Musical Identity

The arguments against affirmative action are often articulated in terms of equality and meritocracy. If it’s not fair to disproportionately offer opportunities to traditionally privileged groups, then it is equally unfair to give a leg up to those who have traditionally been excluded from opportunities. Equality should mean equality; the playing field should be level.

Which, on the face of it is not an unreasonable position. It reminds me of my arguments against trying to get people to sing sharp as a cure for sinking pitch, or telling people to raise their chests when you just want them to stop slouching. An intervention that would actually spoil things if applied to the world as it should be is not necessarily a helpful intervention.

I had an email query recently that gave me one of those ‘this is not going to be the only person who wants to know this’ moments. So I thought I’d share my answer here, and also expand it a bit beyond the specifics of my correspondent’s particular circumstance for more general use.

The question was this:

We have a prospective new member coming to rehearsal tomorrow. If you can spare a minute, what would you suggest for voice testing for her range?

I can’t find anything on google or perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place

Now I am sure that if you did think of the right search terms, you would find quite a lot of stuff on this - at least there is quite a lot in the books on choral conducting aimed at students in training to lead choral programmes in US schools. If I wanted to find online resources I’d probably start with ChoralNet and work out from there.

The weekend's running joke...Yes, I know the British Association of Barbershop Singers has been holding conventions for more than twice that long, but the last weekend in May marked 20 years since the first one I ever went to. Back in 1996, I had a recently-acquired PhD in Music, a job lecturing in higher education, and thought I knew a thing or two about music, and so rocking up to Bournemouth to discover a whole new world of which I had had no previous inkling was a bit of a shock to the system. You’d say I haven’t recovered yet...

(To be fair, I had an inkling or two that barbershop music existed, but the social world it facilitates was a complete revelation.)

The benefits for a choral director of not mouthing the words are something that I have explored on several occasions in this blog over the years. Let's assume for now that we've covered those points well enough to make the point; I'll append a list of those previous posts at the end here* for anyone who's not seen them yet. For today, our question is the perfectly reasonable one of what to do instead.

It was asked by a conductor I worked with recently who found himself at something of a loss about how to use his face once he stopped mouthing the words. My first thought when he said this, I have to say, was admiration and delight that he had taken the advice seriously and acted upon it rather than the more usual response of making cogent arguments about why it is hard to do so. My second thought was that it's a good question, and one that other directors who grapple with this element of technical control might also be interested in, and thus a prime candidate for a blog post.

Most Sundays in the centre of Didcot are possibly not that exciting, but every March for the last 6 years, there has been an event worth travelling to. And this year’s A Cappella Spring Fest saw people come from as far afield as the Isle of Wight and Selby to participate in a day’s celebration of unaccompanied song in the Cornerstone Arts Centre. This was my second year as a tutor, and, like last year, I was leading the Contemporary A Cappella stream.

The format of the day was similar to last year’s, though the team tweaks marginally from year to year in response to feedback and experience. This time the ‘Fest Flash’ song - a song to be flashmobbed out in the shopping centre where Cornerstone is situated over lunchtime - took a much more central role for all participants. As before a core of singers who had opted to work on it during the morning formed the nucleus of the performance, but this time all other participants had enough work on it scheduled in also to join in.

Daniel Kahneman’s ideas about two different kinds of thinking helped me better understand two major areas in which I have long-term interests. I wrote about the first, the acquisition of skill, the other day. Today we get to mull over the thorny issue of unconscious prejudice.

Conversations about inequality and its impact in daily life are often fraught with anxiety and defensiveness because nobody really likes to think of themselves as unfair. Even more the case, nobody likes being accused of it - whether that is benefitting from an unfair advantage bestowed by others (aka privilege) or behaving differently to others along established lines of social hierarchy.

But research shows that many of the endemic structural inequalities we find in material terms are evident in social attitudes even of people who disapprove of them. Identical job applications are read more favourably when associated with a male name than with a female one. Measurements of pupil dilation show a more positive response to pictures of white faces than of black. Unconscious prejudice is clearly rife, but by its very nature is hard to identify and therefore hard to address.

I have been mulling over an interesting blog post shared by a friend recently. The writer, Mari Valverde, has some very interesting things to say about the misogyny implicit in cultural stereotypes of the soprano voice and the practical consequences for how composers and arrangers tend to write for it. I think she is really onto something, and she has made me think about the question of voice-part stereotypes (which I explore in various ways in both my books) in some new ways. I also suspect there are some aspects of the question she is tangling up, so I wanted to spend a post teasing out how my own thoughts are developing in the light of her ideas.

So, the following are factors that feed into the phenomenon of exhaustingly high tessituras in soprano parts:

It’s not hard to get people to agree that it’s good to perform music that an audience will be able to relate to. It’s not always the highest priority - some people might think first about beauty, or about spiritual depth - but a dialogue about musical values will usually find the common ground between these more abstract qualities and the importance of a meaningful experience that connects performers and listeners.

This does not necessarily make it easy, of course, to reach agreement as to what constitutes ‘relatable’ music.

I had two conversations in quick succession recently that brought this into relief for me. In both cases the issue arose through differences of opinion between a choir director and some of their singers, though in rather different genre contexts. It gradually emerged that people were using the concept of ‘relatable’ music as a code for ‘not that stuff you want to do that I don’t like’.