliminary exercise before you can sing well - the infamous "warm-up". But over and above this second principle is the first - that the rest of your body needs to be relaxed so that the voice warm-up will work. How you do it depends on you and your teacher, but the wobble is as good as anything - do a few tiptoes to remind you what muscular tension feels like, then let your legs relax. Next loosen your wrists and arms (by shaking them about); relax your shoulders by swinging your arms from back to front a few times; then let your head flop. Imagine you're a jellyfish. Finally chew on an imaginary piece of gum to loosen up the muscles of your face. A lot of singing has to do with imagination and "let's pretend".
The third principle is stance - knees very slightly bent, your weight slightly forward - towards your toes rather than your heels, but not enough to make you feel as though you're about to fall flat on your face, which is rather an unseemly thing to do, especially in church.
Now, the voice warm-up. It was refreshing to see a very different approach to the usual series of major scales jacked up a semitone each time and a few arpeggios, performed with abject boredom by everybody as though it were some incomprehensible but sacred rite. For a start, on Saturday you worked downwards, opening up your lower range before you exercised the top, which makes perfect sense to me (I just wish I'd thought of it - but I will, I will...) , and there was a lot of fun theatre to go with it, to exercise the giggle muscles.
Finally - was anyone nervous before the service? Good! Nerves are what you get when your body and mind are gearing themselves up to do a job, and they are working for you, not against you, whatever you might think when have to visit the little room for the fourteenth time in an hour.
Children, when you hear people say "musicians and singers" you have my permission to scream "outrageous" at them (provided, of course, you are not singing a service in church at the time.) Singers are every bit musicians as the people who scrape violins or bang pianos or blow into tubes, and you should never forget that. You also have anadded dimension that instrumentalists don't - you have words to do at the same time as notes. And cellos and fiddles and church organs don't catch colds and 'flu, but you will, to add to your woes. Though, looking on the bright side, you can take your instrument with you on buses and trains and planes without paying extra or having it stuck in a freezing, airless hold by some goon with a back-to-front cap on who wouldn't know a fiddle from a frisbee.
Saturday's choir wasn't exactly a random assortment of young people, for the organisers will have done their best to match music to volunteers. But to the ears of the mums and dads and other interested parties who formed the congregation at the4:30 service and who had delivered their charges at 10:45 they certainly were at the start. But six hours later a small miracle had been wrought - a job lot of 28 young people between the ages of 7 and 18 had become a choir. Some of them are already experienced in choir work, because they belong to choirs with good leaders, and they've been doing the job for a long time, but others were beginners (including St Oswald's' three musical missionaries), so I would first pay tribute to the triumvirateof young men who formed the tenor and bass* sections - without you, and your experience, and your willingness to be a part of a day of fun and music for much younger children, it wouldn't have been so much fun for all of us, leaders, participants and bystanders. And for the older sops and altos - the same goes for you. You older singers teach and guide by your example, and the tinies look up to you.
I was sorry to miss the short rehearsal by a group of the older choristers for the Byrd anthem - not a particularly difficult bit of Byrd, but still one that lays a lot of snares for the unwary who have been brought up to believe that bar-lines and time signatures are a guarantee of regular strong and weak beats, which they rarely are, unless you're in a military or a dance band. It is a great tribute to the musicianship of this small choir that when I asked Rachael after the service how she had taught them so quickly how to circumvent these traps and snares, she said: "I didn't have to. They did it by themselves." It only takes one voice to place a false stress and Byrd's Mass in Four Parts becomes Byrd's Mass in 4/4.
Bar lines are a hindrance in Byrd, but notation itself is a hindrance in modern hymns and worship songs when it attempts to show the rhythms of swing. The notation of a Scott Joplin rag may look very similar to the notation of the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Cm piano sonata, Op 111, but in performance they are worlds apart, and it isn't just a matter of treating dotted notes as though they were two tied triplets waiting for the third, as we do in much of Handel, but of feeling the rhythms as rhythms of the body - which is why gospel choirs jiggle about such a lot. But Saturday's choir moved effortlessly from the Byrd to a modern piece of church swing, and made a pretty good job of the swing, too.
And now the "small ensembles" - two or three of you singing the solo bits. If you didn't already know from your past experience, working solo or with just one or two other voices is very different from working with a larger group. Once you get over the mild stage fright that singing solo or virtually solo always brings, you discover that the air you're singing into has a different feel to it, because it isn't being disturbed by zillions of other sound waves - it is (relatively) still, and it's there for you to use. These considerations are very important when you come to do solo work with an orchestra. If you are an alto, for example, you don't stand in front of the violas or cellos - they will pinch the air you need. Stand in front of the violins, instead. At the frequencies your voice will be using, the air will be stiller. And keep as far away from the organ as you are allowed to, for the same reason.
Next, the younger readers. I hope you listened to the young man who read and learned from him. You did a splendid job with your readings, and you had no help or guidance at all because there simply wasn't time. But you might at any time be called on to read something in church, with microphone or without, and being able to read well requires just as much care and attention as being able to sing well. I am therefore entering a plea to all choir leaders - think about how to create good readers as well as good choristers - it's all part of the same job. Good reading is good singing, though without precise pitch and metre, and one skill informs the other.
It was a good congregation (between 50 and 60, I made it) present to hear the results of the day's work - mums and dads, and us hangers-on who had been there all day, not to sing, but to learn more about how singing is (and should be) taught to youngsters.
Our children who volunteer to learn the discipline (and the fun) of choir work - their vocation - do so because they believe they have been called to lead the music that goes with worship. They work hard, and they learn quickly. They would love to show you what they can achieve in a day.
So where were you, representatives of our congregations? And our clergy?
* The young bass, in particular, should be congratulated for inventing what should henceforth be known as the Morecambe Cadence (VIII-I), a chord sequence hitherto unknown to man (or woman) - one that is much more interesting than the composer's rather boring, however unconventional, V-I, and never mind the parallel octaves and fifths.
The Morecambe Cadence © Henry, 2009
