Filling the room and other metaphors

This past week in Anaheim I sang with about seventy of my fellow past barbershop quartet champs in a group called the “AIC” or “Association of International Champions.” We put on a great show every year featuring the champ quartets that are still active, and a chorus of past champs that learns a half-dozen songs in a couple of days, and then sings them on the show. It’s a blast!

As part of that AIC chorus I had the pleasure to be directed and coached by a half-dozen different high-level musicians in the hobby like principal director Jay Giallombardo, and assistant directors Clay Hine, Tony DeRosa and Royce Ferguson.

Royce has been rather famous lately for directing the amazing Westminster chorus to the championship, and for his particular method of getting the best out of singers. What he does is very quick and effective, because he’s using the most powerful weapon we have in singing instruction – the metaphor.

Actually there’s a good reason that metaphor is so useful in teaching people how to use their voices and sing in ensembles. Singers don’t have conscious control over the muscles of the vocal apparatus. You can’t just ask them to rotate their arytenoids 15 degrees and relax their masseters! Instead we talk about “light” and “dark” sounds, adding “color” to the voice, “projecting” and “adding spin” and so forth. These things have no literal meaning, but they get a specific response out of singers.

The power of what Royce does (and I’m sure he would credit other people for much of what he has learned and uses so effectively), is that his metaphors are just better – they get a better ensemble sound than other metaphors. Consider the difference between asking a large group of singers to “project” their voices vs. “fill the room” with their voices. The first one tends to emphasize individual voice characteristics, while the second makes each singer aware of the other singers around him, giving a uniform ensemble sound.