Soapbox

In Chris Davidsons’s tele-seminar on Successful Speaking Secrets the other week, one of the participants noted as a bad habit of some presenters the mannerism of pointing at the audience. The participant felt that it made them feel like they were being told off. From the speaker’s perspective, the gesture is intended for emphasis; they probably experience it as pointing at an idea that they find important, but the listener experiences it as being pointed at themselves.

Metaphors sometimes get a bit of a rough ride in our scientific world. There is sometimes a sense that talking about, say, voice production in anatomical terms is always and inherently better than what I have heard derided as the ‘pink fluffy cloud school of singing teaching’. Or that precise, concrete performance instructions are more grown-up than expressive imagery. ‘But do you want it louder or softer?’ is the kind of passive-aggressive put-down that players use to tell conductors to stow it with the airy-fairy stuff.

Now, I’m not going to argue against either scientific knowledge or directness of communication. Both of these are Good Things. But I am going to argue that the things they do well do not and cannot replace the things that metaphors do well, and if we replace all our figurative language with literal language, it gets harder to make good music.

There are three things that metaphors do that literal language does not.

Some months ago I attended a short workshop for choral leaders which started with a warm-up using the spiritual ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’. It was an efficient and musically interesting warm-up and gave me ideas for workshop activities of my own (which I am sure was the point). But one thing bothered me at the time, and I have continued to mull over it since: the lyric was secularised to remove the reference to Jesus. (Actually, this was nicely done too – after teaching the replacement words, simply a parenthetical comment of, ‘We’re leaving Jesus out of this; he’s got enough troubles of his own.’)

Now, I get the reluctance to promote a dominant religion in a general community context where there may be people from a bunch of different religions present. Religious differences get all muddled up with cultural politics and race and all those other messy by-products of populations with different origins and histories learning to live together. So maybe it’s a good idea not to have Jesus showing up as a potential point of contention.

But I’m bothered by the bowdlerisation.

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 spent some of last weekend watching and listening the webcasts from the Sweet Adelines Convention in Nashville, and the ‘show package’ finals had me thinking again about the nature of entertainment and its relationship with competition. I’ve had these thoughts before, but I thought I’d mention them now as they’re current.

Goals are important things to have for a choir to develop, and performance indicators are vital for letting us know how we’re getting on with achieving those goals. But it’s awfully easy to get them muddled up. So often you hear people stating as goals things that really ought to be performance indicators.

Over on ChoralNet, they have a persistent running gripe about copyright legislation and the heavy-handedness with which big businesses in the music industry enforce it. I mostly try not to get too worked up about these things – it’s part of the landscape we work in and I have other more interesting uses for my emotional energy – though I do appreciate having voices of reason on the case lobbying for balance.

But there was a news story last week that has me mentally frothing at the mouth (if such a thing is possible). The music publisher Larrikin, who bought the copyright to ‘Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree’ in 1990, is apparently suing Men At Work for plagiarism, claiming that the flute riff in the 1981 song ‘Down Under’ is stolen from the girl guide tune.

Okay, so I’m hardly the first person to rail against the abuses committed with PowerPoint by presenters – but I find myself boggled at the really quite irritatingly basic errors being committed by people who are clearly intelligent and competent in their areas of specialism. And it’s not just PowerPoint – though that accursed software does offer apparently hard-to-refuse opportunities to screw up.

So, just let me get this off my chest. And if it helps someone avoid presenting in a counter-productive way, all the better. Because these issues are all about habits that make it harder for an audience to understand what you’re trying to tell them.