This week, I'm expanding on the same subject I covered in yesterday's YouTube video, so if you'd like to hear more about these ideas, make sure you check out the video!

Dear singers,

For a few years, I've been a part of the planning team for a wonderful music festival here in DC - the Epiphany Festival, where we assemble a volunteer choir to sing seldom-performed works, often in their DC-area premieres.

This year, we are doing Einojuhari Rautavaara's Vigilia, and it is A: AWESOME and B: HARD.

We've done a few soprano sectionals to try to get our bearings and, while it's helpful to just have extra time to run through tricky spots, I'm really pushing hard on the idea that we have musical tools we can employ to manage difficult rhythms and pitches, and remembering and deploying those tools is the quickest and most successful way to deal with hard music.

I know that most of you are not working on Rautavaara right now, but these tools are useful in all kinds of situations, so I thought I would share this list with you.

Here's an important thing to remember: not every tool is useful all the time. In fact, many of the tools below contradict one another. So you'll need to discern which tool to use when.

And how do you know which one to use?

Use the one that helps YOU sing the right notes and rhythms.

It doesn't matter if it's "correct" according to the rules of music theory, or if it's the same tool your neighbor is using.

If it's making the music come out right, keep using it!

Without further ado, the tools (with examples from Vigilia):

RHYTHMIC TOOLS

1. Mark the big beat. I know there are many ways to mark this and, per my comment above, I suggest you use the one that works for you. The section below is in 6/8, so I've put vertical lines (my preferred beat marker) on the first and fourth eighth note values of each bar.

2. Mark only the useful beat. So, while I LOVE marking beats, sometimes we need a mark to show which beats are most useful or important.

The excerpt below is in a 5/4 whispered section. I did go ahead and put slashes on each quarter beat, but I only drew special attention to beat 4, because that's the beat I jump off of for "syn."

This is an extremely useful technique for syncopated rhythms - draw attention to the big beat before the syncopated note.

3. Don't count (just watch). Ok, this is a controversial idea, but there are some rhythms that are best left uncounted.

Just leave them in the hands of the conductor!

Consider the rhythm below, which is in a 7/8 bar, and in Finnish, and just generally troublesome. I have marked a few rhythmic things in there, like a big slash to remember the empty beat on beat 1, and how the conductor is grouping the 7 eighth notes (2+2+3).

But the salient marking here, is the glasses at the end of the bar.

I refuse to spend the rest of my forties trying to figure out how to count three-and-a-half eighth note beats.

So I just jump off the empty beat, sing eighth-eighth-sixteenth on "ih-mis-su" and then hold "vu" until the conductor shows the next downbeat.

Mission accomplished!!

4. Mark syllabic groupings instead of beats. Especially in chants and languages you don't know, it's VERY helpful to draw groupings of 2 and 3 syllables. My typical marking is a square bracket for 2's and a curved slur for 3's, but you could also just put emphases or tenuto markings on the first of each group of three, like I've done for the second line down in the picture below.

The important thing to notice here is that this bar, in 9/8, would traditionally be counted "one-and-a two-and-a three-and-a" but it's more helpful with this text to put it in groups of two, two, three, and two syllables.

NB: I don't ever mark a group bigger than four because my brain is small and can only hold twos and threes, so four syllable words become 2+2, etc.

PITCH TOOLS

1.Find a tonal anchor. Trying to sing a fiddly, chromatic passage like the one below by interval is really frustrating, and can feel like pushing a noodle. Whole, half, whole, whole, half . . . after a few notes, the sizes of my steps start to vary and I end up somewhere other than where I intended.

So I looked at the WHOLE phrase and realized it revolves around A-natural.

Instead of jumping from note to note, I audiate the A like a drone as I sing, and have a steady anchor to move against and around.

2. Use mnemonics. If you love using intervals, consider expanding your repertoire of interval mnemonics so you have a few options beyond Here Comes the Bride and the Love Story theme. Here's a link to the interval mnemonics cheat sheet I made a few years ago!

3. Audiate the octave. Ok, check out the passage below - S1 starts on F, S2 has to come in on the B-flat below. You might be thinking, "It's a fifth!!" And, of course, you're right. But can you actually sing it?

This is the kind of passage that made me look for alternatives beyond intervallic pitch learning because, when the rubber meets the road, it's hard for a lot of mere mortals to hear a descending fifth.

You could check out that interval mnemonics sheet and think about the Flintstones theme, or if that doesn't help, you might try audiating (hearing in your head) the F an octave lower than the one the S1s are singing, and then going up a perfect 4th , which is way easier than the descending fifth.

This is great with all kinds of cue pitch issues - when a pitch is given, at the start of a piece or by another part during a piece, try hearing it in the octave that will be most actionable for you!

4. Collapse big intervals. This is a related idea to #3 - when you have to learn a big interval and you don't feel confident about it, move the destination pitch of the leap either up or down an octave.

Sixths will turn into thirds, and sevenths into seconds.

Learn the melody that way, with the octave collapsed, and then when you are confident in how the melody goes, you can transpose the octave back to where it is written but you'll hear the tune carrying you through the big leap.

I learned the melody below with the 3/4 bar transposed an octave down. Now that M7th is no biggie!

5. Use solfege (for the key you're in or not!!) With a little practice, solfège can work as a powerful mnemonic device for all kinds of intervals and scalar patterns. But some singers feel like they're going to have to do a full theoretical analysis of a whole piece for it to be useful. Not true!

You can use snippets of solfege to support you even if they're technically inaccurate! Check this out:

The passage below is most definitely NOT in the key of C-flat, but thinking of these pitches as Mi-Re-Do-Ti-La helps me put all the half and whole steps in the right spot without having to calculate it on the fly.

6. Consider enharmonics. Enharmonics are alternate spellings of notes or chords. Although some people will get very academic and fiddly about this idea, you can get a lot of mileage out of substituting D-flat for C-sharp, and I recommend you try it!

Look at the line below - the cue pitches from the previous page are F and D. Finding A-sharp could feel a little intimidating, until you consider that A-sharp could be spelled B-flat, and then F-D-B-flat is just a B-flat major triad!

You could even think sol-mi-do if you liked that Solfege tip!

So were any of these helpful for you? Do you have a tip for me?

I hope you were able to tuck at least one idea into your toolbox for later.

It's all about having a variety of resources so that when one doesn't work, you have alternatives.

If you'd like to hear the result of all this marking and learning, I hope you'll join us for the Epiphany Festival this weekend and next at Westmoreland UCC in Bethesda.

Weather permitting, I'll do an incredible solo piece with chamber orchestra this Saturday, and then the whole choir will perform the Rautavaara on Feb. 1. We would love to see you there!

In the meanwhile, happy singing - I hope it's a little easier going with all these handy tips.

Big, actionable hugs,

Laura