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.