Aesthetics

I’ve recently been reading Matthew Crawford’s book The Case For Working With Your Hands, which is an extended critique of modern education and workplace practices. It’s one of those books where the over-riding impression is, ‘a bit ranty, but he’s a got a point’. Specifically, actually, the framing chapters are where it’s most ranty, and the middle is where he develops his more positive and compelling case about the relationship between intellect and ethics manifest in practical tasks. So if you can get past the opening, it’s worth it.

I’ve been thinking recently about the visual dimension of musical performances, and cultural attitudes about High Art and vulgarity. The immediate spur for these thoughts was the Sweet Adelines convention in Birmingham, but they’re also plugging into things I’ve been thinking about at least since my PhD days.

So, the concern with costume and make-up and general blingification is of course the aspect of barbershop that people affiliated with other genres sometimes take as evidence of triviality. It’s The Music that matters, they say, not all this frippery stuff. Diamante earrings and choreography are tricksy things in this view, at best distracting the audience from the Real Thing that is The Music, and at worst trying to disguise the fact that the music isn’t very good. It’s all style-over-substance, is the criticism.

I’ve been thinking about tempo a lot recently in performances I’ve been listening to, and how we develop perceptions about what is the ‘right’ tempo for a piece. It’s one of those interesting questions because there are no absolute right answers, but as listeners we still have a pretty reliable sense of when a particular choice feels appropriate.

So, to state the obvious: most pieces of music have a range of speeds at which they will work well. The metronome looked like a major advance for composer control-freakery, but even with pieces that have precise speeds specified in the text, there are still musically plausible performances possible at faster and slower speeds.

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.

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.

The process of communication – whether verbal, nonverbal or musical - is typically theorised with a model based on the postal system. The originator (speaker, composer) writes a letter that they deposit into the postbox of the relevant communication system (spoken utterance for conversation, performing ensemble for music) so that it can be delivered to the addressee (listener, audience).

It’s a model that’s useful for thinking about such things as intentionality of communication, and the dangers of transmission error and misreading. But there are whole other aspects of communication it ignores.

Gesture theorist David McNeill develops a concept of communication that is much more participative. (It also integrates verbal and nonverbal communication rather than separating them out into distinct ‘channels’.) He uses the word ‘inhabitance’ to express the way a conversational group works as an ensemble, creating a world of meaning that they cooperate to maintain and develop.

There are comments going back nearly 100 years in the literature on choral music about differences in vocal sound between British and American choirs. Back in 1914, Henry Coward was making the following comments:

There is no doubt that, generally speaking, the English choral singer favours a backward voice-production (p. 39).

Of course one must always be careful to avoid excess of nasality, or more harm than good will result; but I must say that, except in two cases in the United States, where the people have an excess of nasality in speaking, I never yet heard a choir go beyond the limits of good tone in the way of nasal resonance, whereas one often hears excess of throatiness in England (p. 44).

Just doesn't look like a singer, does he?I had an email earlier this week from an erstwhile student who is now doing a masters degree in musicology. He’s contemplating doing a study on (I quote) ‘the poor quality of Beethoven’s choral writing’ as something that seems under-discussed in the literature. He was asking for recommendations on literature that would articulate a consensus of what constitutes good choral writing against which to measure Beethoven’s work. My first instinct was to reply grumpily that I wasn’t going to do his bibliographical work for him, since the identification and evaluation of sources is a pretty major part of a musicology student’s job description. I was always mean like that when I was teaching musicology, and old habits die hard (but I’d probably also suggest having a furtle around on Choralnet.)

My second instinct, though, was to question his premise. (And if he’s still like I remember him, I think he’ll enjoy this more than a list of books.)