Musical Identity

Back in the early days of this blog I wrote about how some songs are gendered, either implicitly or implicitly. Sometimes it’s just a surface effect of pronouns, and you can readily adapt the song to an ensemble of the other gender either my changing a few words or by abandoning the assumption of heteronormativity. Other times, the persona’s gender is built more deeply into the song’s lyric and/or musical material and is less susceptible to switching.

At the European Barbershop Convention I found myself articulating a couple of thumbprints of implicit gender more consciously than I had before. One was the way some songs lie on the patriarchy-compensated slope: they build giving away power as a token of commitment, the lyric goes down on one knee, so to speak. When sung by a male persona, this mitigates a cultural context of inequality; when sung by a female persona, it exacerbates it. ‘All I possess I surrender,’ is an expression of superlative sacrifice from a man, but for a woman it merely indicates a willingness to return to the oppressive norms of yesteryear when that’s what happened by law when you got married.

Having shared some of the background to The Vocal Freedom Project in a previous post, I thought it might be helpful to explore in a little more depth what I mean by the phrase ‘vocal freedom’ in this context. It is one of the ideas that is both multidimensional and holistic – you can think about it from a number of different angles, but in practice they all work together in a single, unified experience.

The Physical Dimension is the most obvious, in that it is the one we are most likely to directly perceive in ourselves and in others, both visually and aurally. We find physical freedom by shedding extraneous muscular tension – that is, muscular engagement that isn’t doing anything productive. Tongue, jaw, neck, shoulders, glutes are all areas we tense up when under stress then never quite loosen off again when the immediate stressor goes away. Our bodies get locked up, our breath becomes shallow, and we hear this in our voices as strain and loss of resonance. Vocal Freedom Project workshops start with the body as the dimension which is both most accessible and usually the most urgent to address.

Some of the voicings I have been puzzling overOne of the orthodoxies of my musical upbringing and subsequent teaching life is that the performer should respect the composer’s intentions. In practical terms this entails, at the basic level, playing the music presented in the score accurately – i.e. all the pitches written, in the durational relationships represented by the notation.

This basic level is never really challenged, though it is inflected as you move educationally beyond a literalist approach to the score to understanding it as a document emerging from a historical and cultural context. ‘Style’ is the shorthand term used to embrace the range of types of information used as filters through which to interpret the written score: changing notational conventions, changes in the construction and thus sound of instruments, changing aesthetic ideals and their impact on tone production, articulation, timing, and embellishment.

Today tickets have gone on sale for the first of what will probably become a series of workshops called the Vocal Freedom Project. We’ve got quite detailed info about the VFP’s rationale and aims over on the project page, but I thought it might also be useful to give a little background into its genesis.

The project was born in a conversation back in early December with my friend Myra, who sang with me in Magenta for ten years. I can’t remember exactly how she phrased her expression of her need to sing, but she crystallized a lot of the observations I had been making over the months since live singing had restarted in the UK about what the lockdown experience had done to people’s voices.

Warm-up pic snapped at a particularly invigorating moment

Last Thursday evening saw me coaching Strictly A Cappella, having spent the afternoon coaching Frisson quartet. Both ensembles are preparing for a concert coming up next week – and if you think the timing of the coaching is surprisingly close to the performance, you’d be right. Our plan had been to work together the week before, but Covid had other ideas.

Still, when you are working that close to a performance you get a very distinctive kind of energy and impetus to the experience. With both groups we romped through far more music than you would when digging deep at an earlier stage of preparation, with all attention focused on how to enhance the impact of music that is already essentially well under control.

I’ve recently finished reading The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk. Its primary focus is the treatment of trauma, a specialised pursuit that has no direct relevance to my personal or professional lives. But in the process of explaining the difficulties experienced by people who have been damaged by shock, tragedy or abuse, he gives many and varied insights into how our internal landscapes - our memories, our sense of self - work.

One chapter particularly resonated with an experience of musicianship I have observed in both others and myself and called out for some reflection. Chapter 17 deals with a form of treatment called Internal Family Systems therapy, and is predicated on the idea that the self isn’t a single, unitary entity, but rather a mosaic of different parts.

In my previous post about the differences in arranging for male and female voicings, I reflected on how little opportunity you get for genuinely tight voicings for ensembles working in lower registers. One of the things that brought this into focus for me recently was a conversation about a specific arrangement written in the women’s key, explaining why I didn’t feel it would work transposed down for a men’s group. The closely-voiced chords that bring spritz and joy in the higher register would become cloudy and unclear lower down.

Today’s subject has also provided a reason to decline to transpose particular arrangements down for men, though I’ve tended to remain somewhat veiled in my explanations for the decision. ‘It wouldn’t work well in the lower key’ is a kinder thing to say than, ‘I don’t think men will be able to sing that’.

So, what is it that I doubt men’s capacities to perform effectively? And why do I harbour that doubt?

My previous post about the experience of sorting through a packet of music from a barbershop chorus of the 1980s got a bit long, so I decided to save the rest of my observations for a second post.

The third main impression was that, as well as the pervasiveness of nostalgia in the songs’ subject matter, it was striking how nearly everything fit very safely into the core barbershop style. Primarily homophonic, melody in the second voice down, harmonic progressions, chord choices and voicings all very orthodox. It would pretty much all pass muster as ‘contest-suitable’ these days in terms the arrangement choices – though of course a lot of it probably wouldn’t have worked so well back in the 1980s when the scoring of contest arrangements still took a weirdly tick-box approach.