Gedney reporting on her experience as one of the newer Dunava members on this musical adventure abroad.
Before I joined Dunava, almost all my exposure to singing had been through theater - but not musical theater.
For about half of my professional career to date, I worked as a director and actor with theater companies that used singing as a core part of their ongoing training and rehearsals. Presence and listening are critical muscles for actors, and there are few workouts for those muscles more effective than singing.
But what these theater companies found was that you couldn’t cultivate presence and listening with just any old song. Interestingly, a song was especially effective at getting people to pay attention and listen to each other, when it possessed one or more of the following qualities:
- Unfamiliar - it was a lot harder to get the same quality of engagement with something like Yesterday or Old McDonald
- Foreign - similarly, singing in a language you neither understood nor spoke forced you to pay attention to the sounds a lot more closely
- Harmonically complex - When the music did things the learner does not expect, or created chords they couldn’t easily anticipate based on their own musical background
It should be no surprise, then, that the cadre of theater companies that were and are interested in continually fine-tuning their companies’ ability to listen closely while making something together have been drawn to the polyphonic traditions of places like Bulgaria, Corsica, Georgia. In my experience, even professionally trained singers, when confronted with this music for the first time, find they cannot rely on the same muscles or habits they usually rely on for belting out the hits from Les Mis or even La Boheme. And because perfecting these songs for an actual performance is seldom the goal, it allows actors working with this music to focus on the process of learning, of catching the quality of a song that is or feels far from what you know or understand, and to open yourself and grow just in the attention exerted in trying.
Let me be clear - in the companies where I’ve seen this exercise applied, pronunciation is often butchered, tuning can be quite wonky, as can timing. The actors rarely succeed in approaching anything approximating authenticity or successful mimicry. If you came from these traditions, or even a choir like Dunava, and sat in on one of these rehearsals, you might cringe. And this makes sense, because only inconsistently is anyone who is an expert in any of the musical traditions drawn upon in the room to coach or correct. The focus was instead more myopic: what happens to us as we’re singing this music together. What physical, psychological, emotive, intellectual associations arise? How can we hold those together, all the while tending to the main objective of singing this song?
Just like an actor with lines, if you don’t fill the words you’re saying with feeling, embodiment, and intention towards the other people onstage, the audience feels little. But also, if you just feel whatever the words make you feel and cease to care about the words themselves, about conveying them to others, the audience will likely just receive a chaotic, intensely felt grab bag. The same balance actors needed to strike when acting was called upon with these songs - and with native language stripped away, it felt like a more targeted workout of those muscles.
All that is to say, the way we actors learned these songs was shaped by what it was we wanted to do. Since we didn’t want to perform them, what we were listening for was very different than, say, Dunava.
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, when I joined Dunava three years ago with next to no choral experience, the “choir” approach felt like a bit of a culture shock. I had never tried to sing these songs as close to the source recording as possible. I had never really concerned myself over dark or light Ls, whether my ornamentation was the same every time, or even whether or not I was totally in tune. But I had auditioned for the group because I had always loved that singing part of my theater work, and wanted to see what it was like to really focus on the music devotedly with a group of astoundingly skilled and disciplined singers.
Three years later, I’m still here! But I’m definitely still processing the different ways we can relate to what we’re singing, who we’re singing with, and how we practice.
While we were traveling in Serbia and Bulgaria, we heard various interpretations and approaches to how to handle “their” music - I put “their” in quotations because for some of our teachers, they had traveled to regions where they did not grow up to learn songs from grannies who had learned the songs from their grannies, who learned from their grannies, and so on. In other instances they studied music professionally, and were teaching us music based on folk songs but adapted / arranged by composers from their country - countries, I might add, whose borders have fluctuated over the past centuries. But also sometimes they might’ve been teaching us a song they heard their granny sing growing up.
All along the trip, we wrestled with the question of ownership and authenticity, as our teachers adopted very divergent approaches for how to teach this music to us. And each of those teaching styles spoke to, I think, different priorities in what they hoped to impart.
In Serbia, the first teacher we worked with - Svetlana Spajić - spent six hours teaching us two songs - with a four hour / two hour split on songs one and two. The first day, we spoke the words, reviewed their meaning, and were asked to “bluetooth” with her silently. We were “too eager to ‘do do do’” and did not spend enough time just listening, trying to sing along with her in our bodies and minds first. We spent an hour mapping out the song with pencil and paper to observe the internal logic of the song’s syllable count and breath rhythm.
The next teacher we worked with - Sanja Ranković - taught us about ten songs in three hours, belting one after the other in quick succession, asking us to repeat, and, satisfied we got the gist, moving onto the next.
In Bulgaria, our exposure to a diversity of teaching styles broadened. Tzvetanka Varimezova, a longtime teacher of the choir (and almost certainly our biggest cheerleader) seems to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of Bulgarian polyphony, and teaches each song by singing each of three to six-part songs to us, more or less from memory, focusing very practically on the best songs for us given our skillset and size, what performance choices would be most interesting and/or fun, and reviewing any of the trickier pieces (usually ornamentation, harmony, or timing) that may trip us up once we leave her. Tzetze wants our choir to succeed and she wants Bulgarian music to reach as wide an audience, executed with the most joy and at the highest quality possible. And her teaching reflected that, or more accurately her whole being projected that joy and care every second she spent in rehearsal with us.
In their way, each of these teaching styles were familiar to me. Where Svetlana prioritized intimacy with the music and language over volume, Sanja enthusiastically showered us in repertoire, rooted I think in an excitement and pride in the power, peculiarities, and diversity of music from the broader region formerly known as Yugoslavia.* And while Tzetze similarly loves music from her native country, she equally loves seeing other choirs both attempt and perform that music - she seemed to love the learning process as much as the result, and even when we didn’t fully succeed, she still loved to do it, and loved us, because she could tell we loved it too.
When we arrived in Burgas, we encountered yet another pedagogical method, one that I’ve continued to think about quite a bit since we left. Ana Borisova is a PhD student at Veliko Turnovo University, focused specifically on the transmission of Bulgarian music to non-Bulgarian students. Her pedagogy relies on a technique called “mirroring.” Whereas all our other lessons had been as a choir, Ana taught us in pairs, pairs she selected based on song samples we sent a few months prior to our arrival. I was paired with Ramona, one of the longest-standing members of Dunava besides our founder, and a singer who gives me chills every time she sings. As someone who has been only singing this music for about three years, I was both excited and nervous.
In some ways, the mirroring rehearsals unfolded much like any other singing lesson: Ana would play and/or sing a line, ask one of us to repeat, and then the next. She made sure we understood the regional background of the songs we learned and the meaning of the lyrics. But two things were unique to me about our lessons with Ana:
Our songs were packed with what I will call technically challenging “moves,” for lack of a more musical term. Mordents every other note, mordents plus a trill, slowed and sped-up vibratos, vibratos that had to match tempo with someone else, "prochukvone" (which involve a kind of vocal break, sometimes with sometimes without a grace note)…You get the idea!
Ana discouraged “marking,” when you sing a song at less than full voice or without the full “production value” or commitment as you would in performance. Within 15 minutes of our first lesson, she heard that I was singing kind of in my head voice, and immediately corrected me. I should learn the music as I planned to sing it - approximating as much as I could that full-face, head-buzzing resonance of Bulgarian singers. “It will make it easier to learn the notes,” she promised.
Instead of just trying to imitate our teacher, we also tried to imitate each other. In some ways, it was the closest to the theater work I had done because we had to face each other, look into each other’s eyes, and really try to imitate each other, really listen.
Now, of course, other teachers we worked with had us pair up and try to blend. But Ana didn’t just want you to blend like a choir, she wanted me to try to do that mordent like Ramona, or have Ramona shape her “o” like me. And I have continually thought about this pedagogical choice further because Ana developed it specifically to help people unfamiliar with Bulgarian music, a musical style with quite a lot of those “moves” that many singers may never have heard let alone attempted before. I would’ve thought in imitating another non-Bulgarian imitating a Bulgarian, one might kick off a tragic game of telephone that could result in some of the wishy-washy pronunciation, de-complexified time signatures, etc., that I’d seen in theater.
But very clearly that is not what happened. I of course think that obviously has to do with Ana’s close coaching and expertise in this music, but I also think it has to do with what happens when you’re working in pairs, and not a group. Almost every acting program I can think of devotes a large part of their curriculum to scene studies with partners. When it is just you and another person onstage, you and your scene partner are wholly interdependent, and you become very intimate both with your scene material and with each other. And when I am able to focus just on one other person’s voice - their strengths, growth areas, where they really shine - for four hours, I’m able to catch a lot more detail and color from what’s happening in their voice than I would even after the 300 odd hours I’ve spent in a rehearsal room with Dunava. To learn and perform as a duet, Ramona and I needed each other, which took our listening (and singing) I think to a new level.
I know from reading her pedagogical statement that Ana wants to continue and even grow peoples’ ability to sing Bulgarian music, both in Bulgaria and abroad. But I think something she said in our little internal recital speaks even more to the particular approach to teaching. She said that it saddens her to see that so many Bulgarian children do not know their own musical traditions, and she hopes one day to help re-popularize this music in musical education in Bulgaria.
Surely, she doesn’t expect every child who might cross her path to become a professional musician, or to even join a choir. But I think it’s also interesting that I believe I did my strongest singing after her workshop precisely because the goal was not to do it perfectly like her - it was for Ramona and myself to carry each other through a challenging learning journey, forcing us to both listen closely to each other and ourselves.
What mirroring offers as a pedagogical approach is the sense of singing as an intimate, interdependent art, which is so different from how solo voice lessons are taught or even how typical choirs are conducted. It distills the practice down to its most bare, as you and your partner make room in a tradition that is not yours to inhabit and honor the music together.
*Our choir continues to have lively debates about how this music is attributed, as we’ve discovered different people we’ve worked with attribute these songs differently. The borders between these regions are inflected with very recent memories of genocide, and much longerstanding memories of armed conflict, conquest, but also cohabitation, intermarrying, and shared language. I designate the songs from this area with an imperfect term, while signalling we all as a choir are on a journey to learn how we handle the histories of this music with care, and respect, without reproducing any dynamics of erasure. It’s a WIP - we’d love your thoughts!
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