Small group rehearsal techniques, Part 1

Your concert date is approaching. Your chamber music group’s rehearsal time is dwindling. You have so much work that needs to be done! How can you rehearse well and efficiently so you’re ready when your concert date arrives? These small group rehearsal techniques can help you get to the finish line.

Planning your rehearsals can alleviate some of the anxiety that normally comes with preparing for a concert. You can learn to think strategically about the best ways to use your rehearsal time. Consider dividing your rehearsal time into categories.

Tempo and rhythm

Figuring out your tempo and sticking with is one of the first challenges of preparing any piece for performance. Once the group has figured out what their tempo is, often the challenge becomes sticking with it. Frequent reference to a metronome is invaluable. Sometimes, it even makes sense to rehearse for a short period of time with the metronome playing.

One step further from simply turning on the metronome is to play with a click track. Playing with a metronome doesn’t work if your music is in shifting meters. If you are playing a new piece with the composer in attendance, you could ask the composer to add a “click” as a new instrument in the score and play back the score in notation software, muting the other instruments. Or an enterprising member of the group could make a new score with just a loud percussion instrument playing on the beats. Playing with a click track can help make the group aware of where they are gaining or losing time.

One of the most frustrating things to encounter in a rehearsal is figuring out why a passage is having rhythmic issues. To work on rhythms, no matter what the complexity, here are several ideas. For rhythms that are tied over beats or bar lines, try taking the ties away to call attention to the underlying subdivisions of the beat. Sometimes, it’s not the rhythms themselves that are the issue, but the technical challenges of changing pitches that are causing rushing or dragging. Try playing the passage on just one pitch to find out if it’s the rhythm or some other technical challenge that is causing the lack of ensemble. Finally, even though we’ve all heard this too many times, slowing the tempo in varying degrees is almost always revealing.

Intonation

Intonation issues can be frustrating, too. Some small groups hold entire rehearsals dedicated to fixing intonation. If a chord is out of tune, try tuning first roots, then fifths, then thirds, and then other parts of a more complex chord. This will require calling on your music theory training to identify parts of a chord. Sometimes what is perceived to be an intonation issue is solved by changing the balance—a part of a chord is too soft or too loud. Sometimes, unisons are out of tune. In like instruments, one thing to try is to match fingerings. For wind instruments, don’t discount the vicissitudes of the room temperature. Smaller instruments warm up faster than larger instruments do, causing disparities in pitch. Cold instruments are flatter, warmer instruments are sharper. Finally, don’t forget to check in from time to time with your tuner.

Strategies

Sometimes, a small group needs to see the music in a different way and get out of the weeds of tending to details. Breaking the group into small groups of twos and threes sometimes works wonders for all sorts of issues. For persistent ensemble issues, singing parts instead of playing can be fun and can bypass technical challenges. Varying your rehearsals by not always starting at the beginning can give fresh attention to parts of the piece that may not have been adequately rehearsed yet. And don’t forget to dedicate some part of your later rehearsals to full run-throughs—without stopping for anything! Don’t forget that you’re preparing a performance, and performances come with all sorts of unexpected glitches. Get used to working around them in real time as soon as you can. Rehearsing is a separate skill that groups need to learn. The techniques I have described here are just some of the ways small groups can break out of rehearsal ruts and make real progress. In future blog posts, I’ll discuss even more small group rehearsal techniques you can use to bring your performances to the next level.