Rehearsing Now - New or Recycled pieces?

I was just thinking, for those holding rehearsals or creating content currently, are you attempting to learn/perform music that your ensemble hasn’t learned before or are you working with material that you started before quarantine? If you have started new music, what has been your most successful strategy for learning?

My ensembles have all ended for the current year/season, but I need to prepare for the fall and would love to know what you’re doing.

1 Like

Hi Steve, that’s a good question. My chorus has been singing through repertoire we already know to keep it fresh, touching each song at least once a month. We’ve been singing with recordings of ourselves when possible, or with learning tracks when it’s not.

As for learning music, we learned a song last month where we released a section at a time. At rehearsal we’d do sectionals in breakout rooms on Zoom where section leaders would identify possible trouble spots, give tips, ask people to sing small sections, and have the chorus sing on mute with the part-dominant learning track or with a section leader.

It was difficult to track how well learned the music was since we can’t hear everybody all at once. I would highly recommend that you have some performance (virtual or otherwise) planned after the music is learned so that people have a goal to work towards. Our new song got a lot less exciting once we’d released the entire thing because we didn’t have the ability to work the song.

Of course this is a volunteer community choir and things may be different for you.

2 Likes

Actually it’s just the same for me. My group is a volunteer community group as well. This was super helpful. I appreciate the response!

1 Like

My 11-person a cappella group has been doing mostly old rep for the past couple months. But about 5 weeks ago we started spending most of our rehearsal time in #jamulus which allows us to actually sing together and hear each other. Now that we’ve gotten used to that setting, we’re planning to mix in some brand new repertoire along with bringing back some old rep we haven’t brushed off in a couple years.

To me, the key is tightening the feedback loop. Jamulus and other #low-latency software is one way to do that (closest to a “normal” rehearsal). Virtual choirs and the like are great but they often take a LONG time to go from learning to hearing the final sound.

I think there’s an interesting middleground using tools like a cappella app (iOS only at the moment) or BandLab to be able to get each person’s part recorded quickly and have everyone hear what it sounds like in near-real-time.

For larger groups, you could split the group into sub-teams (where each team has a full sampling of voice parts) and have each sub-team make their own “rehearsal recording” of the same song or passage.

1 Like

I think there’s an interesting middleground using tools like a cappella app (iOS only at the moment) or BandLab to be able to get each person’s part recorded quickly and have everyone hear what it sounds like in near-real-time.

I actually used A Cappella for a teaching video submission I had to create last week) and found it pretty easy to pick up and use. I agree with @nathanielgranor that the possibility is there for using it in the short term to create usable (rough) practice tracks with live voices.

My composer/teacher brain also suspects it could be a GREAT tool for teaching beginning arranging to say, middle schoolers. Gotta think on that one some more…

1 Like