More Lessons from the World of Sport

Last week following the NE Patriots' win over the Baltimore Ravens, during the post-game Q&A, I was struck by several of Coach Bellicheck's responses. The man doesn't have a lot of patience for things that don't win football games. Sometimes he speaks a truth so plainly, it sounds harsh. Here is an excerpt from the Q&A that struck me:

Q: When you evaluate Deion Branch’s array of skills, what do you think are the best two or three?

BB: He can get open and catch the ball. Don’t make it too complicated.

What a gift of cutting right to the core! Don't make it too complicated. We all know a cappella singing is a lot like NFL football, isn't it?

Don't Make It Too Complicated: A Page From Bellicheck's Playbook

As musical directors, we coach our singers to produce better vowels, a beautiful blend, a sound that resonates and rings in the hall. We teach them to breathe from down low, support with abdominal muscles, hold the jaw this way, only use the tongue to make this sound, squeeze this, yawn, lift this, stretch that and so on. When considering how to raise the bar in your choir, remember the simplicity of Bellicheck's genius. Don't make it too complicated! A singer has to take a breath and make a good sound. Sure, a zillion components go into making that sound a good one, but everyone fundamentally knows how to do it. Your job is to draw that out without over-complicating it.

We need to recognize that fundamental truth as we coach our singers. Making a beautiful sound involves getting out of the way and allowing the body do what it was born to do. At some level, our body knows how to do it without any thinking at all.

A Cappella Singing and MLB Baseball: "We Have Eliminated Thinking!"

Remember the 2004 Red Sox? How did they overcome such a huge deficit and overcome a superior opponent? I recall it was Johnny Damon who answered the question: "We have eliminated thinking!" That team found a way to get thinking out of the way and became an irresistible force.

A couple of weeks ago, Blue of a Kind was working on a piece with quite a bit of sparse, syncopated, percussive entrances. The guys were coming in near the off-beat point, but with a pronounced staggered effect. Each "bop" sounded like "b-b-b-bop" and the effect was killing the song. For weeks, we had drilled the rhythm, talking it through while tapping the tempo. We ran it dozens of times in slow motion and fast motion. The guys listened to learning track files countless times between rehearsals, but when the moment came to sing it, all we got was "b-b-b-bop".

Becoming An Irresistible Force

I could see everyone was trying very hard to get it right. Their eyes seemed to be picturing the sheet music and trying to figure exactly where the "bop" was. Sometimes we get too tied to those black notes on the white page! I decided the only way to make this work was by eliminating all that thinking and get it down to something which had to be in their bones already. I told them they all knew exactly where the entrances were and asked everyone to close their eyes and sing as they felt it. Guess what? They nailed every single entrance! The song took on a new life, one that was totally irresistible. This is what you want!

You Already Know How To Do It

I had a voice coach who used to say, "If you can talk, you can sing." Singing is nothing more than talking with a little more time spent on the vowels. Many of us probably engage more natural singing skills calling our kids to dinner than in choir practice. When we sing, we get concerned about how it sounds in our head, we apply tension in our vocal apparatus trying to adjust what we hear hoping to diminish our sense of feeling exposed or not sounding good enough. The result is a twisted and distorted sound. It just ain't natural! We need to impart tips and tricks that enable our singers to do what they already know how to do!

Society of Orpheus and Bacchus mini-reunion

This past weekend, 25 alums of the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus gathered on hallowed soil in New Haven to sing, eat, drink, play some golf and reconnect with each other. We swapped stories, met spouses, had laughs and we sang. Oddly, we had done virtually none of this for the last 35 years or so. A few years ago, the group held a reunion to celebrate its 70th anniversary. A few of us looked around the room and noticed how there were almost no attendees who had graduated before the mid '70's. And we planned to do something about it.

I spoke to several of "missing" guys and many said they'd never return. They had seen the group at one time or another 10, 20 or 30 years ago and decided they did not belong with these people. The identification vectors had been broken. Some didn't like the performance values of the group. Some found the humor offensive. Some observed the kids were not "like us". And some found they couldn't sing the old songs with these guys. The music had changed. There were new songs, of course. But many of the old songs had been reworked and the guys could not close their eyes and sing them from beginning to end. There were too many speed bumps!

One of my old pals known affectionately as Kow decided to forge ahead and plan an event just for this lost generation. Maybe we couldn't reach back to the 40's and 50's, but at least we might collect the guys we knew, sing the old songs as we had learned them and through that reestablish a connection with the group.

We cloistered ourselves at first - sang together with restored musical arrangements, something I have been working on the past several years. We were able to interest several of the group's most significant arrangers to come and conduct "master class" rehearsals with the guys. You see me pictured above at the new Mory's with two of my great heros, Dave Bass and Chan Everett who ran these rehearsals. We dined together, swapped tales and songs and even entertained the patrons at Mory's as we used to as undergraduates. Cups were passed. Some magic began to kick in.

Singing as One

We had a more in-depth master class rehearsal the second day and really started to sing like something of a unit. Dynamics were happening, the chords were truing up, the sound was producing goose bumps. At dinner that evening, we sang between courses and this time the songs sounded more solid, more developed. We even tried a few songs we had not rehearsed and pulled off at least one song I did not dream possible. We were singing again!

Reconnecting

Then we took our stuff to meet the young men of the current group. We met at the SOB house where many of them live, circled up in the backyard, eyeballed each other for a bit and then started swapping tunes. Eventually, we sang some together. The young men met some of their idols and legends of the past. They got to shake hands with some of the best arrangers and most clever jokers of the groups history and hear some songs they did not know existed. The old guys got regaled by some stunning voices singing both old songs and new, and suddenly it all seemed really cool. We met a couple of the guys we'll be seeing on TV this fall on the next NBC "Sing Off" series. We had Sam Weisman, producer of that show singing baritone on our team. These guys are stars, but first of all they are just good kids who love to sing, just like us. We all realized how much singing connected us to good friends and fun, making it possible to handle the stress of Yale and the demands of life. We all felt like we belonged together. We found the connection to the living tradition that had been broken for many of us.