Soapbox

I seem to be back in a bah-humbug mood this year over seasonal songs. After last year’s metaphorical extravaganza, I find myself getting curmudgeonly over some of the lyrics bestowed upon us by the Victorian reinvention of Christmas. It’s not so much the clichés that exercise me this year (though I’m only restraining myself becauseI’ve said all that before), as the general poetic ineptitude.

First, for a mild example: Carol of the Bells. This is a Ukrainian carol, furnished with English words by Peter J Wilhousky. The basic message works okay with the music – the narrative of the winter air alive with merrily-jingling bells chimes with the obsessive motivic repetition in the music.

But there are persistent bumps in the prosody. Take this verse for instance:

In my posts earlier this year responding to my correspondent interested in “Music for All” I was very restrained in not getting side-tracked onto a question about repertoire and choral ideology that he didn’t ask about directly, but chimed with various questions that used to float about when I was working at Birmingham Conservatoire. This is about how the vexed question of ‘elitism’ versus ‘inclusion’ relates to repertoire.

The stereotypical critique of so-called high-art traditions is that they are elitist, and in a number of different ways. The music was produced for the ruling classes to enjoy; to a significant extent, participation is still limited to those with the means for private education (private music lessons if not a fee-paying school); its beauty and meaning is not necessarily accessible to people who haven’t been introduced to it while young; its culturally privileged position has unreasonably maligned other (popular, commercial, participative, ethnically diverse) forms of music and treated them as less valid.

Okay, so whilst I don’t really approve of using recordings to learn your music, I do live in the real world. I recognise that the world isn’t going to change its habits just because I have an opinion. So, today I am going send out a plea that if you insist on using learning tracks, you give some thought as to the type and quality you are going to use, and their likely effects.

First, can you check they’re accurate please? Don’t assume that just because you paid for them they’re going to be right. Do this before you send them out to your singers, and get them remade if they’re not accurate. If you leave it for some of your singers to notice any errors, that means that others will already have learned it wrong and you will waste a shocking amount of rehearsal time trying to fix those errors.

I know the arguments in favour of giving people recordings of the music they need to learn to sing their part in a choral group. It’s a very common practice in the barbershop world, and an increasingly common one in classical choirs. And it’s true that it enables people who don’t read music to participate with very little effort, and indeed to perform much more complex music than they would be able to without it.

And, yes, having people participate in singing is a Good Thing. No argument there.

But still, I do think that every so often someone needs to point out the problems that learning tracks create as well as their opportunities.

I have had a conversation with choral conducting students on a number of occasions over the years in which they confess to anxiety in taking rehearsals because their sight-singing is a bit variable in accuracy. Now, feeling overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking rehearsals I can perfectly understand – I tend to think that anyone who starts out thinking it’s easy has not grasped quite what the level of the challenge is. And wanting to improve your sight-singing is always a good idea.

But if the source of your rehearsal worries lies in intermittent sight singing, there is a simple and obvious solution in your preparation.

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.