sjf1967

That's my point Richard - it's not vibrato, it's tremolo which is not the same thing. I know exactly what it sounds like... I've got the recording! However, I'm not sure that there really are that many great recordings of choirs in general from the 60s and 70s. It does seem that there can be a danger of extrapolating a general standard from the work of one or two exceptional ensembles. Best wishes S

We did a fantastic piece of Patrick Gowers recently - Veni Sancte Spiritus - and next morning most of the boys had programmed the theme into their mobiles......

Richard - I wonder how wise it is to copy another choir's sound and impose it on another group of singers, however much you admire it. Different acoustics, different boys - different end result. You won't learn how to train a choir like Willcocks by watching David Hill, of course, but they will certainly learn a tremendous amount from someone who has been at the helm of some of the finest cathedral and collegiate choirs of the last half century. Compare the sound of the boys at the Abbey and Westminster Cathedral under James O Donnell - fine choirs both, and James is a superb choir trainer, but the two sets of boys sound completely different and the same person has trained them both. So why do they sound so different? (Incidentally, the boys in both choirs have regular professional singing tuition). I still can't quite apprehend your concept of vibrato. You can't 'use' it like a string player uses it, or an organist uses a tremulant - it either comes or it doesn't. What your boys are doing must be something else I think. AJT/pncd - a couple of books that might be interesting. They are very definitely about the voice in general rather than boy choristers in particualr, but they are very sound. 'A Handbook of the Singing Voice' - Meribeth Bunch - a concise and not too anatomically involved description of how it all works physiologically. Even I understand most of it and I'm no scientist... 'Singing and the Actor' - Gillyanne Kayes. Despite the title, this has a lot of very helpful information about general vocal technique, and some excellent exercises - especially good on register change etc. It's a kind of handbook for the Estill method of voice training, and while not all of that approach works for every singer, it provides a good basis for some things. Not by any means the only way to do it, but you might find it helpful to read - again, in conjunction with lessons/discussion from a good teacher - both books avoid vague imagery and airy terminology in favour of straight fact, a good basis for an understanding of basic vocal physiology on which you can then build an approach that kids relate to. There's a good bibliography in the Bunch book for serious researchers.

ajt/Richard - I do think that there is more to this than just an ear and instinct. Singing is a skill that can be taught, and there are certainly principles behind a sound technique that no-one, however gifted, is just going to hit on by chance; but the knowledge can be acquired. This becomes more the case when trainers have to sort out voices with problem areas - there isn't a predictable steady supply of natural, easy, fluent voices now, and the first year or two of a boy's training sometimes needs to be spent unpicking the unhelpful vocal habits with which he arrives. I don't imagine the Willcocks generation of choir trainers had this problem to the same degree. As for material - no, there isn't much. Some of the RSCM Voice for Life material is quite good; David/Hilary/Elizabeth's book is very good. My particular luck was a) in working as assistant to two brilliant choir trainers, from whom I learnt countless things and secondly when I arrived here in having a specialist child voice consultant as teacher to the choristers here for three years - she is currently working on a PhD on adolescent voice and at the time she taught here was also teaching in the London cathedrals and coaching child singers for the ROH and ENO. I went and watched many of her coaching and teaching sessions, played for lessons she gave to adults, watched and accompanied her masterclasses, and sent her innumerable emails asking why, what, how..she very patiently and kindly sent me detailed responses and it was enormously helpful. Now I quiz my wife about her own lessons with a different but equally wonderful teacher, some of whose priniciples are proving very helpful in the work we try to do with the boys here. To summarise a fairly long winded response - get talking to some capable singing teachers and ask pertinent questions would be my recommendation. Ask them why they do why they do what they do and get a working knowledge of how the voice actually functions.

Or Christchurch Oxford.....it makes a beautiful noise but I found it a test of technique every day, even after 6 years playing it.

No idea what that smiley is doing there - and of course I meant significance, not what I typed. It's late.

But a) he's quite a lot older than 14 (certainly old enough to have acquired an ability to decipher notation a bit more accurately) and his site is chock a block with intemperately immodest statements about his own ability and artistic siginificance....so he is rather inviting, if not ridicule, then certainly trenchant comment.

It's not quite an exact analogy I think Richard - of course you can't play trios on a one manual, but you're already suggesting that you can 'tailor' vocal sound to suit different genres - so why not tailor range too? A wider vocal range would open up wider repertoire choices. Maybe this is a limitation of the 'head voice' approach.

You've hit on an important point Richard - repertoire. Are you really saying that you choose your repertoire to fit the sound you are cultivating and that anything which strays outside the range limits of the sound you prefer can't be attempted? Isn't the whole point of technique to enable you to tackle what composers throw at you, no matter what? What about the men in your choir? Do you have to transpose everything up? How do the altos feel about that? I wonder if it has to be acknowledged that the repertoire suited to the older style of training was actually fairly limited in its technical demands - no extremes of compass of dynamic, no angular lines requiring great agility. How would those boys have coped with Weir, Macmillan, Langlais and Poulenc? They do sing very beautifully - but what they sing is not technically testing by modern standards.

I think I know what Richard means by that forced 'chest' sound - it's using the same amount of vocal fold mass as speech employs, and it just can't be carried beyond a certain range - that is the source of the nasty register break we all want to avoid and the vocal mechanism has ways of protecting itself in these circumstances. Lightening the voice as pitch rises is essential, but it has to relate to various postural issues too. The 'ee' vowel is crucial - but as I said before it's what the root of the tongue does that's important (the idea that the tip shouldn't wander about is more established generally now) - a sensation that the tongue is vertical and resting in a relaxed space against the upper back molars is the best strategy for lots of reasons. No space here to go into it in detail! Jaw released and relaxed, rather than dropped, is a terminology I find helpful - if it's dropped too far (like in a yawn) the joint in front of the ears gets involved and the interconnection of musculature eventually puts downward pressure on the larynx from the chin - this inhibits the free movement of the larynx (it rises slightly for higher pitches, and needs freedom to tilt forward to access the thinner vocal fold configuration which enables easy access to high pitches) and will in the end also cause register problems. A sensation that the upper jaw is lifting can be more helpful - a sneeze rather than a yawn - and this also helps with soft palate position. The neck needs to feel like it is lengthening vertically too as pitch rises - this helps to 'support' the larynx as it deals with register changes. Actually heavy 'chest' register can be carried up quite a long way - singers in musical theatre use it. It's called 'belting' and is a specialised technique which needs very expert training - it has NO place in the sort of music we deal with and no one who doesn't know exactly what they're doing should even think of trying to train in this style.

There seems to some support hereabouts for the concept of a tour...perhaps we should issue an invitation for a couple of lunchtime concerts, Andrew. Can you find a slot at St Saviour's? I' d travel a long way to hear that combination of organ and performer. As for the pronunciation I had imagined it was No-bi-le, as in 'La Donna e....'

Andrew - let's talk ....he'd make a great juror you know. I will if you will....

I'm quite tempted to offer him a concert here, but we're booked out until 2008...

Richard - a book would be good, maybe. How do you get them to produce the oo? Tongue position for that vowel? And what do you do about vibrato? - it either comes or it doesn't if it's true vibrato - you can't 'add' it or remove it if it isn't naturally in the voice, I think. Can you expand on those points ? Best S

the widor's worse....

You've hit the nail on the head - you can't teach people (especailly children!) to do something you haven't tried to do yourself....an empirical approach to singing technique without some sort of input from a real life singer is rarely successful.

Richard - can I ask you a few specific questions? Absolutely no offence taken here, and it would never do it everyone sounded the same - but it's all very interesting and having heard your boys on the sound clips I am keen to know exactly what you are teaching them to do. What precisely do you tell your boys to do to achieve it the sound you want? Do you have a blueprint for an absolute ideal of sound which you mould each voice to fit, whatever its intrinsic qualities? How do you make a voice produce vibrato if it isn't naturally there? Can you be really specific about the training methods you use, from basics onwards - what's your regular warm up routine, for example? No one who advocates the 'older' style ever gives anything away about how they think it should be done beyond fairly vague description, and I wish they would - it would open up some useful avenues in the debate. Best wishes S

Our two sets of choristers are a generation apart - 8-13 for boys and 11-17 for girls - and the difference in their respective maturity makes it more of a challenge to deal with both simultaneously - there is a different psychology operating in the two groups. I do wonder what Roffensis/Richard has to say about this thread so far? It would be interesting hear his views, on the voice training aspect especially.

There's a famous recording of a John's organ scholar breaking wind very audibly in a live R3 broadcast...wouldn't dream of saying who.

pncd - it would great to see you here but I'm afraid Saturdays are no longer sung by the cathedral choir - it was a change we made reluctantly a few years back to address our particular chorister recruitment problems. Drop me a line via the cathedral website if you like - I'll let you know what's coming up. Very best wishes S

pncd - thanks for your comments. We have had three really excellent singing teachers since before my time here - all of them great with the kids - and I think it was my excellent predecessor in post who introduced the idea. Our current system is that the boys and girls work on real repertoire - either from service lists or things they're preparing fro ABRSM exams. I'm doubly lucky in that my wife (a professional singer herself) is doing the teaching (boys and girls)- nearly all the boys and many of the girls have individual lessons with her away from choir time - and I discuss constantly with her what is going on with each boy, what problems need monitoring, and try to learn as much as I can about what she teaches and why. My Sub who runs the girl choristers does the same. My better half comes in once a week to rehearsals and does the warm up and often stays in to monitor the sound each boy is making in the full ensemble as well as taking individuals out. I'm sure that a unified approach works best - we use the same imagery in pursuit of the physiological things we want to happen and are pursuing absolutely the same basic ideal for the sound, so the principles we want to instil are (we hope) being constantly reinforced. Images are great in teaching singing to kids as long as you know what the images in question are trying to achieve. We talk about it constantly. Team work is the key if you're using a singing teacher I think - any success we may have here with the way the boys sing is not just my doing - I've had the benefit of the expertise of really wonderful colleagues along the way and I've been tremendously fortunate in that.

VH - one of the hardest things to do - you're quite right.

You're quite right, VH - singers do talk about things in terms of chest/head resonance - but what they are feeling is vibration. Sensation is a crucial part of singing experience but isn't necessarily a representation of the actual situation physically. Resonance in the strictest sense is of course affected by airflow (although the diapraghm, I was interested to discover from one very expert in these matters, is nothing to do with it - it's not under conscious control, and the important muscles for 'support' are actually further down the body), but how the resonator is tuned - the relationship between the tongue, lips, jaw, general head position etc etc. The most crucial element is possibly tongue position - if you say 'eee' quietly to yourself with a relaxed jaw and without a sideways grimace you'll get the best resonating space, and that's where we start from - the other vowels are related to it rather than to 'ooo' which is much more susceptible to bad formation. It's what the back of the tongue does just as much as the tip which has a material effect on the sound. Best wishes S

Excellent points all, Vox Humana. You've opened up one avenue which is especially interesting I think - the whole idea of chest and head voice and how those concepts have changed and developed. What my singing teacher colleagues tell me is that there's only voice - it's produced in the larynx as air passes over the vocal folds, and it resonates in and is 'tuned' by the various regions of the pharynx and the oral cavity. Chest resonance as a logical consequence can't exist - how can you have a resonator below the sound source? And head resonance - in what space exactly is the sound supposed to resonate? How is it supposed to travel there from the larynx in order that it might resonate in the head? There's no route! Sensations of vibration are one thing, but to say that's actual resonance is quite another. You can't pick your sound up and move it at will from chest to head and back again, although some awareness of how the larynx deals with pitch change makes training out nasty register breaks a lot easier and helps to avoid them developing in the first place. The point you make about balance is important - but I'd say it depends on the men who are singing, and on the ability of the director to balance the sonorities; I don't think it's a fault of 'continental' production to cause balance problems. I wonder how many boys Willcocks had to choose from for each chorister place at King's and how many arrived with vocal problems that he had to train out of them? Alastair - I'm glad you liked the article - and yes, let's include girls in the discussion, although for obvious reasons the issue of training them seems to be less emotive...we are certainly delighted to have the girls here and I do hope your two continue to enjoy their singing - good for them.

With the proviso that this may be nothing whatsoever to do with this board...here goes. First of all, Goldsmith - you're very kind - the cheque's in the post I have been very interested to read comments here and elsewhere about the 'parlous' state of choir training in cathedrals. What specific things - posture, breathing, vowel formation, airflow management etc - do proponents of the 'traditional' sonority think the boys should be taught to do? Richard - your letter in Choir and Organ was pretty categorical that we're mostly doing it wrong (It's a shame the sound clips of your own choristers have disappeared, apparently along with the rest of the church website, by the way). Here we teach the boys to sing in the way that any other singer is taught, with regular input from expert professional singing teachers, and the sound that results is I suppose quite 'continental' in character, whatever that means. I know that at least one person here quite likes it and I know exactly what I do to get it. Not that it doesn't change from year to year - it should, given that the personnel aren't the same every year - but all we do is give them sound technical infomation about their voices. The bottom line is that if I were wasting Dean and Chapter funds by wrecking the voice of every boy that came through the choir I'd have some explaining to do ....any views?