Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the positive

Chris Rowbury points to a familiar experience of choral directors:

Things are going swimmingly, the choir are eating up the new, complex song you’re teaching them, even though it was a bit of a risk introducing it. They sound great, they’ve mastered the tricky rhythms and are clearly having fun.

Then you see the one singer who’s looking grumpy and fed up and the doubts set in.

He correctly reminds us that any number of other things might be making a singer grumpy other than what’s happening in rehearsal. I actually find it pretty easy to compartmentalize this, because my rehearsals are all on weekday evenings, and most of the singers rush there after work, so inevitably a few will have had a bad day at work, sometimes exacerbated by the fact that they’re waiting to make dinner out of the break-time snacks.

As Chris concludes, the only right answer is to tune out the grumpy-looking singer or audience member and keep focus on the music, but it isn’t always easy.