Soapbox

If you spend any time assessing performance exams or adjudicating festivals/competitions, you end up having a lot of conversations with fellow assessors about what you heard. And you’ll probably have experienced conversations in which your fellow adjudicator turns to you with a rather concerned face and gives a laundry list of the things that were wrong with the performance.

‘The blend was very dicey.’
‘The sopranos had a hard, bitty sound.’
‘The basses were terribly muddy.’
‘The Palestrina really had no sense of style.’

Now, I’ve often found myself slightly uncomfortable at this point, and I think I’m starting to work out why.

Okay, so I’m sure nobody ever chooses to breathe noisily on purpose, but it’s still irritating when you hear an otherwise reasonably enjoyable performance preceded and punctuated by the sounds like Davros from Dr Who.

There are multiple reasons why it is irritating.

‘Backing off’ is a standard metaphor for asking people to sing a bit quieter. In fact, it is so standard that we mostly don’t notice that it is a metaphor. But when you think about it, we don’t usually want people actually to move further away from us, we simply want them to sing in a way that gives that impression – i.e. with less volume.

But in real life of course, ‘backing off’ is also not just a spatial thing, it is also about attitude and behaviour.

Note-bashing must be about the most unhealthy concept in common use among choirs and their directors. It evokes an image of rehearsals spent in dull, joyless grind, with frowning singers marking time doggedly as their conductor beats the rhythm to pieces. Pitch errors are punished by repeatedly hammering the correct note on the piano. There is no thought of beauty of tone or of projection of text or of shape in the phrases: all that is deferred until such time as the choir has earned the right to delight in the music by working through the purgatory of note-accuracy.

The idea of note-bashing arises from the notion that you have to learn the notes before you can ‘put in the interpretation’.