Aesthetics

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.

The last event we went to before leaving Edinburgh was David Patrick’s Jazz Rite of Spring. It has got me thinking about cross-over aesthetics - why they work, why they don’t - but before I get into that, I’d just like to enthuse for a paragraph or two about the performance itself.

It was performed by an 8-piece jazz ensemble, and much of it was a very faithful transcription of the original score for these reduced forces. But every so often they’d hang out on a riff longer than Stravinsky had specified, and put in a solo. The transitions between the two modes were remarkably convincing. There was one where I felt the holding pattern of the riff and easing back onto the score interrupted a build-and-release passage such that the moment of arrival wasn’t as effective as it might have been, but then again you have to accept that not every person thinks of musical shape in the same way.

The nature of the ensemble mitigated towards a thrilling, edge-of-your-seat performance, even without the improvised passages. If you think about the usual scoring of the Rite, and then imagine the whole lot played by just 8 people...they all had a lot more work to do than your average orchestral player. Nobody got any down-time to speak of; all were on duty throughout.

This post arises from the same circumstances as my recent one about interpreting barbershop ballads. I was listening to some recordings of work-in-progress with the remit of giving advice about the musical choices they were making about a song's delivery. The nitty-gritty stuff helped me crystallise observations about musical delivery and pacing, but I ended up with a pile of left-over thoughts about the relationship between analysis and intuition in developing performances, which is what I am going to be sorting through here.

You see, I had been given that remit because I have certain technical skills. I can identify chords; I can use notation to infer not just what to sing, but how. A lot of the ineffective musical moments you encounter in barbershop world come from a lack of that analysis, an over-reliance on lyric to tell you everything about how a song should go, without working out what the melody, harmony, voicing and embellishment strategies are suggesting.

One of the events that got me thinking on my recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe was the last of a series of lectures about comedy and culture from researchers at Brunel University’s Centre for Comedy Studies and Research. The one we went to was by Leon Hunt, and as well as focusing on the work a particular comedy duo, did some nice analysis of the concept of dark comedy. I do like a spot of theorising, as you know.

The thing that particularly got me thinking was the phrase ‘pushing the envelope’. This is a formulation that gets bandied around a fair bit in comedy, and you also hear it all the time in barbershop’s various debates about style. There are some interesting parallels and differences in the way the phrase gets deployed in these two worlds, and I have been saving the idea up to have a think about. Now I’m home again, it’s time to mull.

There has been some interesting research over the years about barbershop and constructions of masculinity. Richard Mook, in particular, has investigated the discourses in both golden-age (i.e. early 20th-century) and contemporary barbershop ensembles and shown how they configure the harmonic experience of expanded sound in terms of homosocial bonding.

This is possibly why you can get a room full of barbershop judges watching a video of the Gas House Gang's of 'Bright Was the Night', and the men are raving about what an amazing experience it is, musically and emotionally, while the women are saying, 'Yes but it's just chord-worship, isn't it? It's all about them; they're not really interested in the woman they're ostensibly singing about, are they?'. And both, in their way, are right. It is an amazing performance, but it is more about lock and ring as symbol and enactment of the bond between singers than about the content of the lyrics. And the comments posted on youtube about it are telling in this context - the verbal equivalent of punching the air and shouting 'yeah'.

Gratuitous paradise pic: taken on the way to the supermarket...I recently had a rather wonderful trip back to the island of Bermuda, where my mother grew up and where we still have family. It was intended to be a break from my usual obsessions, but you know how it is - sometimes ideas insist on presenting themselves to your brain even when you’ve put yourself off-duty. To my credit, I didn’t have very many thoughts out there.

But I did spend quite a lot of time thinking about accents. I love the Bermudian accent - not especially for any inherent beauty of sound, but simply because it is the sound of childhood holidays and family closeness. If you met my mother you’d probably think she sounded quite English - and more so, the more formal the circumstance - but even 60 years after moving to the UK, she will revert to a Bermudian accent within the family for certain expressive registers.

(Thus, it was weirdly comforting to do things like going to the supermarket in Bermuda: it was just a shop full of strangers like any grocery store, but sonically it felt like being en famille.)