Aesthetics

I’m sure you’ve heard this happen: a choir reaches a dramatic pause after the climax towards the end of their performance, and some of the audience think they’ve finished and start applauding. The choir re-starts to sing the last bit of the song after the pause, and the applause fizzles out, and everyone sits there feeling a little bit awkward and thinking that they didn’t really get the benefit of the intended musical shape.

An interesting debate around the definition of the ‘male voice choir’ arose at Llangollen, and it got people thinking about the relationship between ensemble membership, repertoire and performance style. The question was whether the term should be simply understood as a choir of male voices, or whether it should be understood to include the histories and practices of the major male voice choir traditions.

Is it a coincidence that both the international singing events I’m attending this month are in rather beautiful places off the beaten track?

Last weekend I was in St John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador for the 7th biennial Phenomenon of Singing Symposium, and I could have stayed on for the associated choral festival called Festival 500:Sharing the Voices were it not for my commitments at Llangollen International Eisteddfod in North Wales. Both events attract people from all over the world and present a level of quality that one might not necessarily associate with ‘provincial’ or remote locations.

On Saturday night, Magenta had the pleasure of performing in a concert featuring five early-career opera singers. (Two of them, as it happens, were ex-students of mine from Birmingham Conservatoire, though the invitation to participate arose from a suggestion by the Director of Music at the church that hosted the concert – one of those nice ‘small world’ moments.)

The second half featured some arrangements of spirituals for solo singer and piano by Moses Hogan and Peter Daley, and the comparison of the arranging styles of the two had me thinking about the relationship between arranging and performing styles again.

There is a school of thought that sees equal temperament as a Bad Thing. It is presented as a kind of industrialisation of a natural process, imposing a new regulative order on the west’s approach to music, commodifying our ways of hearing at the same time as mass-production processes were applied to pianos and popular songs.

For example, this is what the Just Intonation Network has to say on the matter:

Imagine you are a pianist preparing a performance of Beethoven’s Op. 2 no. 3 sonata in C major. You find the parallel triads in the right hand at the start of the finale a bit tricky, so you decide to omit the lower notes and just play a scale. On the other hand, you decide that the II7 chord in bar 4 is a bit bland, and change it to a 3rd inversion flatVI7 instead. When you get to the end, you think that the last two chords, V7-I don’t really make the point about how exciting this movement has been, so you add another V7-I after them, taking the right hand back up into the higher registers of the instrument.

With these changes, you feel that the piece suits your performing style and personality much better. But what does the audience think?

I recently had the pleasure of judging at the pan-European barbershop convention in Veldhoven, Holland. I noticed some interesting things about performance style that led me to reflect on how traditions develop in relationship to their audiences.

The thing that I particularly noticed was the barbershop delivery style that rushes through all the little words in a phrase and draws out all the phrase-end embellishments. (I’ve also written about this from a somewhat different perspective in my first book.) What struck me was the very coherent, or at least consistent, patterns of distortion this approach applied to the music. It reminded me of those dolls that map the density of nerve endings in the human body by enlarging the areas that are more sensitive. So you get a model with huge hands and tongue, and titchy elbows – a very distorted figure, but one that makes sense in its own way.

I was thinking about the process by which a performing tradition produces this kind of consistent distortion, and I think it’s to do with connoisseurship – i.e. a small, specialist audience – and with competition.

We’ve all been present at performances that made us squirm. We describe them as cringingly bad, as awkward, as embarrassing. Mostly we don’t think about them more than we have to – rather we get irritated at how the memory of them sticks around in our heads like a nasty taste or funny smell. But if we do stop to think about them at all, we usually put our response down to lack of skill on the performers’ part.

But we’ve also all been to performances that weren’t very skilled but that were nonetheless not embarrassing. We might be slightly patronising about them – calling them sweet, or heartfelt, or well-meaning – but we don’t resent the experience. Embarrassing performances are not just about lack of skill.

What I think is going on is based in the structure of empathy between performer and audience.