blog post Singing a cappella, or flying by the seat of your pants

Choirs that sing a cappella, or without any musical instruments, have a lot in common with pilots who “fly by the seat of their pants.” That expression originated in actual flying — with pilots who fly airplanes not by gauges or instrumentation but by, well, their buttocks.

And the seat of your pants is as good an indicator as any of three-dimensional movement, since that’s where you feel the forces of an airplane’s movement. Nevertheless, you have to be a very confident pilot to pull this off and sensitive to the subtle forces pushing around your bottom end.

Here’s a Newfoundland group called Lady Cove Women’s Choir flying in a musical way by the seat of its pants. In this exclusive CBC Music video, the singers are up on Signal Hill overlooking St. John’s, singing beautifully without accompaniment. They’re singing a cappella.

And just like pilots, the singers are sensitive to all sorts of subtle things, including pitch, blend, tempo, dynamics — all things that take years to learn. I guess they aren’t using their seats as much as pilots do, but they are fielding different signals from their bodies as they pull together the delicate formations that make a cappella choral singing truly come alive.

Related links:

CBC radio 2's Choral Concert with Peter Togni

Check out the CBC blog: "Grassroots choirs come to Canadian choral music"