Musical Identity

Posting an article about goal-setting this week wasn’t purely a decision related to the New Year. I was also thinking about a session I was due to facilitate with the Music Team of Cleeve Harmony on Thursday. The chorus has just celebrated its 3rd birthday (indeed, they celebrated this week with a very well-attended Open Night), and are shifting from the new-chorus-doing-everything-as-novices phase into the now-we’re-established-and-have-a-sense-of-group-identity-how-do-we-want-to-develop? phase. Whilst they still feel they have plenty to learn, they have some solid experience and successes under their belts on which to build.

(I’m not sure that you ever really stop feeling that there’s more to learn, but being able to look back and measure the distance you’ve travelled since you knew even less does build a corporate sense of stability. And whatever the previous experience people come in with, the ensemble needs to do that journey together to generate that shared history.)

Quick plug for this publication from members of CReIMHaving unloaded my initial impressions of the experience of attending a conference in my second language for the first time, I also wanted to have a brief mull over some of the things I found myself taking notes about from other people’s papers. Feminist musicology is a relatively recent addition to the landscape of francophone musicology, I gather, and is still getting itself established.

(Whereas in anglophone musicology, it was fully respectable by the mid-1990s. This means that when you say anything particularly feminist these days, some helpful soul can breezily dismiss your point with the assertion that we did all this 20 years ago so there can really be nothing left to complain about. I am thinking of a particular exchange from a couple of months ago when I write that, but in a fit of discretion I am not going to say who it was between. Just because I am angry with someone doesn’t mean I have to be gratuitously rude about them online.)

This was the view from my bedroom window...I’m starting writing this post on the train along the Rhine valley from Oberwesel to Frankfurt at dawn. After several days of glorious autumnal sunshine, the clouds are hanging down over the hilltops. In both guises, you can see why the early Romantics were so willing to mythologise this area.

I was about to write that this is almost incidental to the joy and richness the last few days have seen at BinG! Harmony College, but then I thought - maybe the setting helps more than you think. I suddenly remembered how I found myself at culturally rich events in green hilly landscapes in different countries in successive weeks of summer 2009 and wondering to what extent a landscape facilitates artistic growth.

Anyhow, the view is such that I am pretty sure I won’t get this post finished in this one trip, but I wanted to start getting the ideas down while the impressions are fresh.

I spent Saturday working with Brunel Harmony on the contest package they are preparing for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers Convention in October. They had got to the point where things were generally in place - music and choreography largely embedded, and the overall concept and intentions clear - so what it needed next was a combination of polishing of execution and bringing out the details.

What we found ourselves doing to achieve this, though, was integrating technical control of the various performance elements with a sense of characterisation and narrative. It was a classic example of how you can start with any one item of technique, and find that as you explore it, it turns out to be connected with all kinds of other areas, both technical and expressive.

Feeling the love: bestowing a hug and a box of Cadbury's Heros on our guest

Introduction

The weekend of 17-19 July was the culmination of my biggest project for 2015: planning and then leading a training weekend for the chorus directors of the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. I didn’t do it all by myself - I had the support of the organisation’s fabulous events team, who managed all the logistics and communications with delegates, and of a glorious faculty drawn from LABBS’s most skilled and successful directors to help devise and deliver the curriculum. But, still, the project was my baby, and took up a lot of time and attention in the 6 months leading up to it.

Apologies if I sound smug at any point when talking about it. It is merely that I am immensely pleased by how it all went. The director education programme doesn’t get the budget for a big event every year, so it mattered to me that we made the most of it.

This is a spin-off from my current project of adapting ideas from Doug Lemov’s taxonomy of effective classroom methods to the rehearsal room. As I wrote my introductory post on the project, I had the following tangential thoughts on a subject that is a mainstay of choral discourse.

It is a widely-held truism that ‘leaners’ are a Bad Thing for a choir. Their failings may be treated as moral deficits: that they are lazy in letting other people do their learning for them. Or they may be seen as lacking in ‘talent’, and thus a drag on the choir’s progress. The literature tends to treat them quite impatiently, with the basic imperative that they just need to get a grip and learn to think for themselves. The very label ‘leaner’ places the blame for their condition squarely on their own shoulders.

But it occurred to me when writing about Lemov’s techniques that there are two kinds of leaning going on in choir, and they need quite different solutions.

Hey Big Spender!

I spent Saturday afternoon in London doing a bespoke workshop with the Barberfellas, an a cappella ensemble who all also sing with the Pink Singers choir. As their name implies, they specialise in close-harmony music, some of which is barbershop in the purists’ sense (you don’t get much more classic than arrangements by Ed Waesche), and some more stylistically varied, including some material arranged in-house.

My remit for the afternoon fell into two main areas: first a focus on building the classic barbershop ‘ring’ in the sound, and second some work on engaging the audience, both through stagecraft and generating musical expression and variety in performance.

My previous two posts on this theme considered the scenario of a young, skilled musician taking on the role of director for the first time with an established choir, and, respectively, the challenges they are likely to face, and the advantages they are likely to wield. This last post in the series looks a bit wider to the dangers the category ‘young and talented’ presents to those it is applied to in general, as well as how this plays out the specific scenario of the new director.

Talent, as I have discussed before, is a mythological category. Our culture largely regards it as an inborn, innate quality, an assumption for which the literature on expertise can find no basis. Depth of skill emerges from the quantity and quality of practise someone undertakes; capacity follows rather than precedes the activity.

But, because the mythology of talent is so ubiquitous, people still use it to describe the facts of aptitude that they observe. Henry Kingsbury describes how it thus becomes a socially-negotiated label: those with authority bestow it upon junior members of that social world, giving them permission to consider themselves as particularly and specially endowed. This label can then prove a useful motivator for continued engagement: a child who is led to believe they have a special capacity for something is arguably less likely to give it up.