Musical Identity

Back before Christmas, Tom Carter came over here and engaged in some really productive debate in response to my post on Stanislavski and Schenker. (Joke on me: I had wondered whether it was going to be an excessively obscure subject, but got probably the most response I’ve had for ages. Shows the limits of my predictive power!) This post is a follow-up to a couple of loose ends that got left dangling.

First, Tom asked:

So, could you talk more about the performances you experienced in which the singers identified local objectives without integrating them into a super-objective? Or those in which they had detail but missed on the global?

I was listening recently to a Stuff You Should Know podcast about cults and thought reform, and it made me notice how a number of areas I have been interested in as both scholar and musician interact even more than I had already noticed.

The first is my discussion in my first book of how barbershop positions itself relative to the musical mainstream in analogous ways to the way a sect positions itself relative to established churches. The second is the discussion in my second book of the disciplinary techniques that choirs of all kinds use to ‘convert’ the raw material of people into appropriately thinking and behaving choral singers. The third is my current research interest into the mechanisms of charisma in conductors and performers – which has led me right back to the sociology of Max Weber I was dealing with in the first.

The Great British Barbershop Boys perform their mammoth 'history of song' in the foyer

Last Sunday saw the British Association of Barbershop Singers coming to my old home patch of Birmingham Conservatoire for their annual Quartet Prelims. This is the event at which quartets compete to qualify for the Convention in May, and at which the Youth Quartet and Senior Quartet contests are held. It has become an increasingly well-supported event in the barbershop calendar, both by quartets and by supporters.

This year they had over 50 entrants, and as a result chose to split the quartets between the venue’s two concert halls into parallel competitions. All the Senior quartets appeared in the Adrian Boult Hall, all the Youth quartets in the Recital Hall, and the quartets in the main contest were split between the two.

Jessica Duchen has been berating her fellow critics for getting into a swivet about concert dress. Her basic stance is: calm down and listen to the music, as that’s what matters. Which is a nice way of turning the complainers’ arguments back on them. If they object to female performers dressing in trendy and attractive clothing because classical music is supposed to be timeless and above the concerns of the flesh, then they should put their attention onto the performance instead of wittering on about mundane things like clothes.

A blog post from last week at On An Overgrown Path conceptualises classical music as a venn diagram with four elements: enlightenment, entertainment, education and engagement. The illustration plots a variety of figures from classical music at different places in this diagram, giving a neatly concise idea of their primary contributions to the genre.

Interestingly, Andre Previn is the only face to appear in the intersection of all four circles, which presents him as a more rounded musician than Beethoven. (Arguably, from this analytical perspective, he is – but you can just imagine the amused and self-deprecating murmur he would emit if accused of this.)

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent years about confidence, and its relationship with competence. The two can so often seem to go together…but not so reliably that you can generalise about the correlation. Indeed, it is when the two seem mismatched that it feels dysfunctional. A novice who feels tentative seems as rational in their relationship with praxis as a self-possessed virtuoso. But a good performer wracked with self-doubt is a cause for concern, while an ebullient mediocrity just seems deluded.

Harrogate International Centre: viewed from aboveLast weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers return to their favourite venue for their annual convention. It was a week earlier than its usual spot in the calendar this year, so it overlapped with the Sweet Adelines International Convention in Houston, where LABBS 2005 and 2009 champions Finesse were making history as the first British quartet to reach an international top-10 placing.

In my posts earlier this year responding to my correspondent interested in “Music for All” I was very restrained in not getting side-tracked onto a question about repertoire and choral ideology that he didn’t ask about directly, but chimed with various questions that used to float about when I was working at Birmingham Conservatoire. This is about how the vexed question of ‘elitism’ versus ‘inclusion’ relates to repertoire.

The stereotypical critique of so-called high-art traditions is that they are elitist, and in a number of different ways. The music was produced for the ruling classes to enjoy; to a significant extent, participation is still limited to those with the means for private education (private music lessons if not a fee-paying school); its beauty and meaning is not necessarily accessible to people who haven’t been introduced to it while young; its culturally privileged position has unreasonably maligned other (popular, commercial, participative, ethnically diverse) forms of music and treated them as less valid.