August 2009

There has been an interesting thread of discussions over on Choralnet recently in response to another blogger’s claim that the Ambassadors of Harmony set ‘a new standard in choral music’ in their performance at this year’s International barbershop convention. The responses range from the enthusiastic to the disdainful, with some interesting variants in each camp – a wonderful example, indeed, of the way that aesthetic values are not static, but culturally negotiated on an ongoing basis.

Lying behind some of the comments are a set of cultural tensions that have existed in music for at least a couple of centuries if not more.

In my post on ‘What makes good music?’ earlier this month I forgot to mention another indicator of quality that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately. This is: really good music lifts and develops performers, and makes them sound better than they do when performing merely adequate music.

Earlier this week I received an email with the above subject line from the director of a small early music vocal ensemble. He has been grappling with the challenge of getting his singers to learn music in their own time to make the most of scarce rehearsal time – and grappling also with the personal tensions that result when not all of his singers cooperate. I’ll quote an extract from his email, as his account of his experience will resonate in the heart of anyone who has found themselves leading a group:

During the time that rehearsals were ongoing, I was never sure what to do about the singers who would not learn their music. I didn't feel I could reprimand them, because we were all students of about equal experience and, while mine was the responsibility to choose the repertoire for the year and to lead the rehearsals, I did not have any authority over them. I could not replace (or threaten to replace) any of the singers, as I did not have any other equally capable singers wanting to join the group. The only motivating tool I had was the music itself, which I cared deeply about and wanted to sing well. Whatever way I had been communicating to the group, my enthusiasm had rubbed off on some singers but not all.

I was just wondering if you have written anything about this, if it's something you have experienced, and if you have any strategies for dealing with it?

It’s a loud voice,
And though it’s not exactly flat,
She’ll need a little more than that
To earn a living wage
Noel Coward, ‘Don’t Put You Daughter on the Stage’

There is sometimes some cultural discomfort with women singing loudly. It can be seen as over-assertive, sonically pushy, ballsy. In times past this was tangled up with questions about public versus private utterance. Early Romantic writers like ETA Hoffmann and Carl Maria von Weber wrote very rude vignettes of female amateurs who sang operatic repertoire in the home, and idealised instead the perfect femininity of an untrained voice that wouldn’t travel beyond an intimate setting.

Those stereotypes have – thankfully – loosened their stranglehold to the point that they seem almost entirely historical.

In my first post on this theme, I looked at Cooper & Meyer’s theory of rhythm, and in particular the way that it frames the idea of accent as any musical event that draws attention to itself. Of the types of accent discussed in that post, by far the most important for homophonic a cappella styles is the harmonic accent. Where all voices are singing the same words at the same time, and the number of notes sounding simultaneously is largely constant, the primary means to alert the ear to a song’s metrical shape is the changing of the harmony.

And indeed, both the arranging styles and performance styles of close-harmony traditions have particularly focused on relishing the harmonic content: it not only regulates the rhythmic flow of the music, but colours its entire emotional shape.

On Sunday night I had a trip up to Yorkshire to work with the combined voices of Pennine Chimes from Bradford and Main Street Sound from York. They have been rehearsing together once a month for the last few months, as well as coordinating their plans and approaches for each group’s weekly rehearsals, and as a result are operating very much as a single ensemble. Indeed, my only clue as to who originated with which chorus were their name badges!

During the second half of the coaching session we addressed an issue that besets so many barbershop groups: the way that introducing choreography seems to undo months of careful work on vocal production.