Performing

When someone smiles, you always know immediately whether they really mean it or whether they’re just going through the motions to be polite. The actual position of the facial muscles is very similar, but humans are expert at reading each others’ emotional states from subtle clues, and find the distinction unmistakable. Nonverbal communications studies calls this smile that you know is felt the ‘duchenne smile’.

I’ve been thinking about this quality in choral performances I’ve seen recently. Sometimes a choir can give the impression of just being obedient: singing the notes and words required by their music in the manner required by their conductor. Other times, you get a sense that they are really living the music, that they are experiencing the performance as a meaningful act of communication. And I’m interested in what goes into making one of the latter ‘duchenne’ performances.

LABBS members who attended the education day in Bristol earlier this year will have already heard Heather Lane’s interesting ideas on the relationship between a melody’s shape and its meaning. I wasn’t there, but had the pleasure of hearing her present them at Category School in September, at which she showed herself to be emerging as a distinctively creative thinker.

Her basic thesis is that a song’s melodic contour often correlates with the way the song’s lyric directs its message. So, a lower tessitura often betokens a more inward, personal statement, while when the melody heads higher, the song is often reaching out to communicate to another.

Performing at the showcase evening
This week saw the Great British Barbershop Boys unleashed on an unsuspecting universe. The quartet formerly known as Monkey Magic has been signed by Sony and rebranded. Their album, Christmas Time, is due out on December 6, but the advance publicity has started, and with a vengeance. The first press release went out on Tuesday, and within two days had appeared in one form or another in around 170 UK newspapers, whilst television coverage included an interview on daybreak and a mention on ITV Central News.

Thursday night saw a showcase event in London where the quartet sang a five-song set, and promotional copies of the album were handed out. I was invited along as one of their arrangers for the album, and it was lovely actually to see them in person after the rather manic time over the summer getting the music ready to record in a very short timescale.

Say the word ‘moon’ out loud twenty times. After a while it stops sounding like a meaningful word with connotations of romantic June nights and/or astronauts and just starts to sound like, well, a sound. A rather silly sound, indeed.

This is a process that linguists call semantic depletion. Say something often enough and the connection between signifier (the sound that points to an idea) and signified (the idea a sound evokes) breaks down. This isn’t usually a problem in conversation, so for linguists I imagine it’s an interesting phenomenon that gives them good clues about how the mind processes language, but doesn’t present any particularly urgent practical issues.

People who rehearse their meaningful utterances have more of a problem though.

Well, I suppose the first question is whether we do in fact perform better to a bigger audience. I’ve not tested this hypothesis at all rigorously, but it does feel like a good generalisation. A full house seems to bring with it a sense of occasion that encourages performers to step up to the mark and do their stuff more extrovertly, with greater panache. A sparse smattering of listeners seems to sap the spirit very slightly, and a performance that is just as thoroughly prepared and technically competent can feel like it lacks a little something.

If you spend any significant amount of time watching and listening to amateur vocal ensembles, you witness a lot of performance decisions intended to add expressive colour to the music. What’s interesting is that some of them succeed in having their intended emotional impact, and others just look like techniques. So, why are some of these effects believable, while others leave us cold? What are the expressive performers doing that’s different from the ones where we can see the artifice?

Bird's-eye view of the Harmony Marketplace in the Pennsylvania Convention Center
Last week saw the Barbershop Harmony Society’s annual International Convention come to the historic city of Philadelphia. It was a musically rich and socially warm event, as ever, and I came home feeling that such full immersion in the artform has made me a better musician.

For many years now I’ve found the distinction that Lucy Green makes between ‘inherent’ and ‘delineated’ musical meanings a useful way to think about music. It’s a dialectic between meanings that are created in and by the musical materials themselves (and she draws significantly on Leonard Meyer, another favourite theorist of mine, for this) and meanings that are attributed to music by the culture in which it subsists.

As is often the case with dialectics, the pairing has a way of constantly deconstructing itself on one hand (you find you can access the inherent meanings except through cultural filters, so do the inherent meanings really exist?) whilst still remaining a robust and useful distinction to make. I wrote about this tendency many years ago in an article that engaged with the question of whether the social meanings we find in music are carried within the music itself or simply read into it.

Through years of teaching, I’ve also observed how this distinction provides a useful way to account for how people learn music. (Indeed, I note that Lucy Green is herself a music education specialist – and one of the few who has found a dedicated readership in ‘mainstream’ musicology and music theory.)