Notes on my fourth season with SF Bach Choir
Repertoire
This concert's program featured a selection of pieces by J.S. Bach and his extended family: Johann, Johann Christoph, Tobias Friedrich, Wilhelm Friedemann, C.P.E., and Johann Christoph Friedrich.
This is, obviously, a lot of Bachs, and nobody in the choir was familiar with all of them. My theory is that our artistic director got some negative feedback from the choir for last autumn's program's diversity — it included Appalachian, Samoan, Sephardic, and Romani music, as well as some jazz — and decided to spite our closed-mindedness by stuffing as many Bachs into one program as she could.
Honestly, I didn't mind, voluminous German text notwithstanding. We all like this music; it’s why we joined the Bach(s) choir. For a taste, here are recordings of a few of the pieces we sang:
J.S. Bach - Lobet den Herrn
Johann Bach (likely) - Weint nicht um meinem Tod
C.P.E. Bach - Et misericordia eius
Preparation
The autumn concert rehearsal period is only 6 weeks, and it always feels rushed for me. Unfortunately, that was exacerbated this round by some work-related stress. Readers will know that my health isn't great, and working ~50 hour weeks, feeding myself, and keeping my apartment clean are about all I can manage during our hot Indian summers. Note that “studying Bach choir repertoire” isn’t included in the list.
The truth is that the way I’d learned rep in previous sessions wasn’t very good. The approach was:
Split the material into 4-12 measure chunks
Practice hearing the notes in my mind, using Anki to schedule review
When I felt very confident about the notes, add the text
This is a great way to learn the notes very well (i.e. by heart), but it requires a lot of practice time per measure, and neglects most of the challenges of singing — producing pure vowels and crisp consonants with precise intonation and expressive dynamics, all while staying relaxed and keeping the breath flowing.
So it’s probably a blessing that I didn’t have the time for my Anki note study routine, and instead used a more direct approach:
Learn the text, at least enough to comfortably recite it
Record myself playing sections of my part on the piano, and sing along with these.
Learning the notes is easier, because I just copy the piano, and I can more quickly see what will be vocally challenging about any given line and address it.
A mature version of this approach would involve recording all the parts of each song into a DAW, then singing my part in relation to various combinations of them, to get a clear understanding of the harmonies. I won’t do that for the upcoming concert, but it’s something to work towards in time.
The concert
For me, at this stage of my relationship with choral singing, a concert is successful to the extent that I accomplish two things:
Don't make the choir sound bad
Feel emotionally engaged in the music
For a given level of preparation, these two goals are in-line with each other. On any given day, the primary factor in determining the quality of my rhythm and intonation is my health is, and it also determines the extent to which I'm able to feel the music. On a good day, I can have crisp timing and precise intonation, and I've been known to choke up during a show; on bad days I slip out of tune and out of time and feel numb besides.
Unfortunately, the concert took place at the end of a heat wave, and it was rather hot in the church day-of, which I don’t tolerate very well. By the time the concert started it was a struggle just to hold on. I think I sang ok, but it’s disappointing to work towards a concert for more than a month and then have the experience degraded by a random late-October heat wave.
Nevertheless, thanks to Magen and the rest of the choir. I’m already looking forward to the next one in December.