Performing

During her keynote address at LABBS Harmony College, Blair Brown briefly explored the issue of the gestures singers use in performance. It came in the context of the over-riding principle that our performances should be honest and meaningful, that we should bring our best selves to the stage in order generate a genuine human encounter with our listeners.

All too often, she observed, a singer’s gestures can become conventionalised, using standard forms that thus appear to betoken a sense of ‘I’m doing this because it’s what people do,’ rather than being personally meaningful. Blair described the style of ‘churning’ hands one often sees in quartet performances as ‘transactional’ and attributed its use to a desire to impress rather than to connect. As such, it can be a barrier to communication.

I’ve been thinking a lot about melodic shape recently in the context of a couple of pieces Rainbow Voices are working on. Specifically, I’ve been wanting to catalogue a handful of features that are often found in melodies, that, once identified, offer clues to help make the most of the tune’s expressive potential. They’re all features that you may well respond to by feel, but by bringing them to conscious awareness, you can be more purposeful in how you approach them. The point is not to replace your intuition, that is, but to understand and thus enhance it.

I’ve written about some of these principles from an arranger’s perspective in the past; this post is following through to what the implications are for singers.

• Long notes are there to feature the beauty of your voice. When you have a long note, there is nothing to do except be glorious, so use these opportunities to take the note on a journey of beauty and meaning. The most interesting moment in a long note is just before it finishes.

Friday night at Birmingham Pride

Well over half the Spring bank holiday weekends in my entire life have been spent at the British Association of Barbershop Singers Annual Convention. This year was the first of a new shape to the weekend, as it is also the weekend of Birmingham Pride which is a major fixture in Rainbow Voices’ calendar. Hence I spent the Friday night with them performing on the big stage at Pride, before heading down to Bournemouth to catch just the final day of the Convention.

I have on multiple occasions had conversations, when musicking in Germany, that went:

German person: Is there an English phrase equivalent to ‘Ohrwurm’?
Me: We say, ‘The Germans have a phrase that translates as ‘ear worm’
Everyone: chuckles

(It is only on looking it up to check my spelling that I discover that this is also what Germans call the insect the English call an earwig. Maybe everyone else knew that already.)

Anyway, I am thinking about earworms because I’m writing this the day after Rainbow Voices’ Winter Concert. As is so often the case, it is the day after a performance when the music I’ve spent the previous weeks preparing for it is particularly vivid in my head. I have a similar experience when delivering an arrangement: just at the point when I no longer need to process the music is exactly when it rings loudly in my inner ear.

Another one here that emerges from a series of conversations with people in different parts of my musical life. ‘Performance-readiness’ sounds like it should be a relatively easy thing to define, but my observation is that there are wildly different views on what people take it mean in practice.

So at one extreme there is the position that a piece needs to be highly polished before it is fit to be shared with others. And, while in many ways I like the commitment to high standards this view implies, in practice it often serves as a procrastination tactic. ‘I’m not ready yet, I need to practice more,’ is a way of avoiding the risks inherent in a performing situation by hiding behind an activity that you’re never going to be judged harshly for wanting to undertake. Doing more practice is always a Good Thing, and so can usefully be deployed to deflect criticism for holding back from performance.

I spent a happy day on Saturday with Celtic Chords chorus down in Truro, with the remit to help them develop performing confidence. We approached this from a variety of angles; indeed it turns out that all kinds of development activities that you might think of in terms of vocal or musical skills can helpfully be addressed through the lens of how they contribute to performing confidence. And front and centre through all of them was the principle of why we perform: to share the delight that is music, to put joy into the hearts of others.

We started the day with a focus on vocal skills, since security in your technique facilitates security in performance. The essence of technique is being able to do something at will; having that sense of control over yourself means that you feel much less at the mercy of the vagaries of fate. And addressing this first meant that we continued to get the benefit of enhanced continuity of sound throughout the rest of the day.

Sometimes you find a common theme emerging in a variety of different parts of your life, and it’s interesting to reflect on how the same principle plays out in different contexts.

While arranging

I’m looking at the most recent one first, as it was this that made me notice a pattern. I was working on an arrangement for barbershop contest, and was getting bogged down in chord choice. Everything sounded a bit mannered and awkward.

Eventually I thought to ask myself: if I were just arranging this as a song with no thought of style requirements, what would I do? And the natural chord choice revealed itself immediately. For sure, it was one of those permitted-but-less-conspicuously-ringy chords that the style guidelines discourage in excess, but it just sounded so much better than any of the other engineered solutions I had been playing with. And the right chord for the moment will always ring better on the voices in real time than a choice that is theoretically ringier but expressively counter-intuitive.

I’ve had a few conversations recently about the principle that a performer should feel the emotions that the music they perform will evoke in their listeners. It’s a widely-promulgated view; I came across it recently in Joszef Gat’s Technique of Piano Playing, and a friend shared a quote from CPE Bach which I suspect might be one of the earlier examples, articulating what was then the new aesthetic of sensibility. It was readily absorbed into the Romantic tradition in formulations such as ETA Hoffman’s idea of music ‘speaking directly from the heart to the heart’, and, like much of that tradition has become pretty much a truism in general conceptions of musical performance today.

The principle articulates an aesthetic of authenticity, or honesty, in performance, the idea that the performer means what they are saying. It conceives of the act of performance as one of communication, as a transmission of meaning from one consciousness to others, and assumes that meaning is of a type that is personally engaging and generates mutual sympathy. If you have been involved in making or listening to music in the west in the 20th or 21st centuries, this will all sound sensible and very much what performance is about.