Excellence

When someone smiles, you always know immediately whether they really mean it or whether they’re just going through the motions to be polite. The actual position of the facial muscles is very similar, but humans are expert at reading each others’ emotional states from subtle clues, and find the distinction unmistakable. Nonverbal communications studies calls this smile that you know is felt the ‘duchenne smile’.

I’ve been thinking about this quality in choral performances I’ve seen recently. Sometimes a choir can give the impression of just being obedient: singing the notes and words required by their music in the manner required by their conductor. Other times, you get a sense that they are really living the music, that they are experiencing the performance as a meaningful act of communication. And I’m interested in what goes into making one of the latter ‘duchenne’ performances.

Over on From the Front of the Choir a couple of years back, Chris Rowbury posted a thought-provoking piece on the theme that competitions are for losers (i.e. that, by definition, the majority of people who participate can’t win). He identifies two particular problems with the idea of competition in the arts. First, that they encourage extrinsic rather than intrinsic values – doing things for external rewards rather than their inherent worth – and are therefore artistically shallow. Second, this makes them psychologically disempowering, as participants are handing over their sense of self-worth to somebody else’s judgement.

These are both compelling arguments in my view, and articulate well why many of us in the arts experience a degree of discomfort about competitive events. On the other hand, contest is rife in all walks of musical life: from the institutionalised systems of brass bands and barbershop, to the local festival circuit, to the annual cycle of competitions and prizes in conservatoires, and their grown-up analogues in Cardiff and Leeds. Competition may be problematic for musicians, but it also clearly offers something that is valued widely enough to make contest a normal rather than aberrational behaviour.

On Sunday I made another coaching visit to my friends in Bristol Fashion chorus as they start their pre-convention season of contest preparation. They had had the foresight to record their contest package on their rehearsal night last week and send them to me in advance, and it was great to be able to spend some time on the way down formulating ideas for our day’s work from a really up-to-date snapshot of their work.

One of the issues the chorus is grappling with how to get the benefit of deep familiarity with a song whilst keeping their relationship with it fresh. This is a dilemma that all ensembles face in some way or another. You need new repertoire to expand your artistic horizons and stretch you emotionally and technically; but you also need to be able to get beyond the practical issues of getting the notes and words right to be able to develop depth and insight. So the question is how to manage this balance without familiarity collapsing into autopilot.

John Bertalot produces a wonderful description of the rehearsal process in his book How to be a Successful Choir Director. He says:

The leading of practices is like pushing a man up a greasy pole. He goes up with a bit of effort, but slides down naturally when you leave him alone.

I like this metaphor not just because it is vivid and surprising – and therefore expressive and memorable – but because it is rich enough to tell us things beyond the immediate message it is presented to convey.

A reasonably common point of debate within amateur choirs is whether the point is to have fun or to perform well. For the fun-faction, the requirements of choral discipline (watching the conductor, enunciating the text, not chatting all the time) are frustrating because they dampen the spirits and inhibit people’s enjoyment of a social occasion. For the performance posse, all the chattage and talkery and not following instructions very reliably is frustrating because it inhibits their opportunity for a flow experience and the specifically musical pleasures available from a really clean choral sound.

I suspect there are several things going on within this debate. One is a choral version of the difference in orientation between the people-focused and task-focused that you meet in any walk of life. Some people care about singing with other people because it’s singing with other people, while others are interested in singing with other people.

Well, I suppose the first question is whether we do in fact perform better to a bigger audience. I’ve not tested this hypothesis at all rigorously, but it does feel like a good generalisation. A full house seems to bring with it a sense of occasion that encourages performers to step up to the mark and do their stuff more extrovertly, with greater panache. A sparse smattering of listeners seems to sap the spirit very slightly, and a performance that is just as thoroughly prepared and technically competent can feel like it lacks a little something.

Toronto Northern Lights in rehearsalWell, I said in my last post that Toronto Northern Light’s package that won them third place at the Barbershop Harmony Society’s International Convention recently deserved a post of its own, so here goes. It doesn’t appear to be up on Youtube so I’ll start off by describing what they did for those who haven’t seen it, and then highlight a few points as to why I admired it so much.

The first song was a medley of parodies on the theme of robots who wished they were human. All the chorus were costumed in grey overalls with all their visible skin painted in silver make-up except their director, Steve Armstrong, who played the part of the human operator. At the end of the first song, he sat down at a desk and went to sleep, while all the robots actually came ‘alive’ as humans to sing their ballad, ‘Over the Rainbow’ under the direction of their assistant director, Jordan Travis. At the end they returned to their robot world, leaving their operator to wake up with a hunch that something unusual had just occurred.

Bird's-eye view of the Harmony Marketplace in the Pennsylvania Convention Center
Last week saw the Barbershop Harmony Society’s annual International Convention come to the historic city of Philadelphia. It was a musically rich and socially warm event, as ever, and I came home feeling that such full immersion in the artform has made me a better musician.