Performing

This coming semester I will be teaching a class on arranging and performing vocal close harmony. The students are all specialist performers or composers in the 3rd year of a 4-year BMus degree, but most will have had little or no contact with close-harmony styles beforehand. So it’s a real challenge to take a bunch of intelligent musicians and see how far they can get in an unfamiliar style in just eleven weeks of teaching. It’s a small class this year, which will make it possible to give students more individual attention, so I’m looking forward to it even more than usual.

I’ve been over-hauling the course materials in anticipation, and thought I’d share the marking guidelines I’ll be using to assess them.

I've been thinking quite a lot recently about what music theorists call harmonic charge – that is, the amount of inherent oomph a chord has. Quite clearly some chords are more surprising, more jangly, have more of a frisson of energy than others. Having some way to diagnose the relative level of harmonic charge is useful for making both arrangement decisions and performance decisions.

Back in October, Tom Metzger published this post on Owning the Stage about the Inner Game of Music – or at least, about the first part of the book. Inner Game principles have long been near to my heart. I used them as an undergraduate to help conquer a serious performance confidence problem (at its worst I used to get nervous even *practising* anything more expressive than scales), and have built a lot of my teaching, coaching and rehearsal practices on them since.

So, I thought I’d respond to some of Tom’s points, because, while I think his critique makes some useful points, I think he’s also being somewhat hard on the book.