Aesthetics

Every so often I like to baffle myself with philosophical questions, such as:

Is it possible to have moral integrity without intellectual integrity?

We’re not going to explore that one today, but I offer it to you in case you enjoy this kind of thing too.

Today’s question is possibly less abstract (in the way it is expressed, at any rate, if not in consequence):

Is it possible to be musical, but lack musicianship, and vice versa?

(Spoiler alert. I think the answer to both may end up as: to an extent, but not entirely.)

When I was learning to drive, my father gave me the advice that you shouldn’t rely on other cars’ indicators to work out what they were going to do, but instead take note of their road position and speed. It’s quite possible for someone to have failed to cancel their indicator, or for them to think they are using it, but the bulb has gone, and if you rely on that misleading information to make decisions, you could cause an accident. So, he taught me, make your judgements about what other drivers are likely to do by seeing how they’re driving, and look at the indicators for confirmation. Likewise, drive in such a way that other drivers can tell what you’re going to do.

Much the same principle, historically, applies to dynamic markings in music. Musical shape (texture, harmony, voicing, contour) tells you a lot about how you should perform the music if you attend to it. Rose Rosengard Subotnik wrote about the proliferation of sforzandi in Beethoven’s music as indicating a ‘loss of semiotic certainty’, reflecting a need to add extra, paramusical information about the ‘how’ through a fear that it would not otherwise be played as it should be. Those 19th- and 20th-century editors who littered older music with extra layers of instructions likewise seem to evince a mistrust of performers’ judgement.

When I was working through the implications of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for choirs back in the Spring, my focus was on the rehearsal environment, and in particular how the director can diagnose and thus meet singers’ needs within it. As it’s the time of year when choirs find themselves performing a lot, I found myself reflecting on the way that performance environments generate and satisfy the various types of need.

At the basic end of the scale, performance nerves are a symptom of safety needs - the combination of unfamiliar circumstances and personal vulnerability of putting yourself on the line in public can leave people feeling psychologically insecure. Many of the strategies I have discussed over the years for managing this form of environment are essentially about helping people feel safer. These include such things as preparation to anticipate the experience and thus diminish the fear of the unknown, building trust within the group so they keep each other safe, and managing adrenaline levels to attain a state of useful readiness rather than loss of control.

So, after reflecting recently on how barbershop has certain emotional registers that feel more central to the genre that others - in particular certain flavours of nostalgia - I started to think about the genre’s relationship with comedy. The vaudeville heritage of the style roots it in light entertainment, and indeed the outsider’s stereotypical view of the genre is that its default setting is to get you laughing.

(As I document in Chapter 4 of my barbershop book, one of the things I discovered when I started writing about the genre was that if you show a room full of musicologists a video clip of men in pink tuxedos singing a ballad, they will snigger, even if the song is a heartfelt paean to love lost. It was fun, mind you, when I started giving papers that opened with this phenomenon and then went on discuss why outsiders felt the need to laugh.)

That barbershop is a genre founded on nostalgia is well-documented. Gage Averill’s monumental history of the tradition in America discusses in detail how the revival of the later 1930s invested the music from before the First World War with a yearning for the days before modernity, carnage and economic meltdown. The Disneyesque image of ‘traditional’ Main Street America was constructed in retrospect, after it had gone.

And of course much of the classic repertoire is built around nostalgia. ‘I wonder what has happened to that old quartet of mine’ conflates loss of youth with loss of music in its purest form, while many of the golden-era songs themselves look back to the world left behind when immigrants came to make a new life in the new world: that tumble-down shack in Athlone may sound picturesque, but it is also a picture of poverty and famine.

Sunday took me up to Scunthorpe to participate in a Festival of Choirs at the rather wonderful Baths Hall. It was an ambitious day’s music-making, with an afternoon of workshops followed by a combined concert involving nine choirs in the evening. It became clear in conversation that it had also attracted a considerable number of singers who weren’t in the concert choirs along to the workshops (and, I would hope, as audience members). The place was thronged, and had a really lively buzz about it. They were already plotting to repeat the experience next year.

I had been asked to do a workshop on barbershop, running it twice with two different groups. It was an interesting challenge - we had just over an hour in which to both introduce the central elements of the style and get a good amount of meaningful music-making done. It would be all too easy to spend the whole time grappling with notes and words without finding space to put the resultant chords and meanings into context. Equally, it was important that the participants spent a lot more time singing than I did talking.

Partway through my recent reflections on choral values, I was suddenly visited with a memory from Magenta’s early days that I had not thought about for ages. I thought it might have slipped into one of those other posts as an example, but the place for it never arose. So, I thought I’d just share it with you in a different post.

Magenta started via a workshop evening which I advertised around the area and at which I gave a taster of the kind of things we’d be doing, then invited the attendees to be the founder members of this new choir. Those who were interested filled in an application form, first half of which was basically contact info, and the second half of which asked four questions:

When I was mulling over Digger McDougal’s four pillars of motivation the other day, I said I’d come back and have another think about values at a later date. Of the four pillars, it strikes me as the one that is most fundamental, but by the same token, the one most likely to be implicit rather than actively reflected upon.

So I got to thinking: how does a choir develop its values? And how do you identify the values your own choir holds?

At a BABS Directors College some years back, Chris Davidson introduced an exercise by which to identify your personal values. Ask three people, not necessarily people you are close to, but with whom you are reasonably well acquainted, to say in three words how they would describe you to someone who didn’t know you. The things that they all say are the values you currently live by.