“Our business is recreation and resurrection – when we sing, we bring the dead to life” Robert Shaw, founder of the Collegiate Chorale (“a melting pot that sings” RLS).
Last night there was a piece on BBC America about the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Vienna Philharmonic. We were watching with some interest as they showed clips of legendary conductors and glittering audiences (did you know there is a six year wait for subscription seats, guess classical music is alive and well in Vienna). Towards the end of the piece they were talking to a retired clarinet player about what made the Philharmonic unique. He talked about the unusual social/democratic structure that makes the players as powerful as the conductor. He talked about how his father and his grandfather both played in the Philharmonic before him. And then he said something seemingly banal that nonetheless really resonated.
In the background the orchestra was playing the Skater’s Waltz, the strings pulling and stroking to create the sensation of the skaters’ blades pushing off and carving and arcing across the ice. And the retired clarinet player said every musician in the Philharmonic was striving for “the moment in music that allows our heart to speak.”
In that phrase, he captured the essence of what making music is all about and why we do it. We strive to learn the notes, to master the timings, to listen for the interweavings of voice parts, to incorporate the dynamics, to shape our vocal instrument to make beautiful sounds, all to conjure what the composer heard in her head and heart during the moments of creation. But what is truly magical about this process, what “allows our heart to speak”, is the fact that the performance of music can become more than the sum of its parts, that all the individual elements of the composition go thru some strange unknowable alchemy to create an emotional channel between singers and audience.
Thinking of some of the pieces in the spring concert, Homeward Bound, There Will Be Rest, Deep River, well, actually, just about all of them, the “heart” is pretty easy to spot in most of the lyrics. But that doesn’t mean that just by mastering the building blocks of the songs that we can open our “heart” to the audience. Just as the composer brought something to the creative process besides the tools of composition, we as singers must bring something from within ourselves, from our hearts, to help free the music from the bondage of staves, bar lines, notes, and markings. We must reach deep into our dark and dusty memory vaults to unlock our own emotional connection to the music. And when you think about it, the process from creation/composing to learning/performing is rather like first birthing the music, watching it die, and then standing awestruck (hopefully not because it begins to seem like an episode of “The Walking Dead”) as it is gloriously reborn in performance.

“To create a smooth legato line, sing vowels only until the vowels align with the beat. Then add the consonants back in "on top" of the vowel line” (Robert Shaw, no not that Robert Shaw, the other one, the “Towering Figure” of choral music sound) .
.Suppose building a musical phrase is not unlike building a house. Suppose there are discrete pieces; foundation stones, lumber, steel, windows, hardware, that, in careful combination, can create a homey cottage, a stunning light filled contemporary, or a garishly baroque overindulgence, like say, oh maybe, Mar a Lago. Well, Shop Teacher/Music Director Kortge has been schooling us on the fundamental building blocks used to construct the perfect musical phrase and a dim bulb lit up in this writer’s brain when she asked us to do a simple exercise that “could change your vocal technique forever and ever.”
Try, said MD Kortge, to sing a phrase leaving out all the consonants, all those hard-edged plosives and fricatives, those pesky phrase “disrupters” that can so totally take the “line” out of a musical phrase. Par example: the song “The Road Not Taken” by Randall Thompson, lyric by Robert Frost. Imagine the opening line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” with all those “disrupters” removed. What is left? “oo awoods eevehgd ihn ah ehllawoow oouhd”, all the vowel sounds (or something like this). So imagine the notes, the beats, in the line are the foundation of this phrase, some short, some long, all moving forward to the end of the phrase. The vowel sounds are the framework that builds upwards from the foundation, carefully “aligned” with the beats of the “foundation.” Now imagine the dynamics of the line are the siding,windows and doors of the phrase. And finally, imagine the hardware, the doorknobs and all the little doodads are the consonants, plosives, fricatives, sibilants and such, some hard-edged, some gentler, more subtly suggested.
Now here is the key thing; in order for the phrase to have “structural integrity” (not falling flat, not offending the listener’s ear) the vowel sounds need to be sung on the beat and the consonants need to be sounded just a wee little smidgen before the beat. And herein, eureka: another revelation (a slightly brighter bulb this time in writer’s cobwebby head). To wit, the only way to keep a phrase/line moving forward with the energy required to make it a thing of beauty is to understand that those dastardly “disrupters” need to come slightly before the beat. Otherwise as a phrase is sung, the singer will be falling behind the line, which results in rushed, less beautiful vowel sounds, and this leads to a bloating song “circle”. And the bigger the song/circle becomes the less it comes to represent the thing of beauty the composer first heard in her head. Or to put it another way, suddenly your dream home is way over budget, foundation and framing are misaligned, and, before your very eyes, it begins to wobble and weeble in the wind and here and there, little doodad consonants begin to break free from the line, carried away on the huffing wind of the not-quite-with-it chorus.