As most of you know, I get really excited when something about choral singing becomes clearer to me and I think it’s going to be useful in rehearsals. (Some of you may be happy that I finally have something new to talk about that isn’t “make best friends with your oblique muscles.”)  What is this new topic? Well, I’ve been talking lately in rehearsals quite a bit lately about consonants. It’s getting clearer to me just how much they can help us when we’re singing.

John William Trotter

This was driven home for me, literally in my own nervous system, between mid-August and mid-October. During that period of time, I had the opportunity to sing with Chicago a cappella under the musical direction of John William Trotter for the “Chicago, Chicago” show (about the history of our fair city), which we performed with WTTW’s Geoffrey Baer last weekend.

I had heard in workshops at choral conferences before about the power of paying attention to consonants. In San Antonio, Texas during the hot summer of 2015, I heard a lecture by the great choral conductor Jo-Michael (“Mike”) Scheibe of USC, where he spent the whole hour talking about consonants.

Jo-Michael Scheibe

A gifted teacher indeed, Mike is extremely articulate (no pun intended) on this topic. He pointed out that something like 57% of the sounds we make in the English language are actually consonants, and that consonants are the carriers of meaning. More importantly for us choral singers, however, many consonants carry pitch. These are what we call the “Voiced Consonants.” and they can have a big impact on how or whether or how well the rest of our singing — namely, the vowels — end up sounding. If we aren’t paying attention to consonants, we can end up inadvertently pulling the pitch of our vowels (what we think of as “the main event” in our singing, whether we are conscious of it or not) up or down or just making it more diffuse and less precise than it could be. This was my main take-away from Mike’s lecture, and all the conductors in the room served as a sort of “lab choir” to help him demonstrate his point. I thought it was pretty cool, but I wasn’t doing much conducting at time. Fast forward to 2018, and it’s how I spend many hours a week.

With Chicago a cappella, this stuff about consonants became familiar to me on a cellular and acoustical level in my own mouth and ears. It lives in a completely different place for me now, and I hope that I’ll be able to pass it along to most or all of you in rehearsals over the months ahead. John Trotter told us at several key points in several pieces that we were not hitting the pitch square on, meaning the vowel. John also explained that we could go a long way toward fixing it, quickly and forever, by paying split-second attention to where we pitched the voiced consonant that sounded right before the vowel in question. Being dutiful singers, or course we did it. I was surprised at what a large impact this had on the sound. I’ve tried it several times this week in rehearsals with many of you, especially at the end of “Glow,” where all those L’s right before the O vowel can be our best friends if we pay attention to what pitch we sing them on. I was impressed at how quickly the chord locked into well-tuned beauty right away. We spent a good bit of time on this level of detail at today’s Tune-Up workshop as well.

As they say, it’s the little things that count. I hope that this gets you curious and thinking about your consonants more deeply!

Have a great week.

As ever,

Jon