Aesthetics

In the blog post that follows this I plan to publish a paper I wrote back in the last millennium, so I thought it might be useful to give a little context as to why I’m doing this. And as it’s several times longer than my usual blog posts as it stands, I decided to do that in a separate post so as not to make it even longer.

The paper started off as a spin-off from my PhD – a set of themes I noticed as I worked on the section about gendered discourses in music theory and aesthetics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It had no place in my actual thesis, but the ideas coalesced into a separate argument that I took to a couple of conferences in 1994 and 1995. I spent some time over the next few years, when I was teaching at Colchester, developing it with a wider evidence base, and submitted it for publication to a major journal in 1999, shortly after moving to Birmingham.

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.

It’s quite a few years since I last mused at length on the subject of key lifts, but my attention has returned to it in the wake of a couple of conversations I’ve had recently with barbershop friends. Interestingly, one was with someone who had come to the conclusion that she was done with them: she had heard too many, to the point that they just sound formulaic and are rarely well enough sung to transcend the cliché. The other was with someone who was keen to have one in an arrangement I was doing for his quartet, in a song which I felt not only didn’t need one but whose expression would be impaired by one.

As conversations are wont to do, I found the dialogues clarified my own ideas, and I have emerged with a more developed set of opinions than I had last time I blogged on the subject. Though, looking back, I don’t disagree with that post – I have merely had extra thoughts that inflect when I am likely to want to include or not include them in any given arrangement.

I have been re-reading Joszef Gat’s The Technique of Piano Playing, which I last read in its entirety age 20. I have dipped it into it maybe a couple of times since, but it’s safe to say there’s a lot in there that I had completely forgotten about. It is that curious mixture of, ‘Oh, that’s interesting and insightful,’ and, ‘Really? You’re kidding me!’ that you often get in the writings of practical musicians, and as such is a very rich reading experience.

Anyway, as you’d expect in a book on this subject, he talks about legato, which is a notorious challenge for pianists. In common with many writers, he holds up singing as the ideal model for this, contending that even string instruments can only achieve a partial legato. Whilst on the one hand (literally!) the bow offers continuity, on the other, the act of forming pitches by stopping strings means you are effectively playing a different string for every note, as each is a different length.

I wrote a while back about the experience of listening out for our favourite bits in familiar music, and the obligations thus placed upon performers to make those eagerly-anticipated moments special. This opened up the question as to how we identify which moments these are if we’re new to the repertoire – either because we’re relatively junior in the genre or because the music itself is not yet widely performed.

That’s a good question, I thought, and then: hmm, that’s a really good question, how do we do this? What looked on first sight like a nice rhetorical question to which I thought I knew the answer actually had me more baffled than I anticipated.

This post is the result of two remarks made in different contexts ganging up on my brain and making me think about them together. Both were made by Jay Dougherty during BABS Directors Academy back in January.

The first (well, it came along second, but has muscled to the front of the logical queue for consideration) was in his class on Audio Illusions, where he demonstrated the phenomenon of phonemic restoration. This is where the brain fills in missing or masked fragments in a heard linguistic utterance, leaving us with the impression that we have heard it in its entirety. This is very useful for intelligibility, helping us make sense of what we hear despite environmental distractions or indistinct speech.

For the last year or so I have been attending tai chi classes in local parks. I tried it on a whim when I was looking for things to take me away from my screen, and have kept doing it both because it is enjoyable during the session and I always feel good afterwards. It’s good for a sense of balance, both physical and mental.

Recently our teacher, Perry, was making some interesting observations about breath and tempo in the context of the Form (the extended sequence of moves that always features in the last 15 minutes so of the class), and I found myself wanting to reflect on parallels with musicking. Breathing and tempo are, after all, pretty central to our craft too.

I have been reading Helen Walker-Hill’s splendid book From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and their Music, and learning many enlightening things. Today I’m going to share with you some of the thoughts of Undine Smith Moore. I already knew I liked her music, but it turns out that she was also a percipient cultural critic with many insights to share.

Two particular thoughts leapt out from Walker-Hill’s account, both to do with the way those who are excluded from a dominant culture can have a clearer view of that culture than those who are inside it. I’ll quote at length because the clarity of expression is part of what makes her clarity of thought so palpable: