Musical Identity

Friday night's panel: Brian Kay, Amy Bebbington, Neil Ferris, Jackie Roxborough, Helen Smith, Rachel Greaves, Pamela Cook and John Rutter
The last weekend in August has become the traditional weekend for the Association of British Choral Directors to hold their annual convention. This year’s was on my home patch in Birmingham, and was celebrating the organisation’s 25th anniversary.

The plenary sessions on Friday evening and Saturday morning accordingly took an overview of British choral life – the first looking at trends from the last 25 years (and into the future), the second considering the ‘state of the choral nation’. In fact, the two debates became quite interrelated, with themes from the Friday evening re-emerging within the ostensibly different subjects under review on the Saturday morning. As you might imagine, we had both utopic and dystopic visions of British choral life: depending on whom you ask, we are either in better or worse shape than we have been for years!

I spent Sunday with my friends in Bristol Fashion. I think this must have been my 5th visit in a bit over two years, and they always organise glorious weather. Even though it was drizzling when I arrived this time, once the singing started, the clouds parted. (I am sure this is nothing to either with the mild climate in the south-west of England or the fact that they always invite me in the months of May-September!)

A lot of our work this time focused less on skills per se than the psychology of confidence. There were certainly skills targeted for development (clear and positive articulation of word sounds for one), but what emerged as more central to the chorus’s quality of performance was their decision to use skills already acquired. One of the things about a group that has developed a long way in a short time is that it is very easy to default back to a lower level of performance because it is in fact not very long ago that that was the norm. They have the skills to perform with real beauty and believability to when they remember to deploy them, but they find it too easy to slip back into a more ordinary state of competence that not so long ago would have pleased them, but is no longer in the league they could be.

Last week I heard from a friend about an experience that was bothering her 17-year-old son. He’s currently studying for A levels, and planning to apply for a place on a BMus course. His career aspirations seem quite clearly thought-through (way more than mine were at that age!), with a desire to perform professionally backed up by Plans B and C of teaching music and/or doing something else to pay the bills while moonlighting on the semi-pro circuit.

The first thing to note is that Plan A will almost certainly involve either or both of Plans B and C en route. Very few people support themselves throughout their career entirely from performing. It’s not just when you’re in the early stages needing to supplement income either. You also see people shifting away from full-time performance later on, in order to see their kids before they grow up, or for the chance to spend a bit of time enjoying the house they’ve been paying the mortgage on.

Anyway, that’s the background; the problem is this:

Years ago I was watching one of the piano classes at the Colchester Festival, in which I had a piano student performing. One of the other entrants played the first of Debussy’s Arabesques. He was accurate, but ploddy, showing little of the sense of sweep and flow the music calls for. My first thought was: ‘What on earth is his teacher doing letting him loose on this?’ My second thought, following hard on the heels of this was: ‘I know exactly why his teacher wanted him to learn this.’

This experience highlighted the contradictory nature of two standard imperatives in the development of musical performers. On the one hand, people are encouraged to perform music that ‘suits’ them; on the other, people are encouraged to engage with a variety of styles and expressive worlds in order to develop breadth and flexibility of communication.

The Spooky Men's Chorale in performance at the end of the workshop
I spent last Saturday morning at a workshop by the Spooky Men’s Chorale entitled ‘Sing Like a Bloke’. It was hosted by Sounds Allowed, and had been preceded the night before by a concert (which I’d missed through trying to book tickets after it had already sold out). Birmingham was the first stop in a tour of the UK, which continues right through into September.

As it turned out, the gender implications of the workshop’s title didn’t play a major part. It was more a case of learning to sing in the style that this particular set of people, who happen to be blokes, do. This style draws heavily on the vocal production of the Georgian choral tradition; indeed apparently they referred to themselves as ‘post-Georgian’ in the concert, which opened up all kinds of interesting conversations about being post-a place. I think I may take to being post-English on the same principle.

On Sunday I reported on how the participants in the June singing practice experiment wrote about their experience of maintaining the habit of five minutes singing practice a day.

Feedback on the effects of the practice regime

By definition there’s less of this, since only those who did much practice were able to feed back on it.

The headline result is that, yes, five minutes a day does seem to make a difference. And the difference is discernible after a week. One respondent who fell by the wayside towards the end of week 2 reported that she was ‘starting to think it was all very helpful’ at the end of the first week. Another noted at the 1-week mark that she:

Noticed at rehearsal that I'd retained odds and ends we worked on the week before (correcting notes, where to breathe etc) because I'd practised it several times. I felt quite virtuous!

So, here are the outcomes from the reports sent in by participants in June’s singing practice experiment. There are a few notable (and gratifying!) overlaps with my predictions, but also some interesting things I wouldn’t have guessed. Which is why it is worth asking people about their experience of course - so as not to fall down the hole between theory and real life!

The first striking thing was actually how few people did send in reports. I don’t think this was because nobody knew about it. For one thing my website stats reassure me that people are at least visiting the site in some numbers, and 154 of those visits were straight to one or other of the two posts about the experiment. For another, I had quite a few people tell me that they were forwarding the links to other people they sang with. This latter point also suggests that at least some people thought the idea worth engaging with.

I’ve been thinking recently about the visual dimension of musical performances, and cultural attitudes about High Art and vulgarity. The immediate spur for these thoughts was the Sweet Adelines convention in Birmingham, but they’re also plugging into things I’ve been thinking about at least since my PhD days.

So, the concern with costume and make-up and general blingification is of course the aspect of barbershop that people affiliated with other genres sometimes take as evidence of triviality. It’s The Music that matters, they say, not all this frippery stuff. Diamante earrings and choreography are tricksy things in this view, at best distracting the audience from the Real Thing that is The Music, and at worst trying to disguise the fact that the music isn’t very good. It’s all style-over-substance, is the criticism.