Aesthetics

I spent last Saturday working the current BABS silver medal quartet, Crossfire. It was a pleasingly varied day, focusing at different points on matters both of technique and artistry, and on big-picture strategic decisions and fine-tuning details.

One area we worked on that has had me reflecting further since was the relationship with performance traditions of arrangements that are strongly associated with particular quartets.

One of the things that happens when you are a barbershop judge is that you get to hear multiple performances of the same arrangement. (You get it as an audience member too, but you get it more as a judge as you can’t pop out for a beer and a sandwich during the early afternoon session.) And sometimes you notice over repeated hearings that certain arrangements seem consistently to elicit sub-optimal performances.

These are arrangements that, on the face of it look fine. If there were obvious technical or artistic flaws with them, they wouldn’t get picked up by lots of groups. So it takes quite a few hearings to notice that whenever ensembles sing them, they always perform better in the other song – they’re more synchronised, better in tune and more naturally expressive. I’m not going to name specific arrangements, as I don’t think that would be polite. Rather I’ll just invite you to compile your own lists from your own listening experiences.

Archibald Davison's 1940 book Choral Conducting was published 28 years after he took over the directorship of the Harvard Glee Club. In it, he makes an interesting distinction between what he calls ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ tone. It’s interesting for all sorts of reasons – both because it is a useful distinction to be able to make in working with a choir, and because of the ambiguities present in the way he develops the idea.

It starts off as an aesthetic distinction deriving from the relationship between choral tone and musical intent. Subjective tone, he says, ‘results from and is an inseparable component of the whole musical situation of which it is just a part. It characterizes the text in its varying implications and conveys the singers’ feelings in regard to that text.’ Objective tone, by contrast, is a technical achievement; it is the product of a focus on tone itself independent of musical context.

I recently came across a post on the Dilbert Blog in which Scott Adams was toying with the idea of developing a theory of flavour analogous with musical structures of pitch:

I believe that flavor can also be reduced to a set of engineering guidelines. Specifically, I think you could categorize most flavors the way you categorize music, with high notes and low notes. Garlic and onions and pepper feel like low notes to me, whereas lemon and cilantro are like high notes. I've noticed that the best food has a combination of both, just like music. I'll bet an experienced chef could categorize most flavors in a way that would allow you to know if you were breaking any rules, such as cooking with all low notes. And I'll bet the high notes can't be more than say 10% of what you experience, in some subjective sense, without overwhelming the flavor.

Now I found this interesting in several dimensions.

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?

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.)

Prof. Peter JohnsonOn Wednesday lunchtime, Birmingham Consevatoire held a concert to celebrate the work of Professor Peter Johnson on the occasion of his retirement. As a long-time friend and colleague of Peter's, I was invited to say a few words and to have the privilege of presenting his leaving gift, volumes from Catalogue d’Oiseaux. Peter's work has had a profound impact on both my own research and my relationship with my own praxis over the years, so I thought it would be appropriate to make those public thanks even more public by posting them here.

I first heard of Peter when I was a postgraduate student, and some friends who were doing PhDs in the then very new area of performance studies came home from a conference bubbling over with excitement and talking about somebody called Peter Johnson who was ‘doing the most amazing things with tuning’. As first impressions go, I think he’d be okay with that. I then met Peter myself at various conferences during the 1990s and so when a lectureship came up here in 1999, it was the knowledge of his work that gave me the confidence that my own research could find a safe home here.

Peter’s most remarkable talent is for integration.

In a comment on my last post, Chris Rowbury made the following point:

Re: listening to other people's work. I agree up to a point. An analogy: when play writers want to get stuff onto Radio 4, they are encouraged to listen A LOT to the afternoon play. What then happens is they end up writing stuff that sounds just like all the other stuff in that slot. You can spot a Radio 4 afternoon play a mile off. I can spot a barbershop arrangement a mile off. But I sit up and notice when something is REALLY original.

I started to reply to him there, but his point is so interesting that I decided to focus on it for a whole post in its own right.