Choral Caffeine: Formations, Part 2

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1. John Howell says

   July 20, 2011 at 4:21 pm

   OK, sorry to reply to my own reply, but I’ve just finished reading Brian’s article.  And one thing–no, actually two things really stand out, for me at least.

    

   1.  At no point in his voice placement does he speak to the rather important question of voice QUALITY, which is awfully important in both balance and blend.  He deals with nothing but vocal RANGE, and not really with tessitura at all, since his suggestion for range determination is completely self-selected.  I would never be happy ignoring voice quality, although I do agree that the larger the choir, the less important individual voices become.  (Not ever UNimportant, but less important.)

    

   2.  And this reallly bothers me.  There is no obvious reason for his including “Gender” on his self-assessment sheet.  AND he is obviously locked into the rather old-fashioned assumptions that only girls sing soprano and alto and only boys sing tenor and bass.  And pace the Texas Music Educators who denied a boy the right to sing soprano in their Honor Choir, that simply isn’t so.  (And I write as the father of two boys who can both sing countertenor, one of whom is doing so professionally!)

    

   So I would have to ask Brian whether he, himself, would automatically require students to sing ONLY sex-linked voice parts regardless of their own natural vocal ranges.  And I would have to ask anyone who adopts his voice placement approach exactly the same question.  Sure, the AVERAGE voices will fall into the culturally-predetermined voice range types, but not every singers falls into the central area of the famous bell-shaped curve.  In fact only about 67% do.  So how does Brian propose to deal with those who do not?  Some boys SHOULD sing alto, or even soprano.  Some girls SHOULD sing tenor or in rare cases baritone.  Those voices are rare, but they exist regardless of administrative fiat.  So what do we do, tell them to get out and go play in band?!!!!

    

   John

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2. John Howell says

   July 20, 2011 at 3:33 pm

   Hi, Scott, and thanks for the links.  I look forward to reading Brian’s article.

    

   The one thing I have trouble with is the concept of one formation being the one and only formation that works best for all music.  And this comes in part from a session Simon Carrington did with the high school madrigal group my son was in when he was in the area to work with a college ensemble.  (My older son worked with Simon at Yale as the solo alto in his first scholarship graduate quartet.)  Simon had them CHANGE formations for each of the madrigals they sang for him, and explained his rationale for doing so, although I do not remember his criteria.  But his basic point was that since every piece of music is different, some formations will work better for some pieces than others do.

    

   On the other hand, we had a “riser stacking” expert come in to work with my Sweet Adelines chorus, and THAT is a very interesting variant of the mixed formation idea, working with individual singers in various combinations rather than with, for example quartets.  And the concept DOES work, although there are limits to what it can accomplish.

    

   With my Early Music Ensemble singers (usually between 10 and 15), I will usually give them a choice as we get closer to a concert, and we do try different ideas.  If I have some weak singers (or if we haven’t had as much rehearsal as we should have because of sickness or other problems), they will almost always choose to stand in sections, although with that small a group the “sections” are 2 or 3 people at most. 

    

   And when I had my show ensemble, the problems and solution were, of course VERY different.  For starters, we used mics–not individual mics but 11 mics on a custom-designed stage set for 11 couples.  So one of our first activities at the beginning of the season was to establish “regular couples.”  We first matched up the boys and girls by height–pretty simple, but necessary because with a couple sharing the mic the boy shouldn’t have to lean down too much or the girl stretch up too much to keep their mouths properly matched.  Then I would adjust those couples to match up the voices in each couple, so we wouldn’t have a strong voice paired with a weaker voice to confound the audio mixers. 

    

   So that gave us our “regualr partners” from which we would start staging each new number, but then we had to adjust further depending on who was on stage, who was off changing costumes or getting ready for an entrance, or downstage dancing, and where people had to go for their NEXT place.

    

   And the idea of placing the singers in order is not only a great one, but one that I absolutely had to do with that ensemble, because at times there WOULD be people off stage, and our arrangements also regularly varied from unison to 4-part harmony for each gender.  And since my auditions extended over about a 3-month period, I could never have the kind of “callbacks” that many directors count on.  So along with our acceptance letters I would send out a Parts Chart listing the singers from highest to lowest, plus giving their singing assignments for 2-part, 3-part, and 4-part divisi.  (That’s what highlighters are good for!)  And the medium voices, in particular, had to be pretty flexible about being able to switch parts when we established in rehearsal that we’d lost our balance.  (And yes, I always STARTED with good blend and balance, and then adjusted as necessary for staging, blocking, and choreography.)

    

   And of COURSE the basic ingredients were my singers, and if one person was replaced I could hear the difference.  But that’s always going to be the case whether the ensemble is acoustic or amplified, and in educational music we KNOW that a student generation is usually only 4 years at the most.  Nor is an “ethereal choral sound” necessarily ideal for every piece of music in every style.  Depending on how the divisi went, I had to be especially careful in selecting my 1st sopranos, since a single voice with an out-of-control vibrato could skew the whole sound.  (Sorry, voice teachers, but that’s life.  If you’re going to develop students who can ONLY sing as soloists, we shouldn’t require them to sing in ensembles.)

    

   So while I’m sure Brian’s artilce is well worth the reading, how much of it is actually the kind of common sense that we’d tend to come up with on our own?

    

   All the best,

   John

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