Musical Identity

I wrote recently about how musical contest may be implicated in maintaining an ensemble’s level of performance. The external attribution of level by individuals in whom a degree of authority is invested shapes an ensemble’s self-image and thus makes them more likely to perform at a similar level in future. ‘Maintaining’ here is both a good thing and a bad thing of course. It involves not deteriorating, but it also entails that sense of getting stuck: you continue to work, but somehow nothing seems to improve. (Though of course, the continuing to work is why you don’t get worse either.)

So, the question is: what is going on when an ensembledoes succeed in making a significant change of level? On the face of it, there appear to be three main scenarios:

Have you ever had the experience of someone looking serious and thoughtful, clearly gathering their thoughts, and then coming out with something that feels like a deep and important truth that they have just figured out? And then when you reflect on it, you realise that the idea, while freighted with genuine value (it’s something one could quite reasonably care about), is not original at all but in fact a bit of a cliché?

(I’m including myself here in the category of people who have these thoughts, by the way. I can think of several ideas which really felt like dawning moments when I had them, but a later acquaintance with a wider literature showed that I was just coming out with a standard tenet of an established artistic or political credo.)

This is all rather abstract, so I’ll give an example.

Neil Watkins recently introduced the combined BABS and LABBS Music Categories to the idea of hysteresis. The term originates in engineering (Neil explained it using the example of magnetism), but gets used metaphorically in other contexts to refer to a lagging effect. Something will tend to stay in a constant state unless it’s given an extra push to change it.

Neil evoked the term to describe the way that barbershop judges will tend to score the second song of a contest set at a similar level to the first. The initial level-setting at the start of the first song holds sway over the entire performance unless something striking happens to trigger a re-levelling. And this makes sense inasmuch as most people tend to perform all their repertoire to about the same skill level. Reflecting on my own experience of assessing performances, it’s probably about 15-20% of the time that you find a contrasting piece of music brings out a significantly different profile of skills such as to make you re-evaluate your sense of their level. Either the performance suddenly comes alive or suddenly falls down a hole.

One of the things a barbershop judge in the Music Category does is to adjudicate the extent to which the music competitors sing in contest actually is barbershop music. This is something I’ve been doing for years without holding particularly strong opinions about it. It’s part of the job, so I do it. But as a scholar I have analysed the way the definition of the style has developed over the last 70 years of the Barbershop Harmony Society’s evolution, which has left me with a strong sense of relativism about it all.

But by the nature of things, I meet quite a lot of people who do hold strong opinions, and they often like to harangue me about it. (And I often feel a bit sorry for them, as I tend neither to agree vehemently nor argue back, which must be most unrewarding.) They tend either to think that the style definition is far far too restrictive and that if the genre is to survive it must be liberalised at once, or that the style has been liberalised so far that it the whole genre is at risk of being lost.

There is an interesting and subtle distinction between two statements that, at a functional level mean pretty much the same thing:

I sing soprano
I am a soprano

Both statements will have the same effect when putting together a choir, but they make quite different assumptions about the nature of voice parts: activity versus identity.

There were some interesting discussions over on ChoralNet at the end of January about the use of metaphors in rehearsal, and the response they got from various types of musician. There seemed to be a consensus that metaphors are useful when working with community choirs peopled by amateur singers, but that they might be found objectionable to other performers.

Allen Simon said:

Of course, this is what instrumentalists hate about choir directors: that we use these metaphors instead of simple musical terms like loud and soft.

and was challenged by John Howell, who said:

I've never known instrumentalists to object to the use of metaphors… What instrumentalists WILL object to, with good and sufficient reason, is conducting that looks like interpretive dance and ignores the downbeats that are absolutely essential to counting rests!

Anna Dembska inflected the discussion with the comment:

In my experience, untrained singers (or those I've trained myself) have no trouble with expressive rather than dynamic directions, and it's very effective. The more professional the singers, the more they want dynamics and don't find metaphors useful.

One of the ways for a director to learn about their choir is to go out for eats/drinks with them after a performance and listen intently. Other occasions can offer some insight, but something about the post-performance social brings out a reflective and celebratory spirit in an ensemble. It’s partly because you get a bigger turn-out, of course – though this in turn is a symptom of the bond that is forged in through the culmination of group endeavour.

I’m thinking about this particularly right now as a working majority of the singers in Magenta had a visit to the pub after our last evening gig before Christmas, and I learned something interesting about the choir. One of our members said it was the first single-sex organisation she had been involved with that had no bitching.

When I was about 11, we did an art project at school that involved groups of about six painting a life-size portrait of one member of the group. I initially got the job of doing the face, and I was quite pleased with the likeness I produced. However, during a later session when I was not there (I have no recollection of why I was missing), another member of the group completely painted over all my work. I was quite hurt but, typically, didn’t say anything.

This incident came to mind back in the summer, when I was commissioned to revise Clay Hine’s arrangement of ‘I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm’ for The Great British Barbershop Boys’ Christmas album. I am generally reluctant to jigger with other people’s arrangements, but I was reassured that Clay was okay with me doing so, and it was simply a matter that I happened to be available to help out in the timescale they needed. Still, I didn’t want Clay to end up feeling that I’d painted over the face of his work.