Performing

Recently a friend shared a rather wonderful TED talk with me, that resonated with all kinds of interests I have about performance and musical identity. It was given by a social psychologist called Amy Cuddy, and it dealt with research into the relationship between body language and how you feel about yourself, with particular reference to questions of power and social status.

If you know my second book, you’ll know why I find this so interesting. One of the things I was looking at there is the way that particular musical traditions share particular ways of using the body and the voice as integral to the style. Gesture, timbre, inflection - all those things that are too subtle to be caught in notation but are essential to competent performance - are encoded in the body. Getting the music needs a degree of willingness to empathise with it, to ‘mentally sing along’ as Schumann described the act of listening.

At the directors’ day I led down in Saltash in October, we started our first session with a discussion of the primary purpose of the choral director. There are lots of things on the director’s to-do list, but it is useful to home in on the central end to which they are all means: to help the choir sing the music.

I was thinking about this again after watching the chorus contest at the LABBS Convention in Harrogate, particularly in the context of the barbershop performance tradition that sees the director turn around and become part of the presentation. Does this contribute to or distract from this central purpose, and in what ways?

When I was working through the implications of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs for choirs back in the Spring, my focus was on the rehearsal environment, and in particular how the director can diagnose and thus meet singers’ needs within it. As it’s the time of year when choirs find themselves performing a lot, I found myself reflecting on the way that performance environments generate and satisfy the various types of need.

At the basic end of the scale, performance nerves are a symptom of safety needs - the combination of unfamiliar circumstances and personal vulnerability of putting yourself on the line in public can leave people feeling psychologically insecure. Many of the strategies I have discussed over the years for managing this form of environment are essentially about helping people feel safer. These include such things as preparation to anticipate the experience and thus diminish the fear of the unknown, building trust within the group so they keep each other safe, and managing adrenaline levels to attain a state of useful readiness rather than loss of control.

Cheshire Chord Co in their winning performance

In many ways this last weekend was very typical for the one that takes October into November. It is the standard time of year for the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers to hold their annual convention, and it was back in one of their frequently-used convention venues, the Harrogate International Centre. But there was one strange thing for me: it was the first LABBS convention since 1997 at which I didn’t spend a day or more behind the judges’ table.

There were obvious ways in which I noticed the difference. I had more time to hang out and chat to friends (and also to have conversations relevant to my new role in LABBS looking after director education.) I could pop out during the day for a breath of fresh air. I could do some coaching - of which more in my next post.

I am recently back from a trip to the Edinburgh Festivals, which offer what may be the richest, most varied and most genuinely international collection of common cold viruses in the world. Coming home with ‘festival flu’ is, apparently, all part of the experience. In five days we went to 15 events and 2 exhibitions; some were professional, some amateur; some charged for entry, others didn’t (interestingly, this is not quite the same division as pro/am); and covering comedy, music, theatre, visual arts and cultural commentary. I also came home with incipient artistic indigestion.

I’ll have some specific thoughts to tease out in response to some of these events (and/or in response to the peculiar juxtaposition of some of these events) in future posts. But in the first instance, I’d like to mull on some general points about the nature of the Fringe Festival in particular, and the effect it has on both the performers involved and the performances they produce.

One of the interesting features of the barbershop tradition is its approach to the delivery of ballads, described various as freely, rubato, ad lib, conversational, or - most circularly, but in the context of the style, most accurately - balladized. I wrote about this in Chapter 6 of my book about barbershop, which discusses variations in approach over the history of the style, and the various ways that insiders and outsiders understand the treatment.

I would say, indeed, that there has been a certain amount of change in the general performance style in the twelve years since I was first writing that chapter, but it probably won’t be clear how much change until we are looking back on today from a vantage point in the future. It’s hard to pick out the signal from the noise when you are living through what will eventually become history.

There has been some interesting research over the years about barbershop and constructions of masculinity. Richard Mook, in particular, has investigated the discourses in both golden-age (i.e. early 20th-century) and contemporary barbershop ensembles and shown how they configure the harmonic experience of expanded sound in terms of homosocial bonding.

This is possibly why you can get a room full of barbershop judges watching a video of the Gas House Gang's of 'Bright Was the Night', and the men are raving about what an amazing experience it is, musically and emotionally, while the women are saying, 'Yes but it's just chord-worship, isn't it? It's all about them; they're not really interested in the woman they're ostensibly singing about, are they?'. And both, in their way, are right. It is an amazing performance, but it is more about lock and ring as symbol and enactment of the bond between singers than about the content of the lyrics. And the comments posted on youtube about it are telling in this context - the verbal equivalent of punching the air and shouting 'yeah'.

Gratuitous paradise pic: taken on the way to the supermarket...I recently had a rather wonderful trip back to the island of Bermuda, where my mother grew up and where we still have family. It was intended to be a break from my usual obsessions, but you know how it is - sometimes ideas insist on presenting themselves to your brain even when you’ve put yourself off-duty. To my credit, I didn’t have very many thoughts out there.

But I did spend quite a lot of time thinking about accents. I love the Bermudian accent - not especially for any inherent beauty of sound, but simply because it is the sound of childhood holidays and family closeness. If you met my mother you’d probably think she sounded quite English - and more so, the more formal the circumstance - but even 60 years after moving to the UK, she will revert to a Bermudian accent within the family for certain expressive registers.

(Thus, it was weirdly comforting to do things like going to the supermarket in Bermuda: it was just a shop full of strangers like any grocery store, but sonically it felt like being en famille.)