Aesthetics

The term 'musical' is one that puzzles me greatly. You might think that someone in my line of work would know what it means, but in fact I see it being used in multiple different ways. Some of these I find at least moderately problematic, especially when they get muddled up with other uses.

(Indeed, when I was involved in writing course documentation for degrees in performance and composition, we avoided the word 'musicality' in favour of 'musicianship' for precisely this reason. There's enough anxiety around assessment criteria without loading the terms.)

The term gets used in (at least) three different ways.

I'm writing this post while in the middle of arranging a song destined to be part of a barbershop contest package. So I am thinking very specifically about the craft of producing contest-grade barbershop, though I suspect I may find myself ranging more widely by the time I'm done. It is very much writing-to-figure-out-exactly-what-this-thought-I-am-trying-to-have mode, so I may ramble. You have been warned.

(Of course, if the thought ends up being especially trite, I have the option of never posting it. Though I might enjoy the irony of engaging in deep thought to come up with a truism. That in itself might say something about the subject.)

So, 'hack' is the phrase used in stand-up comedy for material on themes that are over-used. It is an insult that includes both lack of creativity (you couldn't think of anything original to say) and laziness (you came up with the most obvious joke, then stopped working). The term is, I imagine, derived from 'hackneyed' in the more general sense, as tired and clichéd, but there is a specificity to its usage in comedy that I find interesting.

There’s been a certain amount of heat coming from under collars in the musical world over the last few days over reports of research that showed that judges in piano competitions appear to be using visual information more than aural in picking winners.

Or, to be more precise, people asked to second-guess judges in piano competitions got the same answers much more reliably by watching silent videos than by either audio alone or video+audio clips. Which isn’t precisely the same thing, but the research sounds like it is robustly enough constructed that one can reasonably draw that conclusion.

Now, the heat has come in the rather predictable form of fulminations about:

• Young performers getting promoted on glamour rather than ability
• How shallow and dumbed down everything is getting with all this focus on visual things instead of the Music Itself
• How nobody ever listens properly any more

Which is interesting in all kinds of ways, not least that all these points, except possibly the last one, are at best tangential if not completely irrelevant to the research. But they do help reveal why the research is proving so disturbing.

Do you ever dream about music theory?

I have a feeling people are going to give me those looks about this post. Never mind, I'm used to it... Anyway, it's my blog and I can post about the random stuff that happens in my head - that's part of the deal. At least this is on topic in its way.

The dreams we remember are the ones that capture our imaginations enough on waking for us to rehearse them over in our minds to fix the memories. Mostly when I wake, I find I do not understand in the slightest what has been going on in my head, and those dreams disappear back into the gloop they arose from. But some have enough internal logic to hold onto, and I find them entertaining, sometimes even illuminating.

A recent negotiation about a bespoke arrangement got me thinking about what we mean when we talk about a 'big' piece of music. I'm not going to tell you what the song was, as it is intended for a grand unveiling in due course, but if I tell you the original song was about 8 1/2 minutes long, you'll get the idea that it's a substantial piece. I had cut it down to under 5 minutes in arranging it, mostly by cutting out large-scale repetition such as multiple verses, but had retained the overall trajectory and order of sections.

The negotiation was about whether further cuts were possible in order to make the song quicker to learn. The chorus had identified several places where they felt that cuts were possible in terms of key and phrase structure and were asking my opinion on their viability.

This is a difficult post to write, and I don't know how it is going to turn out. But it has been brewing for some months as the cherished institutions of specialist music education in the UK are engulfed in successive waves of scandal. I am, personally, among the numbers of neither the abused nor the abusers, but have friends and colleagues in both camps, and have had much to come to terms with recently.

Part of the shock of the whole process has been asking: why didn't we know this before? And the conversations between those who lived through the 1980s in these schools and colleges have shown that, well, we did know, kind of, but we didn't know how to articulate what we knew. It was a different version of what Betty Friedan called The Problem with No Name.

Believability is a widely-valued attribute in the performance of song. We value a sense of honesty, of authenticity; we like to experience the performance as a genuine act of communication, of music speaking 'from the heart, to the heart'. The point of bringing music 'to life' in performance is not just to go through the motions, but to generate meaning and interpersonal connection.

One of the standard ways to coach people in how to create this experience is to ask the performer(s) themselves to believe in what they're singing. 'You've got to believe it yourself if you want your audience to believe it,' is one phrase of which I have been on the receiving end. This is fine as a starting point, but it carries some problems with it:

Further to my post last month exploring the way musical genres carry with them characteristic patterns of feeling, I came across a rather wonderful project to chart emotions that have words in other languages but not in English (hat tip to Sarah Foster for the link).

A century ago, Saussure gave us the idea that it's not just the signifier (the perceptible signal) that is generated within the system of a particular language, but also the signified (the mental image the signal evokes). There are things that you can say in one language that you can't say in another. As the Italians put it: traduttore, traditore.