Aesthetics

Imagine you are a pianist preparing a performance of Beethoven’s Op. 2 no. 3 sonata in C major. You find the parallel triads in the right hand at the start of the finale a bit tricky, so you decide to omit the lower notes and just play a scale. On the other hand, you decide that the II7 chord in bar 4 is a bit bland, and change it to a 3rd inversion flatVI7 instead. When you get to the end, you think that the last two chords, V7-I don’t really make the point about how exciting this movement has been, so you add another V7-I after them, taking the right hand back up into the higher registers of the instrument.

With these changes, you feel that the piece suits your performing style and personality much better. But what does the audience think?

I recently had the pleasure of judging at the pan-European barbershop convention in Veldhoven, Holland. I noticed some interesting things about performance style that led me to reflect on how traditions develop in relationship to their audiences.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the barbershop delivery style that rushes through all the little words in a phrase and draws out all the phrase-end embellishments. (I’ve also written about this from a somewhat different perspective in my first book.) What struck me was the very coherent, or at least consistent, patterns of distortion this approach applied to the music. It reminded me of those dolls that map the density of nerve endings in the human body by enlarging the areas that are more sensitive. So you get a model with huge hands and tongue, and titchy elbows – a very distorted figure, but one that makes sense in its own way.

I was thinking about the process by which a performing tradition produces this kind of consistent distortion, and I think it’s to do with connoisseurship – i.e. a small, specialist audience – and with competition.

We’ve all been present at performances that made us squirm. We describe them as cringingly bad, as awkward, as embarrassing. Mostly we don’t think about them more than we have to – rather we get irritated at how the memory of them sticks around in our heads like a nasty taste or funny smell. But if we do stop to think about them at all, we usually put our response down to lack of skill on the performers’ part.

But we’ve also all been to performances that weren’t very skilled but that were nonetheless not embarrassing. We might be slightly patronising about them – calling them sweet, or heartfelt, or well-meaning – but we don’t resent the experience. Embarrassing performances are not just about lack of skill.

What I think is going on is based in the structure of empathy between performer and audience.

The acappella blog has a regular feature of Dos & Don’ts which offers simple practical advice to performing groups. Occasionally, though, what looks on the surface like straightforward common sense turns out to have an interesting underside that is anything but straightforward. Mike Scalise's post on choosing gender-appropriate material for your group has had me thinking about it for the last two weeks.

At a practical level, the advice to choose music that fits the gender of your group is of course sensible. But two things interest me: the list of successful exceptions presented to nuance the argument, and the question of how we assign gender to songs in the first place.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854)When I was doing my PhD I came across the ideas Schelling developed in his early-19th-century philosophy of art. At the time I found them interesting for the purposes of the obsessions I had at the time (to do with gender and discourse and suchlike), but largely dismissed the ideas as waffly romantic claptrap typical of their day.

Like good ideas tend to do, though, they stuck around in my head over the years that followed until one day I suddenly realised how relevant they were to something I was currently obsessed with.

The word interpretation has a double usage in music. It refers both to meaning – how a musician understands a piece – and to action – the concrete performance decisions they make.

Of course, these two senses of the word keep collapsing into one another. Listeners only have access to the musician’s concept through the concrete sounds they produce, and the musicians themselves likewise develop their internal representation of a piece through the act learning to produce it physically. The abstract quality of meaning has no real means to exist independently of its realisation.

There is something intractably fascinating about musical taste. At one level it’s just a personal thing – the musical equivalent of not being fond of celery – but somehow it also seems more important to us than that.

For instance, Chris Rowbury wrote back in June 2008 about how he doesn’t like a cappella (by which he meant the panoply of a cappella popular styles, rather than unaccompanied singing in general). And the late Steve Hall once told me that he liked pretty much all styles of singing except opera. Now, I happen to like both a cappella and opera, but I’m not going to get distracted into talking about why these particular musics are worth listening to – and indeed participating in – as these conversations usually get diverted into.

Instead, I want to think about how people experience these musical dislikes, and what they mean to them.

This is a question that everyone from hard-core music theorists to folk chatting down the pub have had a go at over the years. You already have your own opinion on the answer. This post isn’t intended to change your mind, but simply to play with a few ideas to see how they resonate with your experience of memorable melodies.

The ideas come from a book called Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath It is a splendidly interesting book that analyses the common characteristics of memorable ideas, and anyone who writes or teaches (or advertises or attends job interviews) would find it useful. I was revisiting their list the other day and suddenly wondered if the characteristics also apply to musical ideas. This post attempts to answer that question.