Performing

Alan Davis wrote a blog post back in 2008 about programming, and raised the question about the order of pieces in a mixed programme. His first instinct was to arrange the pieces, which ranged from the 17th to the 20th centuries, in chronological order, but he was also wondering if there were other ways to sequence them that would give a different perspective on them.

It's a more interesting question that it appears on first glance, and it has stayed with me for some time. My initial response was that chronological would raise no eyebrows – since everyone seems to use chronological order – but that it was commensurately the least interesting approach. But two rather more interesting thoughts lurked behind this knee-jerk response, and I’d like to tease them out.

Last Sunday, the best of British barbershop conspired to present a show at the London Palladium as the climax to the national ‘barbershop awareness week’. I had a couple of personal highpoints, with NoteOrious and Eu4ia both singing my arrangements – the latter having commissioned theirs specifically for this show (Christine Aguilera's 'Candyman').

It was a long show – a good three hours – but it did a very good job of sustaining interest. Given that all the acts were from basically the same kind of a cappella world, this is a testament to some very effective programming – it could have become very samey, but didn’t. I’ve been finding it useful to analyse what went in to making the structure so effective.

I’m sure you’ve heard this happen: a choir reaches a dramatic pause after the climax towards the end of their performance, and some of the audience think they’ve finished and start applauding. The choir re-starts to sing the last bit of the song after the pause, and the applause fizzles out, and everyone sits there feeling a little bit awkward and thinking that they didn’t really get the benefit of the intended musical shape.

On Saturday night, Magenta had the pleasure of performing in a concert featuring five early-career opera singers. (Two of them, as it happens, were ex-students of mine from Birmingham Conservatoire, though the invitation to participate arose from a suggestion by the Director of Music at the church that hosted the concert – one of those nice ‘small world’ moments.)

The second half featured some arrangements of spirituals for solo singer and piano by Moses Hogan and Peter Daley, and the comparison of the arranging styles of the two had me thinking about the relationship between arranging and performing styles again.

I spent last weekend at the British Association of Barbershop Singers annual Convention, which this year was held in Llandudno. It was a rich and stimulating weekend with much both to learn from and to warm the heart – both musically and socially. And the setting was gorgeous – it would be easy to have a very pleasant weekend there even without a couple of thousand of your friends to sing with!

I came out of the quartet semi-finals on Friday night with some interesting observations about the relationship between stage presence and vocal resonance.

Jonathan Rathbone working with Serenata
One of the things I discovered when sorting through my notes from the Sing A Cappella day at the end of March was a whole collection of comments by Jonathan Rathbone on the subject of breath-points. It seemed appropriate to bring them all together into a themed post, since, while each is interesting in its own right, when piled up together they give a more developed sense of his musical perspective.

Well, we don’t call it authentic performance any more; now it’s merely historically-informed. But still, classical music still works under a strong ethic to perform music in a way consistent with its original conception. We use concepts such as style and composer’s intentions as means to constrain the expressive and interpretative possibilities a piece can yield.

I recently had the pleasure of judging at the pan-European barbershop convention in Veldhoven, Holland. I noticed some interesting things about performance style that led me to reflect on how traditions develop in relationship to their audiences.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the barbershop delivery style that rushes through all the little words in a phrase and draws out all the phrase-end embellishments. (I’ve also written about this from a somewhat different perspective in my first book.) What struck me was the very coherent, or at least consistent, patterns of distortion this approach applied to the music. It reminded me of those dolls that map the density of nerve endings in the human body by enlarging the areas that are more sensitive. So you get a model with huge hands and tongue, and titchy elbows – a very distorted figure, but one that makes sense in its own way.

I was thinking about the process by which a performing tradition produces this kind of consistent distortion, and I think it’s to do with connoisseurship – i.e. a small, specialist audience – and with competition.