Performing

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.

Something that I’ve found striking when training or coaching novice and/or amateur choral directors is how often they express a desire for ‘quick fixes’. I used to think of this as rather shallow, rather like wanting some kind of miracle pill to make you healthy and beautiful rather than making the effort to eat properly and take some exercise. Directing singers is a more holistic and deep-thinking activity than that, I thought.

Last year I had an experience while coaching a barbershop chorus that put the whole thing in a new light, however.

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.

Okay, so I’m sure nobody ever chooses to breathe noisily on purpose, but it’s still irritating when you hear an otherwise reasonably enjoyable performance preceded and punctuated by the sounds like Davros from Dr Who.

There are multiple reasons why it is irritating.

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’s a lot of advice out and around about how to make interpretive decisions based on the idea of coming up with a plan. This is clearly a useful method for a lot of ensembles, as it gives them tools to perform with some unity of purpose and a common rationale.

However, I’m struck by how verbal the planning process often seems to be. It could just be that the verbal – written and oral - media for communicating these ideas encourages people to focus on this dimension. But it seems to result in interpretive decisions based primarily in the lyrics of a song: you analyse the lyrics to infer the story behind the song, then use the understanding of this story to drive decisions about delivery.

Now, I’m not trying to pretend that narrative and character aren’t important, as anyone who has seen me coach will know. But I think it is worth experimenting with turning this method inside out, for three reasons:

One of the students on my Vocal Close Harmony course this semester, Amy, made the observation that you don’t see a lot of performance instructions such as dynamic markings on close-harmony arrangements. It takes somebody new to a style to point out things that you had forgotten were note-worthy - and in doing so, Amy made me think afresh about the hidden expressive codes that note-smiths (whether composers or arrangers) and performers share.

Not me - I'm still in Birmingham - but my blog post for today is enjoying a trip over to British Columbia at the invitation of Tom Metzger. Pop over to Owning the Stage to learn about Musical Performance and Flow, and if you've not been there before, have a browse around the archives too. I think you'll enjoy it.