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Music
Albums I like
Background
When I was little, I took piano lessons.
When I was slightly bigger, I took cello lessons, and went on to
participate in Junior High and High School orchestras, as well
as an All State orchestra. My high school orchestra travelled to
Canada for a music festival.
I also sang in the choirs at church and in High School. During summer
of 1993 I participated in a two week tour of Europe with an
agglomerative choir, orchestra, and band from All State participants
up and down the East Coast.
When I got to the University of Michigan
in the Fall of 1993, I joined the
Men's Glee Club under the direction of Jerry Blackstone. I sang with
the group for four years, serving as Business Manager for the last two.
We travelled a lot, including a month long trip to South America. That was
quite a ride. I met my wife at a combined Men's / Women's Glee Club
party.
In January of 1995 I helped to start
The Gentlemen an all male a cappella group. I sang with them for a
term.
In the spring of 1995 I joined
Amazin Blue, a co-ed
a cappella group. I sang with them for three years. During that time the
group recorded songs and presented major concerts every term, appeared on
three Best of College A Cappella
(BOCA) CDs, gave workshops, clinics, gigs, concerts, travelled to hell
and back, and made it to the 1998 finals of the
National Championship of College
A Cappella held at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 1998 I left the
group.
In January of 1999 I joined the newly formed
Dicks and Janes, a co-ed group
and spent a very joyful year and a half with them. I was musical director
of the group for the 1999 - 2000 season, and they have since gone on to
appear on BOCA twice
in a row.
In 2000, I was briefly the bass/percussionist for a five man vocal band called
Descant. We only learned three songs, and we disbanded after the end of the
term, but we rocked.
I appeared as a guest percussionist with, arranged for, and led rehearsals
of a whole pile of groups at Michigan, including
The Compulsive Lyres, who went
on to win the ICCA (same competition mentioned above).
In Spring of 2002 I began to sing with an as-yet-unnamed co-ed a cappella
group at the University of Minnesota. Still waiting to see where that
goes.
Contemporary A Cappella
Why sing? My central observation is that people like to tell their
own stories and make their own music. Most folks in modern America do not
create their own entertainment anymore. This is a huge change from the
past 10,000 years of human history, and (like everyone with a pet issue who
takes a dark view of popular culture) I think this loss underlies a great
many of our social woes these days. Contemporary a cappella forms a bridge
between our desire to participate in popular culture and our desire to
create our own entertainment and be the star in our own shows. In this way
it fills the same niche as community theatre, intramural sports, and
craft clubs.
Please note: I'm writing these words for publication on the web, using a
personal computer connected to the internet over my home network. I am
not a freakish luddite who thinks we should go back to the bad old days before
refrigeration and mechanized transportation. Still, I think that it's
important, on a fundamental and human level, to create things that last
and to share our stories with each other.
Rehearsing Vocalists
Some of these points are true across all of education and / or leadership.
Some are specific to vocal musicians. Some may be just plain wrong. Still,
there are the pithy bits with which I've walked away from my attempts to
lead rehearsals.
- A single point takes between ten and twenty minutes to learn.
Before the ten minute barrier, it simply won't be taken up
into long term memory. After the twenty minute line,
people are no longer paying attention. Structure a rehearsal in
terms of ten to twenty minute blocks. Don't be afraid to move on
if one fails. Better to move on than to practice doing it wrong.
- Always close out a section by singing. Singing it wrong and then
talking about it amounts to practicing doing it wrong. If there
is blah-blah-blah needed, then sing it correctly after the blah-blah
to fix it in people's minds.
- Singing is a physical skill. Rehearsing is the building of
physical patterns of movement so that they become automatic.
- Groups perform to the level of their practice. If you get
it right twice in ten tries in rehearsal, you have a
20% chance of getting it right on stage.
- If rehearsals are not (in general) fun, the group will fail.
- A popular misconception is that the group must make a choice between
being "fun" and "working hard." The actual choice is between
working hard and not being any good. If your idea of being "fun"
overlaps with singing poorly good for you.
- Power perceived is power received. Very rarely will you be
explicitly granted the authority to do the things that need doing.
However, if you proceed as though you had that authority (being
sensitive to the fact that it has never been granted). you will
find yourself accomplishing what you need to.
- People learn by hearing. If you model something wrong, they will sing
it as you modelled it. This can be incredibly frustrating.
- "Sing good" is a totally useless bit of advice. Nobody sings badly
on purpose. They either don't realize that they sound bad, or
they're not sure how to get better from where they are.
- Find someone else to do all non-musical dirty work. Restrict your
floggings to musical matters, so as not to dissapate authority.
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