Rehearsal notes · No. 01 · Learning
Learning your part by ear when the page still looks like weather
For our first year we quietly assumed that everyone would learn to read music eventually, and quietly nobody did. What replaced that assumption is a way of teaching a part that works for readers and non-readers in the same room, at the same speed.
- Rehearsal
- 11 June 2024
- Written up
- 3 July 2024
- Reading
- 7 minutes
- Room
- Gràcia and Eixample, Catalonia
The Tuesday we stopped apologising
The change came in a rehearsal where the altos had been stuck on the same entry for three weeks. One of them finally said out loud that she could see the notes go up and had no idea how far up, and half the section nodded. We had been running rehearsals as though the page were the music and the singing were a translation of it. For anyone who did not read, that meant sitting through forty minutes of discussion about a bar they could not locate, then being asked to sing it perfectly.
What we did the following week was simple and slightly embarrassing that it had taken a year. The line was sung to the section, four bars at a time, and sung back. No counting, no naming of notes, no piano at first. Within twenty minutes the altos had the entry, and the two fluent readers in the section had it more securely than they would have done from the page, because they had heard where it sat against the tenors instead of working it out privately.
Ear first, page second: how we actually do it
A part goes in in phrases, not in bars. Whoever is teaching sings a phrase, the section sings it back, and this repeats until it comes back clean twice running; then the previous phrase is joined to the new one and the whole thing is sung from the start of the line. It is slow at the beginning of an evening and surprisingly fast by the end. Nobody is asked to sing alone at any point, which removes the one thing that reliably stops people trying.
The piano comes in later, and only for two jobs: giving a starting note, and holding the other three parts underneath a line that will not settle. Played constantly it becomes a crutch, and the section learns to follow it rather than to know the notes. We also keep the tempo deliberately slow while a phrase is being taught, because a part learned fast is learned approximately, and approximate intervals are the hardest thing in the world to unlearn six weeks later.
Said in the room
- Four bars at a time, sung and sung back.
- Clean twice before anything new is added.
- Piano for starting notes and stubborn lines only.
- Slow while learning; speed is the last thing added.
- Never ask one person to sing it alone.
Where learning by ear quietly fails
It fails on anything long. A motet of a hundred and twenty bars taught entirely by ear takes a term and leaks out of the back of the choir faster than it goes in, because there is nothing to consult between Tuesdays. It also fails where two sections have similar but not identical lines, which is most of the repertoire we like. The sopranos learn a phrase, the altos hear it, and for a fortnight the altos sing a confident hybrid of both that nobody notices until the piece is put together.
The third failure is rhythm. Pitch travels well by ear and rhythm does not, particularly anything with rests in it or a line that begins off the beat. We lost most of a rehearsal once to an entry that half the choir was taking a full beat early, all of them certain, all of them having learned it from each other. Since then anything rhythmically awkward gets spoken in rhythm first, on a single note, before the tune is allowed anywhere near it.
What the page gives back
The score earns its place the moment a piece has to be held for more than a month. It is a record you can check at home, it shows you the shape of the whole line rather than the phrase in front of you, and it tells you what the other three parts are doing, which is the information that turns a section into a choir. We hand out the music at the first rehearsal of every piece, even to people who will never read a note of it, because the layout alone teaches you where you are.
Several of our non-readers have drifted into reading without ever deciding to. It happens in the least glamorous way imaginable: you follow the line with a finger for a year, you notice that the big jump on the page is the big jump in your ear, and one evening you find you know a phrase is coming before it is sung. Nobody is tested on this and nobody mentions it. The folder of photocopies simply gets a little less mysterious every season.