Mantras for Blue of a Kind in 2009

Starting your own a cappella group: "Don't try this at home"

I've talked about the difficulty of bootstrapping your own singing group before. Bootstrapping any new organization takes faith, courage, planning and some luck. Once you've bootstrapped your singing group however, getting guys to join is not that hard. Every time you sing out, you are rock-stars. People swoon over you, women eye you. Being bold enough to stand and deliver in front of an audience is an exciting thing, electrifying singers and listeners alike. Not everyone wants to sing a cappella, but believe me, you'll have no trouble finding folks who want to try.

All you need is a guitar and a hairdo

You can sing easy stuff and people will dig it. You can try more challenging material and many folks won't realize you don't quite succeed. Your choir can go flat and still be entertaining; only singers, musicians and those with perfect pitch will know for sure. Everyone else will feel the sag in energy but not be able to tell you much more. You can intone your vowels like yokels, belabor your consonants, make ragged entrances and cuts and basically do all manner of no-no's and still people will love you. Hey, you're singing for them, right? That's not a bad thing right there. Frank Zappa used to say if you have a guitar and a hairdo, you can be a rock star.

And if that's what you want to do, then go do it and have a ball.

Singing beautifully together

But to take a bunch of wanna-be rock stars and teach them how to sing bel canto might be one of the hardest things in the world. I studied photography, and my teachers taught me the rules as well as how to break them. Word: you are a master when you break the rules to a purpose, but you're a fool if you don't know the rules to begin with. And you're really not a singer if you can't control your body to produce sounds to a desired effect.

In choral singing, the buzzword is blend - sounding as one. Primarily, that means vowels, pure vowels, as in Latin or Italian. It also means producing a clear tone by supporting your air flow, controlling your vocal mechanism through your range and engaging your resonators. You learn to sing around problems caused by the breaks in your registers and keep a mostly consistent sound. I think in our lifetime and maybe a few generations, only Pavoratti was born without a pessagio. "Singing on the pessagio is something akin to the feeling of holding two oppositely poled magnates together, constantly adjusting toward a point of balance under the threat that at any moment the two ends will slip apart." (Christian Huebner). Pavoratti apparently did not have to endure this, but the rest of us do. Less eloquently said, singing on the pessagio hurts.

Blend also means managing your consonants, to produce a sound with as little noise messing up those lovely vowels. The dreaded 's' must not hiss endlessly, dipthongs which just aren't pure vowels and constrict your sound can be moderated to something easier on the ear (and easier on the vocal mechanism), and those 'er' sounds can be opened up to 'ah' to sound appealing and ultimately, more natural.

As a group, you've really got to start and stop together or else it's just campfire singing. Get louder and softer as one to express highs and lows to impart emotional power or delicacy. Color your voices darkly or brightly together to express gravity or lightness. Do all of these things and stay on pitch, and you will move people. That's what you want to do and this is basically what is called bel canto. It requires more than a guitar and a hairdo. If you can cover these fine points, follow these rules, something "beyond the norm" will happen to your audience. You will get under their skin and move them more deeply. You will evoke tears, laughter and goosebumps.

Listen to your favorite performers and you will hear them breaking the rules, no question. But you will also begin to notice how they break the rules to a purpose, and how they honor those rules more often than not.

Mantras for the new year

How do you achieve this? As a director, you can rant and rave. To some extent, you need to do this to demonstrate that you are serious about your requirements. But the primary problem is breaking years of habituation. You will only get so far ranting and raving. I realized two things, and they have become my joint mantras for the new year:

1) Old habits die hard, but die they must!
2) The way you practice is the way you play.

Both points are quite obvious, as they should be. The first goes to the heart of setting standards and insisting that your singers adhere to them. This means using every trick in the book to bring the need for re-habituation to the fore. And where do you do this? Well, in rehearsal, of course. Why wait until you sing a concert recording and then point out the flaws? It's a useless way to learn.

Here's my new approach. Listen to those concert recordings and choose several aspects that need improvement or development. Don't choose too many - pick only 2 or 3. Notice how I only have 2 mantras for myself? Then find pieces in your repertoire that afford a rich opportunity to drill on those aspects, and work those repeatedly, getting the standards in the mouths of your singers. Yes, it has to be learned in the body - that's where habituation exists. You can't tell your folks they have to do this or that and simply expect it to happen. You can ask them what you want and they will parrot what you said. Then they'll go and sing it the way they always do. Their habituation is a more powerful force than your feeble rants. You have to re-habituate them in their mouths and in their bodies.

If you ever quit smoking or started an exercise regimen, you will know this is going to take a while. As the first mantra clearly states, old habits die hard. Habits take 6 weeks to break or to make. Write it down and put it on your 'fridge.

Translating to the playing field

In New England this year, we saw Matt Cassel take over for the injured Tom Brady. As Matt emerged as a first rate NFL QB in the early part of the season, he began to talk about adjusting to "game speed". Your singers face the same issue of "game speed" in performance as an NFL quarterback on Sunday afternoon. Cassel's skills and practice standards were always high; every coach he ever had has said so. When he had to take the field and lead the Pat's his practice discipline was sorely tested. He was able to do what you need your singers to do - translate good habits at practice into solid performance at game time. Look at my mantras again. Translate those into your way of doing business.

Whiffenpoof 100th gets underway!

The Centennial kickoff concert

The kickoff concert beginning the one year celebration of the 100th took place at Woolsey Hall on January 31. I rushed to put my plans together in the last weeks, knowing I just could not miss this. The original group had formed in January of 1909, so January 31, 2009 seemed the perfect date for this concert.

What a turnout! Some 2400 people packed Woolsey Hall. It took over an hour to get everyone seated. I was unable to secure reserved seating and ended up in the 2nd balcony. In Woolsey, this is the nosebleed area. But I could see everything and Woolsey's acoustics are fantastic.

As I read over the program, I saw some of my buds, some classmates, others teammates on the Songbook project, were performing. First, the Replicants, a quintet doing a handful of the songs done by the first Whiffenpoofs. My excitement about what they would perform began to grow as I realized I had only recently been asked to engrave some very early arrangements.

Waiting for the audience to filter slowly in, I began to jabber with the lovely young undergrad sitting beside me. We had a little exchange about the upcoming performance, I got to brag about working on the almighty Songbook and how my buddies and colleagues would soon be on that stage, singing music they had probably learned from my charts. She acted interested for a bit, and then her older sister leaned over and said, "Isn't my baby sister smart? She's in the eighth grade, you know!" We all had a big laugh on that one.

Finally, the show begins

And then, it did indeed happen as I expected. My buds sang the songs I had engraved. "Old Grey Bonnet" and "When Pa" which I had engraved in the run up to this concert, and "And When the Leaves" which I had puzzled over in the Songs of Yale. It turns out these were among the very first songs the founders experimented with developing this new sound. The performance flowed through the years from 1909 to the present, through all the decades with the SLOTS and other alumni groups covering the entire breadth of the 100 year repertoire. All the songs I had engraved, and essentially had learned, note for note, part by part, verse by verse, all were poured out before me. I soaked them up as few people ever could - knowing more than any man deserves to know. It was rich.

Then the Whiffs of 2009 capped the show, and again I was blessed to know this repertoire just as intimately. But this time, I also heard the inaccuracies here and there that have crept in during years of singing from unreadable charts.

Whenever the Whiffs perform on campus, one of their singers has a job to dress outrageously - he is the group "Turkey". I had not realized this tradition which began with my 1973 group had been carried on to this day. But as the Whiffs marched on stage and I saw one guy in a costume that made it appear he was crouched inside a golden cage and being carried by a gorilla. I instantly knew what I was looking at the group's Turkey. In my group, Turkey wore white sneakers to every show, which looked pretty outrageous with white tie and tails. These days, I learned a different costume is rented for  every on campus performance, and the budget numbers thousands of dollars.

Did I mention the group sang incredibly well? This is an exceptional band of Gentlemen Songsters and they brought the house down.

Singing from readable charts

In literary analysis, I had learned that when ancient texts like the Old Testament were passed along by oral tradition, passages that were complex or incomprehensible were often "glossed" over time. Scholars are able to identify these glosses through various means, one of which is comparing various transcriptions and looking for points of deviation. In any case, I could hear glossed sections in some of the music in this show. We had glosses in my time, too. There were sections of the music we just did not get or maybe could not read. We might have heard these sung in the oral tradition and sang it as we'd heard it, or in some places we invented our own glosses.

There are probably sections of some arrangements that have not been sung as they were intended since their first performance. Is any of this bad? No, not really. Often the glosses are clever inventions to fill in a gap that can't be groked by a group. But some strong and powerful intentions of the arranger are lost, and sometimes that invention is far superior to any gloss.

So our work will restore these original intentions and inventions. This is especially gratifying when I get to meet the arrangers now, shake their hands and tell them we've unearthed their original work. I met one of them at the After Glow party that evening.

Black, black, black is the color...

If you know the Whiffs, you probably know "Black Is the Color". It was arranged by the great Fritz Kinzel '58. I spotted his name tag and introduced myself. Our Songbook musicologist, Charlie joined me and we engaged Fritz in a spirited discussion of his work, of the legendary 1958 group and also discussed the stunning performance abilities of our host 2009 group. What a treat! I wanted to ask him about the strikingly modern and nearly incomprehensible chords he used in Black, and somebody brought it up before I did. Well, he said, those aren't any true chords. They are color splashes I made up. The fact that anyone can actually sing these chords is a testament to the abilities of Whiff singers over the years. Fritz is also the arranger of "Johnny One Note" and "Delia". I always loved "Johnny One Note" but did not appreciate the craft of the arrangement until I engraved it a couple months back.

My New Arrangement for the 100th

To cap the evening, I gave Pitchpipe Brian Mummert a new arrangement of mine, which I dedicated to the Whiffs on their Centennial, "Angel Eyes". I'm giving them right of first refusal on a piece I began developing a couple years ago and has evolved and been refined up to this moment. What a thrill it would be to hear the Whiffs sing another arrangement of mine, this one from the 21st century!