Musical Identity

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.

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.