Musical Identity

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.

Cottontown flying kites to finish their show setLast weekend saw British barbershoppers descend in droves on Llandudno for the 2011 BABS convention. This one was a special one for me in several ways. First, because I had the honour of hearing no fewer than eight of my arrangements receive their first performances. Five were in the chorus contest (sung by Telfordaires, Tuxedo Junction and the Cottontown Chorus), one in the quartet finals (sung by the Serious Chord Squad), and two in the Sunday afternoon show. Current LABBS gold medallists Amersham A Cappella and retiring BABS champs, the Great Western Chorus, also aired arrangements of mine in the Saturday night show.

Symphony Hall's central thoroughfare, thronged with chorus singersThe weekend saw Sweet Adelines Region 31 come to Birmingham for their annual convention. Symphony Hall is an expensive venue for this kind of event, but it does provide a wonderful environment. It’s not just that the auditorium is designed so well for acoustic performance (the judges remarked they’d never been at a contest venue of this size before without people needing amplification), but the social areas are so nicely integrated into the city. Of course I could be biased about my home patch, but I’d like to think I’m grateful for good venues wherever they can be found!

Both quartet and chorus contests were of an impressive quality. Both had clear winners out in front of the pack (Finesse and Forth Valley Chorus respectively), but 2nd-5th places were hotly contested in both competitions, giving a real excitement to the results. And in the lower-placed ensembles, all the performances were of creditable quality – all managed to make entertaining contributions to the weekend.

Well, yes, directors don’t get a choice about this – we’re either male or female, and even if you go for re-assignment, you’re still one or the other. It’s like whether or not to play repeats in Mozart sonatas – not something you can fudge. You do get a choice about how much you make a feature or downplay your gender identity in your interactions with your choir, but even here the choice isn’t only in your own hands. As some of our past discussions about conducting and gender showed, even those conductors who wish to ‘leave their gender at the door’ may still be ‘read’ in gendered terms by their singers.

Today’s subject isn’t the general question of gender and directing, however, but the specific question of the dynamics between a director and a single-sex choral group.

One of the conversations I had several times during my recent visits to the London City Singers was about the challenge of dealing with a high turnover of membership. This is something that all choirs face to some extent, but LCS are particularly affected by it because of the demographic of their membership: young professionals working in an international industry.

So, having a significant change of membership from one year to the next presents difficulties with maintaining both skills and repertoire.