Aesthetics

Over on This Blog Will Change the World, there is a quite wonderful post from last November laying out the aesthetic manifesto of the 'concertina-brow'. To give you a flavour of it:

The Concertina Brow reserves the right to enjoy any artistic product, activity, food, beverage, or cultural artefact of any kind, with no regard for the degree to which his tastes may or may not align with highbrows, middlebrows, lowbrows, or any other brow style of which we may not be aware. The fact that a cultural artefact was favoured by Dead, White, European Males is of no significance, either positive or negative. The opinion of his contemporaries is likewise completely irrelevant to the Concertina Brow, with the exception of individuals whose critical acumen he respects. "Popular" and "unpopular" are terms neither of approbation nor contempt.

But do go and read the whole thing – it’s worth the visit over there.

Now what the concertina brow does very well here is to navigate a coherent course between the oft-conflicting discourses of taste and quality.

In a recent email conversation about various musical matters, one of the participants accused the rest of ‘over-analysing’. Our ‘gut’ should tell us what the song is about, he said, and if we get caught in the ‘brain game’ we will lose the true essence of the music.

Now, I recognise the dangers he refers to. Emotional connection is vital to make music live, and an approach that lives in the purely technical part of the brain is unlikely to find anything very meaningful to say. And I don’t think you’ll ever find me arguing against the importance of intuition in realising a song’s expressive purpose.

Having said that, the idea that the ‘gut’ has access to more valid musical expression than the brain is clearly nonsense.

I’ve been dipping into Bruce Hayne’s 2007 book The End of Early Music, and enjoying it in a somewhat argumentative way. It’s written in a lively fashion, in the tradition of and strongly influenced by writers such as Christopher Small and Richard Taruskin – writers who like to take what we thought we knew and reinterpret it until they jiggle us out of our complacency.

Some people find this kind of style irritatingly unscholarly, but it’s great teaching material. Nothing like a spot of outrage to awaken the critical faculties, after all. So I find it easy to like a book that includes sentences like: ‘There was a time when “AUTHENTIC” sold records like “ORGANIC” sold tomatoes’.

In a conversation at Llangollen back in July, one of the Westminster Chorus guys made a throw-away remark that got me thinking: ‘Oh good, you’re a progressive,’ he said. It rather surprised me, and I had to stop and work out why. It’s not that I think of myself as not progressive, and frankly I’d be happy to accept any compliments on offer from good-looking, nice-mannered young men who can sing as well as they do.

I’m very well acquainted with the debates of progressive versus traditional values in barbershop: it’s something I’ve published on, and as a result found myself doing a rash of newspaper and radio interviews on the question in summer 2008. But I don’t tend to think of myself as having a strongly-held position. This is partly because of my scholarly relationship with the subject – I’m more accustomed to theorising than proselytising – but also because of the British barbershop organisations’ dependence on the American. It’s their bat and their ball and so we get to play by their rules. And I’m (usually, mostly) comfortable with that.

But the conversation got me thinking about why we have these discussions, and what purpose might be served by the stylistic boundaries they define.

There’s a funny thing about the popular music of Christmas: so much of it seems to box itself in to a limited set of elements. This is true of both the music and the lyrics. The sound world always has to involve something tinkly, either as a direct reference to sleigh bells (or maybe church bells), or as a kind of metaphorical equivalent of the twinkly things we adorn the world with at this time of year – a kind of aural tinsel. The lyrics also have a set collection of wintery iconography to evoke, listing the items that likewise turn up as figurative imagery in Christmas decorations. Cliff Richard’s 1988 hit ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ is the archetypal example, sounding almost fetishistic in its catalogue of seasonal signifiers.

Henry CowardI have been re-reading Henry Coward’s Choral Technique and Interpretation and it does not get less fascinating on re-acquaintance. Written in 1914, it is simultaneously a fascinating document of the musical practices and cultural values of his time, and a timeless statement of good practice for performing musicians. It is both intensely practical and deeply thought-through. Coward’s own character shines through as both strong-minded and idiosyncratic in all sorts of ways. He must have been wonderful to sing for.

The chapter on musical expression lays down a series of rules for beauty, at first in terms of painting (he credits Ruskin with putting him on this track), and then articulated as musical guidelines.

The balance between unity and variety in music is a technical/artistic challenge that composers have been grappling with for probably as long as they have been writing music. It seems to become a more urgent issue, however, when you head into the nineteenth century with the development of the idea that works should be individual – that they should have recognisable identities that distinguish them from all other works. There are all sorts of reasons for this aesthetic shift, but changes in listening habits are indicative. When the orchestra is the background music for a duchess’s card game, symphonies can be more generic, but when the lights are lowered to put everyone’s attention on the orchestra, the music needs to do more to distinguish itself.

Those of us writing a cappella arrangements of popular songs from the last century might be working on a more modest scale than the nineteenth-century symphonists, but we face similar artistic and technical challenges. Specifically, there is the question about how much to repeat stuff. It’s a simple question, but the answer is always interestingly non-obvious, because of the effect that repetition has on a piece’s sense of identity.

Tintoretto's depiction of the Slaughter of the InnocentsI’ve been thinking just recently about the story of the slaughter of the innocents, as I’ve been working on a new arrangement of the Coventry Carol for Magenta. I find it the most unbearably sad song to sing, but there is also something compelling about reliving the story from the viewpoint of a mother whose child is killed, as the words position the singers.