February 2010

John Mayer: music as intellectAndrew Downes: music as feeling

At one point we had a pair of composition teachers at Birmingham Conservatoire who seemed to get on very well, but nonetheless had diametrically opposed views about how we should approach music. John Mayer used to harangue me over the photocopier about how music was nothing to do with the heart, but was an intellectual pursuit, while the then Head of Composition and Creative Studies, Andrew Downes used to say that you should never analyse anything, it should all come from the heart.

So, when I wrote about this last December I got as far as articulating the following question:

How do we give our singers enough opportunities for repetition to embed the skills that need automating without dulling their imaginative response to the music?

I have subsequently marshalled some of the thoughts that started to teem in my brain in response. There are several strategies you can take, each of which spawns its own set of rehearsal tactics.

One of the participants on the course for choir leaders I’m currently running for MusicLeader West Midlands asked an interesting question as we chatted after this week’s session. She took over a long-established choir (with well-entrenched ways of doing things) about a year ago and is gradually inveigling them out of old habits and into new ways of doing things. One of the things on her to-do list is finding ways to help her sopranos produce a sound that is less hard and shrill. We came up with some solutions together during our conversation, but I kept thinking about it afterwards too. So, this post is for Clare.

One of the areas of choral directing in which there is the greatest disparity between text-book ideas of good practice and what happens in real life is in the use of beat patterns. The orthodoxy is that they provide the correct method for conducting a choir, and they provide the foundation of most approaches to teaching the craft, yet the literature remains full of rude comments about the technique of choir leaders who depart from them – real conductors, it seems, are quite happy to ignore the othodoxy.

As in most well-entrenched debates, each position has its virtues, and real life tends to involve finding a way to sail a coherent course between the polarised points.

When I first started singing lessons at age 14, I was introduced to those standards of voice training, Vaccai’s exercises and Schirmer’s collection of 24 Italian songs and arias. At this stage, I was singing Italian phonetically – I knew the general gist of the words from the translations, but in expressive terms it was much like playing Mozart arias on the clarinet (which I also did around that age). Then at university I took Italian classes for 3 hours a week for a year, thinking it would be useful for someone taking voice lessons (and actually, interesting for someone who liked studying languages).

It was some years later again when I returned to the old Schirmer volume to revisit songs I had learned in my teens and had the bizarre experience of going through the motor actions I had learned to create the sounds, but now understanding the words I was singing. Bizarre and rather fun, I should add – I always enjoy the sensation when bits of my brain that hadn’t really connected before discover they have something in common.