Aesthetics

I keep thinking that, having worked in music all my adult life, I should be in some position to answer this question. But somehow, whilst I seem to be quite good at recognising it when I encounter it, theorising what it is that makes music good remains intractable.

I’m not the first person to puzzle over this of course. There are a number of theories knocking about, all of which have something to offer, but none of which are wholly satisfactory. For example:

Attention span graphThe ‘end effect’ is something that is a mainstay of managing people’s attention quality in both teaching and rehearsal situations. In any one session of an activity, the best quality attention is just after the start (it takes a short while right at the outset to shed the distractions of daily life), and then it declines over time as people get both more tired and more accustomed to the activity. The low point comes somewhere between the 2/3 and 3/4 mark, and then something interesting happens. As we head towards the end, attention perks up again.

Now a couple of observations about this:

Well, of course singing is special and wonderful and a good way to spend your life. That’s not quite what I mean with the question. What I’m wondering is whether singing has particular attributes that makes it inherently different from other forms of musical participation such as playing instruments, or – I suppose – dancing.

Now if you get a bunch of voice specialists together (such as at the Phenomenon of Singing Symposium I recently attended in Canada), you will hear the following kind of assertions:

I’m sure you’ve heard this happen: a choir reaches a dramatic pause after the climax towards the end of their performance, and some of the audience think they’ve finished and start applauding. The choir re-starts to sing the last bit of the song after the pause, and the applause fizzles out, and everyone sits there feeling a little bit awkward and thinking that they didn’t really get the benefit of the intended musical shape.

An interesting debate around the definition of the ‘male voice choir’ arose at Llangollen, and it got people thinking about the relationship between ensemble membership, repertoire and performance style. The question was whether the term should be simply understood as a choir of male voices, or whether it should be understood to include the histories and practices of the major male voice choir traditions.

Is it a coincidence that both the international singing events I’m attending this month are in rather beautiful places off the beaten track?

Last weekend I was in St John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador for the 7th biennial Phenomenon of Singing Symposium, and I could have stayed on for the associated choral festival called Festival 500:Sharing the Voices were it not for my commitments at Llangollen International Eisteddfod in North Wales. Both events attract people from all over the world and present a level of quality that one might not necessarily associate with ‘provincial’ or remote locations.

On Saturday night, Magenta had the pleasure of performing in a concert featuring five early-career opera singers. (Two of them, as it happens, were ex-students of mine from Birmingham Conservatoire, though the invitation to participate arose from a suggestion by the Director of Music at the church that hosted the concert – one of those nice ‘small world’ moments.)

The second half featured some arrangements of spirituals for solo singer and piano by Moses Hogan and Peter Daley, and the comparison of the arranging styles of the two had me thinking about the relationship between arranging and performing styles again.

There is a school of thought that sees equal temperament as a Bad Thing. It is presented as a kind of industrialisation of a natural process, imposing a new regulative order on the west’s approach to music, commodifying our ways of hearing at the same time as mass-production processes were applied to pianos and popular songs.

For example, this is what the Just Intonation Network has to say on the matter: