Week 2: moving my arms (in a helpful way) & learning about singing anatomy

This blog series is part of a course I’ve built to learn more about choir conducting (“Directed Study in Music”, under the supervision of Mark Vuorinen at the University of Waterloo). I am learning and thinking about many cool things and want to share some of them with you!

a good practice room for conducting has a piano and full length mirror!

To see what I was up to last week and get some more context for what these projects are all about, check out last week’s blog post!

What I did this week

• read chapters 4 & 6 of The Perfect Blend and added 4 more exercises to the choir warmup website I built
• practiced gesture (how I’ll move my arms to conduct) for I Thank You God
• did some structural analysis of I Thank You God (looking at overall layout of the piece, how the music uses the poem, repeated musical ideas, etc.)
• read two more chapters of Vocal Technique: A Guide for Conductors, Teachers, and Singers (chapter 3: Initiation, Creation, and Release of Sound & chapter 4: Resonance)
• practiced some exercises to help train my ears and various musicianship skills

Choir Warmups

While reading various sources to find more exercises, I noticed two things:

• There is a common theme of using extremes of poor technique to find good balance. For example, putting all your weight in the left foot, then all in the right foot, then balanced. Or, singing very bright (cheerfully) then very dark, then in between. This contrast is an effective teaching technique and reminds me of a great blog post I read a year ago about fixing bad habits in life by making the other mistake.
• When I read through many exercises, I pick out ones I like and add them to the website. I notice that I pick warmups that are familiar, that I’ve done in some rehearsal before and liked. I have a bias for the familiar (as we all probably do) and I can maybe combat this by actually trying out more of the warmups instead of just reading and thinking about them.

Waving my arms in a helpful way

One of the biggest questions I get when I tell people I’m studying conducting is “what does conducting involve other than moving your arms to the rhythm?” Lots of things! While conducting involves a lot of leadership, organizing, and musicianship, there’s also a lot of skill and thought that goes into how a conductor moves their arms (and other parts of their body!).

Here are some examples of things I’m thinking about for the piece I’m preparing right now (I Thank You God):

• What is the mood of each section? How can I convey that in my facial expression?
• How high are my hands? In sections that are quite loud or have some singers singing quite high, I like to keep my hands around the abdomen area to help encourage good breath support, which is aided by using abdominal muscles. I am also extra cautious about my posture in those moments (though I try to conduct with good singing posture always, since singers mirror what they see in me).
• At each moment, what’s happening next? Sometimes I want to give singers a heads up for what they need to do (e.g. to start singing, sing louder, speed up, etc.) and often this is done with my arm or my breath. These things need to be cued at least a beat earlier so they have time to prepare.
• In what pattern do I move my hands for each measure of music? The pattern for 4/4 (four beats in a measure) is pretty standard, but there are a lot of measures in this piece in 6/8, 5/8, and 6/4 which could be done a few different ways (I have to figure out which one is best!)

4/4 conducting pattern from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdvHUJ88tao

I notice when making a lot of these decisions, my goals are communicating the same things Jackie Hawley communicated to me when she conducted this piece and I sang it. While I really love the way she thinks about music and conducts, I’m definitely interested in exploring more original musical ideas of my own (and this will be practiced in other pieces I work on, ones I haven’t sung before).

Analyzing the structure of a piece

Last week, Mark encouraged me to look over the sheet music for I Thank You God (you can also listen to it here) and analyze the overall structure of it — how the music choices reflect the poem, how different sections are related to each other, what musical ideas repeat, and so on. I found this really fun! I tried not only to notice things, but think of reasons why they were in this piece of music and the effect they would have on the singers or listeners.

It reminds me of English class when we’d talk about the content of a story, but also be on the look out for literary devices and various choices the author made to foreshadow, develop mood, and connect pieces of the story together. People sometimes complain about analyzing literature in this way, saying most of these things weren’t intended by the author, but it’s not actually about what the author intended! And Gwyneth Walker (composer of this piece) agrees:

As the composer, my “role” is to create the music. And as a scholar, your “role” is to comment upon and explain the music. So, I shall not endeavor to be a musicologist on my own music. That is never effective. Also, your ideas on the music are more of interest to me than my own ideas!

You can read my whole analysis in this doc. Here are two things I thought were especially neat:

• While most stanzas of the poem are placed in the piece word for word, the third stanza is treated differently. It starts with the text “how should any human being doubt you” and then repeats, each time adding more of the words of that phrase until it builds all the way up to “how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any human merely being doubt You?” (which is a pretty long phrase without any punctuation, compared to the rest of the piece/poem!)
• The piano part contrasts between sometimes being very busy with lots of quick notes and sometimes playing one single chord per measure (or nothing at all!). Often the fast passages happen during verses (the stanzas of the poem) and the sparse parts happen when the choir sings “I Thank You God” (which is this repeating chorus-like pattern)

Highlights from reading Vocal Technique: A Guide for Conductors, Teachers, and Singers

This week, I learned some more specific, in depth, details about the throat/mouth/face anatomy and how it affects a singer’s sound. A lot of this was new information for me! Here are some bits I thought were extra cool:

Chapter 3: Initiation, Creation, and Release of Sound

• The sound from a singing voice is created when the vocal folds open and close rapidly. Singing A4 (440 Hz) happens when they open and close 440 times a second!
• Pitch can be changed by (1) altering thickness of the folds, where thicker folds have more mass and vibrate slower (this is true for string instruments too), or (2) altering the tension of the folds where a more tense fold vibrates more quickly
• The vocal folds are behind your adam’s apple. FUN FACT: this means you can sing a note and push on your adam’s apple and it changes the pitch!!
• Singers use biofeedback (hearing and feeling the sound) to sing the right pitch — but the auditory feedback isn’t entirely reliable because the bones in our head vibrate differently than the air, meaning we hear something different from what other people hear
• When a singer is dehydrated, it’s measurably harder to vibrate the vocal folds (so hydration really is important!)
• Closing the glottis (throat) or mouth are common ways people stop a singing sound, but these can alter the pitch/vowel/tone in weird ways — the best way to end sound is to stop breathing out (one effective strategy is to start breathing in). As a conductor, the gesture I use to cut off sound can influence which of these strategies singers will use! I try to avoid gestures that cut off sound by closing my fist, since that seems to encourage closing the throat or mouth.

Chapter 4: Resonance

The vocal folds are very quiet (no louder than blowing a raspberry)! The reason singing is louder than that, and the reason you hear different vowels, and the reason different voices sound different… is because of how the sound resonates in a singer’s body!

all of these things vibrate!

• Every sound we hear from a singer (and most instruments) is not just one frequency. We also hear other various harmonic frequencies (which are multiples of the fundamental frequency) and our nervous system interprets it as a single pitch (the fundamental frequency). The different harmonics can vary in loudness and this is why different singers and different instruments sound different!
• If there are more harmonic overtones in your singing voice, you sound louder even though you’re not actually singing louder.
• I learned about formants! Different parts of your body (most importantly the pharynx and mouth) vibrate at different frequencies, and when you sing a note (or a note with a harmonic) that is close to these body frequencies, it makes that body part vibrate louder and changes how things sound. When you sing different vowels, the space in your pharynx/mouth changes, this changes the formants’ pitch and loudness — and the sound of the formants are what make different vowels sound different!

My conductors have taught me a lot of vocal technique over the years, but I learned a lot of new things this week! I found it really interesting, but I think that as a conductor I would still leave out a lot of these details in teaching. Many conductors use metaphors like “sing from behind the head” instead of talking about how to move parts of your mouth. This is generally effective, but “sing from behind the head” doesn’t make sense if you think too hard about it, and so it can be confusing. However, I personally find that if I think about what I’m doing with my tongue or mouth muscles, the muscles get tense and it makes it harder to sing. I still have a preference for metaphors, but am glad I now have a better understanding of what’s really happening.

Ear training

Ear training exercises have been quite challenging for me throughout my music education. Things like “here are two notes, now what is the name of the interval between them?” and “here is a short piece of music with multiple voices playing at the same time, now write down all the notes on this paper”.

I’ve practiced for hours to prepare for tests in theory classes, being grateful that while these skills seem somewhat useful, they didn’t seem to make a huge difference in how well I sang in choir. But when it comes to conducting a choir …now these skills are super important.

When a choir sings in rehearsal, it is my job as a conductor to decide (reacting in real time) what to rehearse next. I need to hear what to improve, which includes notes that are wrong or out of tune. I need to hear what each individual section of voices is doing so I can isolate issues to the relevant people. This is super super hard for me, so Mark suggested a some exercises to train my ears better. Here’s what I did this week:

Chorale error detection

Mark played a the following four bars for me. Then he played it again, making 6 deliberate mistakes (which I’ve marked in pencil). He kept repeating the version with mistakes until I caught (most of) them. If I could practice this every day, I would, but it requires another person. I should look harder for software out there that does this.

Interval training

Interval names label the distance between two notes. I want to get better at being able to immediately know what an interval is when I hear it, as well as immediately singing an interval when given a name and a starting note. These skills make it easier to tell when something is not right (e.g. if I see a fifth in the music, but I hear a third).

The exercise Mark gave me involves playing a note on the piano and then singing the note that is a fifth above it. I found this way harder than I was expecting! Here are some of the things that make it hard:

• It’s surprisingly hard to know where the note falls in my singing range just by hearing it on piano! When I hear a note I first move it into a comfortable octave in my head, then pretend to sing it in my head (engaging my vocal folds but not making a sound), then pretend to sing a fifth higher, then sing it out loud. It’s easy to mess up one of these steps. I find it remarkably easier to do this exercise if I can just sing the first note out loud before singing the fifth above it.
• I treat the first note like the tonic center (“DO, SO ”). That means when I move on to the next starting note, I have to shift my mind to think about a new tonic center. If they’re too different (or too close to each other) I can mess this up.

Most of this week I used https://virtualpiano.net/ (or a pitch pipe app on my phone while walking around) to practice by clicking random notes.

Ear training apps (yay technology!)

Just today I found two apps that do a whole bunch of different ear training exercises and I’m going to try to make some daily routine out of them to strengthen some of my weaker skills.

Rhythms

Paul Hindemith has a bunch of (far from elementary) exercises in a book called Elementary Training For Musicians. In the set of exercises I was assigned this week, I speak a rhythm out loud while conducting myself. Here’s the hardest one:

yikes

Wise words from Mark: speed isn’t the challenge here. We often jump to do things as quickly as we can, and make mistakes or are sloppy along the way. I like how here (and in life) if you resist impatience, you can accomplish a lot more.

That’s all for this week! I’ll be posting these weekly, so keep an eye out for the next one.

If you have questions about anything I talked about or want to chat with me about conducting stuffs, I love to talk about it so feel free to reach out!