More Discoveries with abcd

‹-- PreviousNext --›

The abcd Discovery Day on choral music by women earlier this month provided not only the chance to explore a cornucopia of repertoire, but also generated some interesting insights into the processes by which music gets created and into the repertoire – or not.

The tale of the London Oriana Choir’s Five15 Project, as told by Tara Mack, provided some of these insights. Tara started out by giving a description of the project, which included a programme of sustained commissioning of new music along with programming of existing music by women, and a variety of workshops, over a 5-year period. One thing that struck me about this project was its depth and breadth. It’s hard to get unfamiliar names into the regular performing repertoire because they are, well, unfamiliar, and thus less easy to remember than the big names we hear all the time. Both singers and audiences have a much greater chance of remembering whose music they have experienced if they get repeated exposure.

This in turn resonated with a point Amy Bebbington made about settings of standard texts. If you search Spotify for them, you’ll pull up hundreds of recordings of the Rutter or Chilcott settings. Lovely as these may be, it makes it harder for the composers whose work we were exploring to show up. It’s not just enough to get your music premiered to get it into the cultural imaginary, it needs repeated performances and recordings to show up. This is particularly noticeable through searchable outlets like Spotify, but it was true in earlier eras too: I note that one of the reasons that Beethoven became recognised after his death as an ongoing cornerstone of the classical canon was because A.B. Marx organised concerts that gave repeated opportunities to hear his string quartets.

Tara then went on to tell of how, during one of the workshops, the thought occurred to her: I could do this, I could enjoy writing music. So she started doing so. And it wasn’t particularly easy and she had to go out and learn things she didn’t previously know how to do, but it turned out she was right: she could do it and she did enjoy it. And when the choir workshopped a piece she had written, other members of the choir thought: well, if she can do that, so could we. Now they have a composers’ group within the choir who meet regularly to share ideas and mutual encouragement.

We often use the term ‘role model’ to describe the enabling power of having an example set of how to go about things, but you don’t often get such a clear, first-person narrative of how this plays out in practice. And realistic role models are particularly important with activities like composition, which our culture often gate-keeps with ideological barriers to entry. As Tara put it, ‘Classical composition is made out to be a really difficult thing that only geniuses can do.’

(I would add the same is largely the case with conducting. I am sure I have shared before on this blog how I had grown up fully invested in the Maestro Myth and believed that only rare, special people - of whom I was not one - could possibly be conductors. It took a compulsory course in conducting during my undergraduate years to show me that anybody, including me, can learn how to do it.)

There’s a wider point to be made arising from these tales, but it also draws on insights provided by Louise Stewart of the Multitude of Voyces on the discovery day, so I will share those thoughts another day and bring out the connections there.

...found this helpful?

I provide this content free of charge, because I like to be helpful. If you have found it useful, you may wish to make a donation to the causes I support to say thank you.


Archive by date

Syndicate content