Choral Directors

Here are some suggestions for choral directors from a singer.


Pitch
Pointing up with your index finger will not help a singer adjust their technique in any meaningful way to compensate for poor pitch. All it tells them is that you think they are flat. It doesn't tell them which person (or even which section) is flat. Most importantly, it doesn't tell them which pitches, passages, or chords are out of tune. Nebulous comments about tuning don't help, either. "The pitch is a little... ehh" is not helpful, neither are references to the general pitch being "wonky", "a little under", or "fucking atrocious". We embrace specificity, and so do good conductors.

Helping
You cannot, through sheer arm movement, make us sing better. You cannot affect the tempo by snapping your fingers or knocking on something while we are running music. Singers have to be responsible for tempo, and you have to tell them that. One person cannot force dozens to have good rhythm by banging on something. If the tempo suffers, conduct clearly, and enforce individual responsibility.

Teaching Voice
Most singers have voice teachers, and most voice teachers train their students to sing as soloists and with constant vibrato. Unless you have studied voice seriously with a technical teacher for several years, and read the major voice science and voice pedagogy texts, you probably don't understand vocal technique. As with conducting, there are traditional teaching methods, accepted texts and schools of thought, and scientific principles at play here, and you should consult some of these before giving vocal instruction.

"Raise the palate, drop the jaw" is not helpful, neither is it always a fix. You don't want your singers looking like the victims of the cursed videotape from The Ring, and a too-open jaw is not relaxed, it's just tense in the opposite direction.

Still Teaching Voice (Don't)
Do not make comments about our tone quality, that is personal and subjective. If there is a serious problem with it, it is not something that can be fixed in rehearsal, and will take a lot of work in voice lessons to fix. If there are certain individuals that are causing the problem, talk to them, not the entire choir. I guarantee that the choir will gladly help you identify the troublesome individuals if you can't do that yourself. Also, don't let bad singers pass your audition and then lecture us about the sound of the choir.

Also, for the love of all that is good in the world, do not request "pure" tone, or "floating" high notes. That doesn't mean anything. You are essentially saying "Could you please produce a perfect sound? That's not what we have right now." Don't demonstrate what you want, unless you are positive that you can do it perfectly. If you try a vocal demonstration and it doesn't go well, the singers will probably spend the next few minutes of rehearsal silently judging you and wondering what business you have giving vocal advice when you can't sing well. This is a fair question, as they're not giving you conducting advice.

Teaching Language
Understand that if you are working with a college or professional group, it is very likely that of everyone in the room, you have by far the least experience in whatever language you're instructing. College voice majors have a full year of college-level German, Italian, and French. You don't, because it wasn't required for your degree. If you're going to use IPA, at least have the courtesy to put it out with (or IN) the score, and not waste everyone's time by going through it aloud. It is valuable to read books and rules on diction, but it is not as substantial as the aforementioned years of language instruction that these singers have probably had.

Reality
You cannot fix deficiencies in our performance by jamming in extra rehearsal time just before the concert. If anything, you are going to worsen it by pissing us off because we're tired and demoralized, and we'll enter the concert hall that way. No amount of extra rehearsals will compensate for an inefficient use of time in rehearsal, nor for the fact that many people in a community choir are untrained musicians. Rehearsals should not be the length of a full workday, either. If we wanted that, we would have picked a career that requires full workdays. There is a very relevant concept called "vocal fatigue".

Insanity
Don't let a train wreck go for a long time without stopping it. When you do stop it, don't run things over again without addressing specific issues. Also, vague compliments are just as harmful as vague criticism, because they don't teach us anything about what happened.

If rerunning any section of music, clearly establish the goal for that rerun - no one wants to repeat something for the sake of repetition. Don't try to figure out warm-ups as you go, come with warm-ups prepared or let me do it myself. Stretches do not affect the respiratory, resonatory, or phonatory systems and are useless for vocal readiness. And finally, if you're going to have us do group massage, allow me to go wherever I want in the room so that I get to choose who I massage, because I'm sick of having to do Redneck Phillip Seymour Hoffman over here in the bass section when Italian Natalie Portman is over there in the soprano section.

This is not about music at all

In direct contradiction to what I laid out in my first post, here's something that's been on my mind that has nothing at all to do with music. Basically.

I've been on the road since school let out on May 5th, and haven't been getting any exercise at all as a result. Now that I'm at my parents' house for a little chunk of the summer, I'm hitting the gym like crazy to try and catch up. Some of the people that frequent the gym achieve levels of ridiculousness that I previously thought were reserved for reality-show participants. Here's a quick rundown of things that you should never, ever do at the gym unless it's your first time (in which case you get a pass on some of this stuff, but not all of it).


Don't wear things that you can't work out in. This is especially relevant to

• JLo lady who works out in giant hoop earrings, and other assorted bling
• Mr. Nature guy who wears, not kidding, denim cutoffs, hiking boots, and no deodorant
• Armpit milkshake guy (wait for it...) who wears thick white deodorant and then does shoulder presses in the center of all the mirrors
• These idiots who wear sandals to the gym and somehow... SOMEHOW... are trying to pass it off as gangsta
• People who wear slacks and a tucked-in shirt to the gym
• Guys that take the "shirt required" policy at its absolute loosest interpretation, wearing "tank tops" that barely qualify as chest thongs

Then there are the general behavioral/etiquette things, like

• People that have apparently never done physical activities before, making up random exercises requiring multiple benches and other accessories (gets a pass, but not for more than a week)
• Lack-of-basic-common-sense guy, who has a giant gut but is doing crunches for some reason
• The Ticking Time-Bomb, who is clearly using way too much weight and contorting their body into shapes that have you holding your cell phone, with 911 already typed in, with your finger hovering over the "call" button to request their gurney
• Cardio-all-day-long-without-sweating person. If you're not sweating, it's probably not hard (that's what she said), and if it's not difficult, then you're probably not getting any exercise
• World's Strongest and Most Inconsiderate Man, who loads up every machine with the max possible weight, and doesn't take them back off. Which means I have to. Which is inconvenient, because I'm pretty weak.
• This-is-my-house guy, who leaves a towel on one machine, a water bottle at another, a hat on another... come on now. And then he'll do one set at a machine, then stand there talking on his phone, stretching and doing everything EXCEPT using the machine, all while positioning himself in the perfect position so that no one else can use it.
• Mr. Natural, who uses any and every excuse to get and stay naked in the locker room, and will take as long as possible to complete the requisite naked activities, even going so far as to shave in the public bathroom mirrors, naked. Yes, this happens. He'll use the scale naked, stretch naked, mess with every single item in his gym bag (that's not a euphemism) naked, etc.
• DJ Dumbass, who brings a stereo to the gym and forces everyone else to listen to his music. To add insult to injury, I've found that the type of person that brings stereos to the gym is NEVER the type of person whose taste in music agrees with mine.

Just in case you made it through this post without puking, let me just write this phrase down one more time, for the record: "Armpit milkshake guy". You're welcome.

Talent

The concept of "talent" has annoyed me ever since I gained a measurable amount of musical skill. Every once in a while someone will comment on how talented I must be, and I never really understand what they mean by that. It's as if they're implying that skills are inherited, even though we all know this isn't the case. I don't even believe that physical characteristics play as large a part as most people think they do. Sure, if you're born to tall parents and wind up being 7 foot 3, you'll probably be talented at basketball, but that's not everything (and if you think it is everything, talk to this mofo).

Yeah, it could be that I'm talented. It could also have something to do with the fact that I've worked at music almost every day of the last (almost) 20 years. I've brought this up to several people, and someone pointed out to me that a lot of people simply lack the desire to work really hard at anything, and therefore would rather chalk up their "talents" (or lack thereof) to some kind of nebulous concept of fate/genetic inheritance. It seems that people are always willing to hand over their power over their own lives... that fame, money, skills, happiness, health, and innumerable other things are administered by some unknowable governing body - victims of fate and circumstance.

Some things are beyond our control. Scientific studies have shown that certain brains have certain neural pathways that are stronger than the same pathways in others, and obviously no one has much control over their early childhood (where much formative knowledge occurs). This might be the entire kernel of the concept of "talent". But ask yourself, are you really going to let your neural pathways tell you what you can and cannot do? I don't believe I've ever been talented at music. It's very, very difficult for me, and I've seriously contemplated giving it up many times. I continue to persevere in spite of my sorry brain which, despite my utmost desire, absolutely refused to make me a Mozart-level prodigy, will never give me the ability of perfect pitch, and continues to laugh at my efforts to understand Stravinsky.

Other scientific studies have shown that you can create new neural pathways for yourself with enough conditioning. Maybe that's what it takes. Either way, you're going to be in for a lot of work if you want to get good enough at something to appear talented at it. Despite my lack of talent, my brain is reacting to the work I have done to keep it in shape, and if I keep practicing, I might really have something here. I think I figured something out about Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin today, so that's not a bad start.