Performing

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.

If you spend any significant amount of time watching and listening to amateur vocal ensembles, you witness a lot of performance decisions intended to add expressive colour to the music. What’s interesting is that some of them succeed in having their intended emotional impact, and others just look like techniques. So, why are some of these effects believable, while others leave us cold? What are the expressive performers doing that’s different from the ones where we can see the artifice?

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.

How we construct knowledge from factsFor many years now I’ve found the distinction that Lucy Green makes between ‘inherent’ and ‘delineated’ musical meanings a useful way to think about music. It’s a dialectic between meanings that are created in and by the musical materials themselves (and she draws significantly on Leonard Meyer, another favourite theorist of mine, for this) and meanings that are attributed to music by the culture in which it subsists.

As is often the case with dialectics, the pairing has a way of constantly deconstructing itself on one hand (you find you can access the inherent meanings except through cultural filters, so do the inherent meanings really exist?) whilst still remaining a robust and useful distinction to make. I wrote about this tendency many years ago in an article that engaged with the question of whether the social meanings we find in music are carried within the music itself or simply read into it.

Through years of teaching, I’ve also observed how this distinction provides a useful way to account for how people learn music. (Indeed, I note that Lucy Green is herself a music education specialist – and one of the few who has found a dedicated readership in ‘mainstream’ musicology and music theory.)

I’ve written before – both here in my blog and at length in my choral conducting book – about the ideas of David McNeill on speech-accompanying gesture, and how they can help us understand conducting. But I also find them interesting from the perspective of the singer in performance. Whether and how much to gesture is dilemma that singers routinely face: too much hand movement can be distracting, while keeping the hands completely still can seem unexpressive.

In a comment on Thursday’s post on the Cheltenham Festival, my friend Sarra remarked on the subject of staccato singing:

… it's possible that in a very echoey space with many singers unused to such an acoustic, and preparing a performance in three days, it might be what you need. Just about.

On reflection it's a bit like running a car with vital bits tied on by string. :)

This reminded me that I’ve been intending to blog someday about the relationship between performance styles and the typical venues in which they’re found. Looks like someday has arrived.

Cheltenham Town HallI spent last Saturday afternoon at the choral classes of Cheltenham Festival of Performing Arts. This isn’t the famous Cheltenham Festival that brings lots of big name classical and jazz performers to the town, but the community festival of music, drama and dance with two weeks of competitions for amateur performers. But while it may look more small-time in its level of artistic ambition, it’s still an event that has more than just local interest, attracting entrants from around the South of England and Wales.

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.