:: Coaching

Vocal ensemble and choir coaching have taken me all over the world. I coached on many Hilliard Summer Schools, and it was at the 1998 HE Cambridge course that I first met the Scandinavian Trio Mediaeval. I ended up working intensively with the group and produced all three of their CDs for ECM. In Holland I have worked with the Kassiopeia Quintet on their Gesualdo madrigal cycle project, and I've been a keen supporter and coach of the radical English female group Juice.

I devised and run the MA in Vocal Studies at York, where I coach jointly with Trio Mediaeval's Anna Maria Friman (who is doing a PhD with me on the modern performance of early music by women). Anna and I often coach as a team; we've worked in Latvia, Finland and the USA and will do more work together in Europe later this year. This is often a cheaper option than groups coming to York. I also write about ensemble singing from time to time. There is a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Singing (which I also edited) and I have contributed a chapter to the Tapiola Choir Book on how choirs can work without conductors. For a while now I have been planning a book with Swedish jazz singer Anders Jalkéus of The Real Group, though we haven’t quite managed to get this off the ground yet.

The main aim of my coaching is to empower groups and choirs by giving them a small set of rules which enable them to create an infinite number of future performances of any given piece. Ensemble singing with one voice to a part is perhaps the most sophisticated – and certainly the most fun – way to experience some wonderful music.