Video transcript
2021 Primary Proms repertoire - 08. The Captain's Tale - teaching tips

[music playing]

RACHEL KELLY: Hi, I'm Rachel Kelly. This video is part of a series on tips for conducting your choir. This song is mostly in unison. And the vocal parts are written all on one line. But sometimes, only the sopranos or only the altos sing.

So when everyone sings in unison, it's marked tutti. Otherwise, it says altos or sopranos. For the very last phrase, the two parts sing in parallel harmony, one octave apart.

The time signature is 2/4 so we conduct two beats in every bar, like this. Down, up, down, up, 1, 2, 1, 2.

(SINGING) Hear ye, boys, what'll it be? Come gather 'round, have a drink on me

The rhythms in this piece will be easier to understand if you remember that a crotchet is divided into four semiquavers, like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka, ticka. Sometimes, we see this rhythm with two semiquavers and a quaver, like this, [clapping] ticka ti, like in bar 11 on what'll it.

(SINGING) What'll it. Hear ye, boys, what'll it be?

Sometimes, we have this rhythm, a dotted quaver with a semiquaver. Think of this as the first and the fourth of the group of four semiquavers. Da, duh. Da, duh, dah, duh, tea cup, tea cup. We got this in bar 14 on tales to tell,

(SINGING) Tales to tell, tales to tell, tales to tell.

Sometimes, we have this rhythm, a quaver and two semiquavers, like this, [clapping] ti ticka. When we see it in bar 12, it happens twice in a row.

(SINGING) Come gather 'round

Have a ti, ticka, ti, ticka.

At bar 15, it's got a more syncopated feel because we hold the last one.

(SINGING) Tales to hear

And finally, there's one with a semiquaver followed by a dotted quaver, like in bar 16 on the word bottom.

(SINGING) Bottom of the

Bottom of the

You could practise clapping these rhythms with your choir and even have your singers find more examples of them throughout the song.

Every time we sing hear ye, boys, the word boys joins onto the next word like, this:

(SINGING) Hear ye, boys, what'll it be

or

(SINGING) hear ye, boys, join our song

or maybe

(SINGING) hear ye, boys, the years pass by

So there's not a gap after boys like this.

(SINGING) Hear ye, boys, what'll it be

And we only take a breath when we come to a rest in the music.

So I'm going to sing you the first section, and I want you to notice how some of the phrases might be a bit longer than you would expect.

(SINGING) Hear ye, boys, what'll it be

Come gather 'round, have a drink on me

Tales to tell and tales to hear at the bottom of the sea

All above, come down below

Hear the captain's tale

That last word, tale, cuts off exactly on beat 2, like this:

(SINGING) hear the captain's tale, off.

So you've probably heard singing teachers and choir conductors talking about diphthongs. This is when we have a word where we make two vowel sounds on one syllable. So the word cat doesn't have a diphthong because a is just one vowel sound. But boys, for example, has two sounds in the vowel, aw and E, oy. So this is the diphthong. Now, remember, it's about the sound of the word when we say it and not necessarily about the spelling of it.

So diphthongs can be problematic when you're singing, because they can sound really awful, for example, if you went:

(SINGING) Hear ye boys

So the trick is to hang on to the first part of those two vowel sounds for longer and then just change to the second one as you're finishing the word. So:

(SINGING) Boys

So you'd sing

Hear ye, boys, what'll it be

I know that might all sound a bit technical, but if you model it the right way for your singers, I know they'll easily get the hang of it. There are a lot of diphthongs in this song, for example, here, tale, down, join. You could go on a diphthong hunt.

In general, this song shouldn't take too long to learn, because the melodies repeat quite a lot. Just watch out for the different melody at bar 86 near the end, which goes:

(SINGING) Hear now, the captain's tale

Listen to the captain's wail

There's a breath mark at the end of bar 91, just before the last phrase. This is so we can have a clean attack there, especially for the sopranos, who have that high F:

(SINGING) Hear the captain's tale

We want that note to sound effortless, like they're looking down on it from above, rather than reaching up to it. So instead of:

(SINGING) Hear the captain's tale

we want

(SINGING) Hear the captain's tale.