Musical Identity

There is an approach to developing a performance that substantially borrows the gestures, pacing, emotional shape and styling of another musician's performance of the same piece. This approach is often referred to dismissively as 'copycat' performances, or 'other people's music'. The critics' view is that people should develop their own interpretations, make the music their own, and that copycat performances are derivative and thus artistically empty.

Now, I am not going to argue against these critics. I have also been brought up in artistic traditions that value an individual's own take on a piece, that regards the point of performance as to give a view of some music that nobody else could give. But still, the people doing this aren't going out of their way to generate empty, clichéd performances. They experience them as real, as heartfelt. So I thought it worth stopping to investigate in a bit more depth what's going on here.

This is a difficult post to write, and I don't know how it is going to turn out. But it has been brewing for some months as the cherished institutions of specialist music education in the UK are engulfed in successive waves of scandal. I am, personally, among the numbers of neither the abused nor the abusers, but have friends and colleagues in both camps, and have had much to come to terms with recently.

Part of the shock of the whole process has been asking: why didn't we know this before? And the conversations between those who lived through the 1980s in these schools and colleges have shown that, well, we did know, kind of, but we didn't know how to articulate what we knew. It was a different version of what Betty Friedan called The Problem with No Name.

As I have mentioned before, I don't do very much one-to-one work, but every so often I'll do a series of half a dozen sessions with someone who approaches me for help. Six sessions is enough to make a difference, in my experience, and I tend to reckon that if someone wants to settle in for the long haul, I'd refer them on to someone whose primary focus is one-to-one work.

Now, the people I work with in this way have had a remarkably similar profile: retired ladies who sing in choirs recreationally, and are being bothered by hoarseness during the course of a rehearsal. There is no great mystery behind this consistency of profile, mind you, since all referrals have come by word of mouth along the lines of, 'Yes I had that problem, I'll tell you who helped me...'

Believability is a widely-valued attribute in the performance of song. We value a sense of honesty, of authenticity; we like to experience the performance as a genuine act of communication, of music speaking 'from the heart, to the heart'. The point of bringing music 'to life' in performance is not just to go through the motions, but to generate meaning and interpersonal connection.

One of the standard ways to coach people in how to create this experience is to ask the performer(s) themselves to believe in what they're singing. 'You've got to believe it yourself if you want your audience to believe it,' is one phrase of which I have been on the receiving end. This is fine as a starting point, but it carries some problems with it:

To-do list for discussionOn the recent abcd Midlands Conductors' Day, our final activity was a trouble-shooting session. We compiled a list of the top two or three things that each director felt would most help their choir to get sorted out, and then spent some time on each discussing different approaches to them. This kind of session works on the principle that it's much easier to solve other people's problems than your own, and even with your own, just talking them through with people who understand but aren't involved can open up all kinds of new ideas.

One item on our list gave a wonderful demonstration of how so many dimensions of leading a choir are related to one another. We can divide the craft up into all kinds of areas for convenience of training and development - musical, technical, leadership, organisational - but when dealing with the practical questions of how to get things done, we'll find ourselves moving through all these areas in turn.

My recent post about Technologies of the Self got me thinking about Robert Dilts' hierarchical model of 'neurological levels'. I mentioned this in passing in my post on neurolinguistic programming back in the autumn as something I've been thinking about blogging about for ages. Well, the time has come, because I think it offers quite a useful way to think about these 'technologies' from a practical perspective, rather than the theoretical context Foucault was working in.

First what this is. The Dilts pyramid is a model of personal change. It consists of a series of levels, each of which is constituted from, while also constraining, the one below. Hence, your capabilities define which behaviours you are able to engage in, but are also made up from your behaviours to date. And you only gain new capabilities by engaging in new behaviours.

Heinrich NeuhausI was thinking after a recent bout of piano practice about the way Heinrich Neuhaus apparently framed his teaching. There are three areas of knowledge you need, he contended: you need to know the music, you need to know the instrument, and you need to know yourself. I don't know the flavour of this usage of 'to know' in Russian, but it seems, when rendered into English, to imply both savoir and connaitre in French. Which is interesting in itself, but not what I was intending to write about.

What I find interesting about this concept of learning pianism is how different it is from the technique-focused approach typified by Jozsef Gat. Gat goes into endless detail about the mechanics of fingers and arms, joints and levers, whereas Neuhaus just leaves these as an empty gap in the middle, between that which is played and that which plays. It feels akin to the school of thought in conducting that says (I paraphrase), 'Bugger stick technique, you need to study the work and study the orchestra'.

That's a very poncy-sounding title isn't it? It's a classic example of starting off with a simple, practical question, and discovering that miscellaneous bits of cultural theory lodged in my brain from past research projects are actually quite helpful in thinking through the answer. The title only comes later when it's time to write it up...

So, the question that started this all off is: how can we, as performers, remember to do all the stuff in performance that we have prepared in rehearsal? There are all kinds of things that an ensemble will have considered in their performance preparation, and that the members 'know' to do, but you find yourself half-way through a song and realise that you're not doing something you should be, or are doing something you shouldn't (through ignorance, through weakness, through your own deliberate fault...).