Bopping

I will admit, music theory is not my favorite thing. A pre-requisite for joining GDC, I grit my teeth and plowed through late nights and repeated tests to audition. And hoped it would be over. It wasn't. But I don't think it was until this week I really (hopefully) had my opinion changed for good. We were working on Herbert Howells' "Te Deum Laudamus". It's a beautiful, thrilling piece with many potential traps - singing to the rhythm rather than the text, over singing... We stopped to discuss what we were actually saying and to speak it once outside of the rhythm. Then we dove back in to singing. But something wasn't working. So someone stopped to say "your subtext is all great, but we're losing it under the unbalanced harmonies and inaccuracies in the chords. That's where the subtext LIVES. So we took it back and went through "bopping"- singing on scat syllables with every note short. There's no sliding by with a slightly out of tune pitch or mis-balanced chord when you do it that way. We combed through that section and cleaned up note by note, balancing the voice parts, centering the pitches - then went back to put the words to it. I got it. You could feel it in the room - now the composer's vision could come through because the sounds he heard and wrote were happening. Time to dust off those theory books.